There are dates that divide a life into before and after, and May 16, 2026, is mine.
Suzzaynne died at about 3:30 that morning. Even writing those words still feels strange. They are simple words describing something that happened, and they are factually true, yet they seem completely inadequate for what they mean. How can a sentence that short contain the ending of 26 years together?
The day before, on May 15, Suzzaynne made the decision she had fought so hard to reach on her own terms. She chose Death with Dignity. She had been through enough, and her body had been through enough. There comes a point when continuing to fight is no longer the same thing as continuing to live, and Suzzaynne knew where that line was for her. I loved her enough to honor that decision, even though everything in me wanted her to stay.
There is something almost impossible about loving someone while knowing that the thing they need from you is to let them go. For so long, my role had been to help her live—to go to appointments, listen, worry, research, hope, advocate, and look for the next possibility and then the next one after that. Most of all, my role was simply to be beside her.
Eventually, there were no more possibilities to look for. What remained was Suzzaynne, our love for one another, and whatever time we had left together.
After she took the medication, she slipped into unconsciousness and remained there for roughly twelve hours. I stayed beside her because there was nowhere else in the world I wanted to be, and there is still nowhere else I would have wanted to be.
Those hours occupy a strange place in my memory now. They were excruciating, but there was something sacred about them as well. The woman with whom I had shared almost half of my adult life was lying beside me, still physically here and somehow already beginning to leave.
I couldn’t follow her where she was going, and perhaps that is one of the hardest truths of loving another human being. We can accompany someone an extraordinary distance. We can hold their hand, care for their body, sit beside them, whisper to them and tell them again and again that we love them. But eventually there is a threshold that belongs only to them.
At about 3:30 in the morning on May 16, Suzzaynne crossed that threshold, and I remained on this side.
I don’t know that I can adequately describe what that moment did to me. I’m not even sure I fully understand it yet. People talk about “losing” someone, but losing has always seemed like such an odd word to me. I didn’t misplace Suzzaynne, and she didn’t disappear from my life as though everything that happened before that morning had somehow been erased.
Twenty-six years happened. We met and fell in love. We built a life and raised a family. We annoyed each other, laughed together, worried together, made plans and changed plans. We took care of each other. We shared thousands upon thousands of completely unremarkable moments that I now understand were anything but unremarkable.
That may be one of the cruel discoveries of grief: you begin to understand how precious ordinary life was only after ordinary life is gone.
I miss the conversations from the other room and the sound of her moving around the house. I miss simply knowing where she was. I miss the looks, the touches and the questions that seemed to mean nothing at the time. What do you want for dinner? What are we doing tomorrow? Are you coming to bed?
Those things become the private language of two people who have spent enough years together that much of their life no longer requires explanation. Then suddenly one morning that language has only one person left to speak it.
The morning Suzzaynne died, the world contained all the same things it had contained the day before. Cars still drove down the street. People woke up and made coffee. Somebody somewhere complained about the weather. People went to work, children played, dogs needed to be let outside, and the machinery of ordinary life continued with astonishing indifference.
My world, however, had changed completely.
Suzzaynne was no longer here in the way I had always known her, and what I believe about where she is now is something I am still exploring. I have questions about consciousness, spirit, energy, death, and whether the people we love continue in some form we don’t yet understand. There are days when I feel there must be more, and there are other days when I simply don’t know. I’m learning that perhaps I don’t have to know.
There is one thing about which I have no uncertainty. Suzzaynne existed. She was here, she loved and was loved, she changed people, and she changed me. Death does not get to rewrite any of that.
That is part of why this website exists.
I don’t want Suzzaynne reduced to the date she died. May 16 matters enormously to me, but it is not the most important date in her life, and her death is certainly not the most interesting thing about her. Her life was far more interesting.
I want to remember the way she loved, the people she touched, the things that made her laugh, and all of the peculiarities, contradictions and ordinary habits that made Suzzaynne who she was. I want to remember our 26 years together not simply through the lens of how they ended, but through everything that happened because we found one another in the first place.
So I suppose the day she died is one of the difficult chapters that needs to be here. Not because I want this website to be about death, but because I want it to be truthful about the life we had, the life she lived, and the life I am now trying to understand without her physically beside me.
I miss her more than I know how to say, and I don’t yet know exactly what being the one who is still here is going to mean. Perhaps that is part of what I will discover as I continue writing.
On May 16, 2026, something enormous ended, but I don’t believe love ended with it. I also don’t believe Suzzaynne’s story did.
— Dale