Today was one of those days where your body forces you to stop, and your grief shows up right beside it.
I woke up with pain so sharp it made it hard to breathe and even harder to stand. It wrapped around my ribs, shot through my back, and radiated into my chest and arms — the kind of pain that makes doctors immediately rule out the terrifying things first.
Heart attack. A blood clot in the lungs. Liver or gallbladder issues. Kidney issues that can wrap around to the front. They even threw out lung‑related pain that shows up around the ribs. Basically, everything that lives in that area around the ribs had to be considered, since the symptoms could be linked to any of them. And this was all before 8 am.
So as the pain meds kicked in and the testing continued, another pain, the one always sitting right under the surface, came in screaming. That pain, the one I don’t visit very often, showed up with memories I had suppressed, and the reality of the situation settled in.
The last time I was at the emergency room, we were in room 12. This time around I’m in room 12. Last time, Coleman was the one scared in the bed, and I sat in the chair next to it, holding his hand. This time, I am the one in bed, scared, and the chair next to it is empty. So today I did the only thing I could. I sat in that memory and let it take me back.
I thought back to the time he was hospitalized, and I cried the entire drive home after leaving him there because even though he was in the safest place possible, my anxiety convinced me that if something happened and I wasn’t there, I’d fail him. And the part I still struggle with — the part that sits heavy even now — is knowing I wasn’t home the day he passed. Not because my absence caused anything or because I could have changed the outcome, but because it goes against everything in me that tried so hard to protect him.
He was my best friend. And when I said “in sickness and in health,” I lived that vow in every way I knew how. I researched his surgery, joined support groups, made bone broth, and ordered seven different protein drinks so he could find the one he liked. On his lowest days, I sat with him drinking broth so that he wouldn’t feel alone in the struggle. Those moments created a closeness that only comes from sitting in the dark with someone, rather than trying to drag them out.
It is days like today that stir up everything because trauma doesn’t just live in memories… it lives in the body. Fear settles into the nervous system. Loss hides in muscles. Old panic wakes up when something feels familiar. The love. The guilt. The anger. It’s all there. It never left.
So today, as the pain wrapped around my ribs and the monitors beeped, my body remembered things my mind tries to protect me from, and as I rounded out hour 3 in the emergency room, the loneliness settled in.
Loneliness — the pain that no medicine can lessen and no test can measure. Even though I have an incredible family and friends who would have dropped everything to be there, this was one of those moments when you want your person. The one who knows your breathing, your silences, your fear before you say a word. The one you’ve built a private world of comfort with. The same way Coleman developed a closeness with me — that sense of safety, of belonging, of being free from judgment— I had that with him too. So, as the doctor is explaining that there are degenerative changes in my thoracic spine, and the pain is from my discs drying out, narrowing, and pressing on nerves, I sat there feeling the weight of the loneliness and the hole that his death left behind. The hole that reminds me the last time I trusted someone to hold me through the scary parts, it ended with me sitting front row at a funeral.
So maybe the real pain management from today didn’t come from meds but from the clarity that part of healing is learning to let people help carry the weight again, even when every instinct tells me to hold it all myself. And the irony that while the discs in my thoracic spine are narrowing and compressing inward, my capacity to trust and let people in is finally expanding is not lost on me. I mean, they do say that God has a sense of humor after all.
Love Always, B