My wife, Amanda, was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer (“IBC”) in February, 2022. After three years of cycling through multiple lines of treatment, including clinical trials, Amanda died on February 10, 2025. This was, by a significant margin, the worst day of my life. In the time since her passing, our eight year old son and I have grappled with Amanda’s death, our relationship with her and each other, and our path ahead in life.
Amanda and I met in the fifth grade. We started dating officially our freshmen year of college, and were married in the summer before our junior year. We were married for almost 18 years. Amanda was my best friend and a true partner. If ever two people were two halves of a whole, I believe that was us.
While this might seem like a fairy tale, life is often more Grimm Brothers than Disney. Amanda wanted very much to be a mother. After struggling to conceive, we found that I have a condition called azoospermia, which is the absence of sperm in the semen – not a very helpful condition for pregnancy.
Azoospermia is rare, and Amanda blogged about our experience after finding it hard to connect with other people going through the same thing. Amanda believed that our experience might help others. Amanda was always willing to share her experience and knowledge with others, even about unpleasant topics.
She took the same approach after being diagnosed with IBC, another rare condition where it was challenging to find others in a similar situation. Amanda blogged about it. She connected with many other IBC patients through groups like The IBC Network Foundation. She gave openly of her time and experience in the hope it might help others.
In that spirit, I too am putting words to the page to share my experience in grieving the loss of this incredible woman, and being a parent handling the raising of a bereaved child. So far in my journey, I have found the insights of others – especially other bereaved dads – to be wildly beneficial to me.
Perhaps I can similarly be a resource for others. In the time since Amanda passed, I have experienced a wide array of emotions that I have, at times, struggled to reconcile. There have been waves of sadness, moments of happiness, and much gratitude, surprisingly. Sometimes I even feel all these things at once.
For the first month I felt like not doing much. I tried to establish a routine and figure out what our life would be like. I spent much time crying, doing long overdue tasks, trying to do all the stupid little legal things, and trying to take care of myself. I began seeing a therapist, which I have found to be extremely helpful in giving me valuable perspective on my feelings.
For example, I was having an especially hard time at one point thinking about some memories only Amanda I shared, things nobody else would know. I described thinking about these things as a “burden” and my therapist called out to me that I used the word “burden.” Obviously, the connotation is not what I wanted. It’s not that I don’t want to remember Amanda, it’s just that it was hard to do in that moment.
Reflecting on some advice I had received from our hospice social worker, I had a bit of a revelation. Even though so much had changed – and I was hyper-focused on the changes – there were a lot of things that did not change. Amanda and I had 20+ years of laughter and love. We struggled through hardship and built a home that we filled with love and happiness. We raised a beautiful boy together.
Death may have robbed me of Amanda’s physical presence, but it didn’t (and can’t) rob me of this trove of memories and experiences that are the cosmic record of our life together. I still love Amanda, and she still loves me. Things are still the way they were.
Another big step was finding an outlet for all of the things I’ve wanted to tell Amanda that were accumulating within me. My therapist suggested I write her letters. I started doing it and it felt like weights were lifted off of me. It’s not the same as when she was here but it has definitely given me a place to put these thoughts that I would have normally shared with her.
Doing this makes me feel close to her; bonded across space and time, as we were before. Another major revelation for me was understanding that grief is a forever condition. As people, we are partly the product of the combined experiences of our lives. My romance with Amanda is an enormous part of my life, I’ve known her for more years than I haven’t. Yet, I thought that I could “get through” grief in maybe a couple of months.
It was a relief for me, strange as it may seem, to learn that I would carry this grief forever. I will grow and change around the grief, but nothing can erase it. These are feelings that will never leave me and make up the story of who I am. I found this a relief because it removed a lot of pressure to power through my feelings and get to whatever my ideation of “normal” was. I have since been able to let myself feel whatever I feel whenever I feel it without judgement or consideration of if I “should” be feeling it.
While I feel that I’ve made progress on my own grief, I still struggle with parenting a child in grief. My son can be a little cagey about his feelings or what he’s thinking, so it’s hard sometimes to know what he needs. My natural instincts propel me to try to “fix” the problem, but this is an issue that can’t be “fixed.” Much like with myself, my son will live with this grief forever.
It has been extremely helpful for my son to have resources to support him. He is involved with an incredible organization called Pickles Group that supports children who have parents with cancer. These folks know how to talk to kids about these issues in a much more effective way than I naturally know.
Regardless how well I’m doing at figuring out my son, he and I do at least agree on one thing: this sucks. We hate that Amanda died. It was unfair for everyone involved. It feels cathartic to acknowledge the crappiness of these circumstances. Being positive is important, but I think it’s healthy to also recognize that some things are just really awful.
At the same time, it’s also important to be grateful for all the things that are good. It’s terrible what happened to Amanda and what that meant for our family, but we have been well supported by our community and loved ones, who all reflect the love Amanda put into the world. The best my son and I can hope to do is lead our lives in a way that honors her memory, and to be people of whom she could be proud.