Cassie
The third time we were back in the ER, I knew.
Not because the doctors said it. Because Cody said it. He looked at me and the kids and started saying goodbye. Not the kind where you say “see you later.” The kind where you tell your boys to take care of their sisters. The kind where you say “God’s got this” and what you mean is, “I won’t be here to.”
He was 39 years old. Pancreatic cancer.
He told the boys to trust me. He told them to be strong. And I stood there as a nurse practitioner who’d spent her career taking care of other people and I couldn’t do a single thing to save my own husband.
Ten days later, he was gone.
I had four kids. Two girls 14 and 8. Two boys 12 and 10. And every one of them was looking at me to figure out what happens now.
People say “you’re so strong” like it’s a compliment. It’s not. It’s a life sentence. Because once people decide you’re strong, they stop checking on you. And you stop asking for help. And you build this version of yourself that holds everything together on the outside while something inside you goes quiet and never fully comes back.
Nick
I was standing in church with my two girls 8 and 5 and we were worshiping. Singing. Hands up. And it hit me like a freight train.
Anna was going to die.
She was still alive. Still fighting. Breast cancer. But in that moment, standing between my daughters in a church pew, I saw it. Not a thought. A vision of the rest of my life. The empty seat in the car. The parent-teacher conferences alone. The mornings where the girls would walk into our bedroom and it would just be me.
I was grieving my wife before she was gone. And I couldn’t tell anyone because how do you say that out loud? How do you stand next to someone who’s fighting for their life and admit that part of you already knows how it ends?
She was 38. I was 37.
I’d spent 15 years coaching Texas high school football. I was a part of a state championship winning team. I was a head coach and athletic coordinator before I turned 35 building a brand new program from scratch. I thought I knew what pressure was. I thought I knew what hard was.
I didn’t know anything.
Nick & Cassie
There’s a version of grief nobody talks about. It’s not the funeral. It’s not the first week when everyone shows up with food and “let me know if you need anything.”
It’s the Tuesday night four months later when you’re heating up chicken nuggets for the third time that week and your kid asks a question you can’t answer and the house is so quiet you can hear the clock in the hallway. That’s grief. The long, ordinary, unrelenting kind.
We both lived in that silence. Separately. For years.
And then through a Facebook message that neither of us planned we found each other.
Not in a fairytale way. In a “you lost yours too?” way. In a way where the first real conversation felt like exhaling for the first time in years, because the other person didn’t need you to explain what 3am feels like when the bed is half empty.
We merged six kids under one roof. Four of hers. Two of mine. Ages 6 to 15. No playbook. No manual. Just two broken people who decided that broken doesn’t mean finished.
We’re writing this because we’re still in it. Still figuring it out. Still standing not because we’re special, but because the alternative was quitting, and we’ve got six kids who need us not to.
Every week, we’ll share a piece of this story. The grief. The rebuilding. The blended family chaos. The moments that are still really hard. And the moments that made it worth every hard day.
If you’re in the middle of your own wreck right now the diagnosis, the funeral, the first holiday alone, the dating again when you feel guilty for laughing, we want you to know one thing:
You’re still here. That’s not nothing. That’s everything.
Welcome to Still Standing.
Nick & Cassie
Next week: “The First Christmas” what happens when you try to merge two broken families around a tree for the first time without the one that was lost. Spoiler: it’s not what you would expect.
Know someone who needs to hear this? Forward this email. That’s how we grow from one person telling another, “You should read this.”