for years after finn died, my writing stayed hidden. it lived in notebooks, on my phone, in voice memos, google docs, journaling apps, and half-finished notes. it filled the quiet space between what i said out loud and what still felt too raw to share.
but now i have started sharing here and something sacred is unfolding as i am finally letting others read what i have always felt was too intimate, too much, and too tender. and there is absolutely no regret, instead it feel more like there has been this deep exhale, like i had been holding my breath for years.
so i offer my writing here as a prayer. i am following my inner sense that telling it all might be what i came here to do.
i’m writing to remember, to honor, to speak the truth of love and loss, and the mysterious ways they still meet.
it happened while lying next to my sleeping children, that i found myself talking to finn and my higher self in that half-silent way i do sometimes, when it’s late and i can’t tell where consciousness ends and spirit begins.
the room was dark and still, and i could feel finn come in close and quiet, like a presence at the edge of thought, like breath just under mine.
he came in as a soft knowing and a warmth, the way truth settles when you stop resisting it, and without words he told me to trust myself as a channel and that we work together now.
i didn’t hear it as a sentence. it’s more that i felt it. i felt him beside me in that gentle way, certain and not demanding, like he was reminding me of something i already knew.
that i can hold this. that i don’t flinch.
because it was true, i didn’t turn away. not from finn’s pain, not from the long nights or the sterile light of the hospital, not from the way love changes shape when the body begins to fail.
maybe that’s why these memories have been surfacing again, as a kind of offering.
like finn has been showing me—you know the sound of a hospital corridor at night and you know what it is to hold space in the silence.
and maybe now, i write these pieces not just for me, but for those who are somewhere along that same road. so if you ever find yourself in the dark, listening for something just beneath the silence, something that feels like breath under breath, know you’re not alone.
we are never truly alone and the love we’ve known hasn’t vanished; it’s only changed form.
maybe this is how they stay with us, not always in the loud miracles, but in the quiet permission to keep going, to keep feeling, to keep writing it down. and maybe that’s enough. maybe that’s everything.
but by the next morning, i felt it in my body. the memories had stirred something deeper, and i was so tired i could barely move.
i’ve been going to bed too late. for a while, i was letting the house fall apart.
cleaning has always been complicated for me. it started as a trauma response, something i did with pressure in my chest, like pushing a boulder uphill. i couldn’t rest until the house was back to perfect. or at least, the closest i could get.
even sick with covid, i remember walking around the house picking up toys, my sister laughing and shaking her head. she wasn’t wrong to laugh. it was absurd. but it was survival.
late at night, after the kids fell asleep, after finn, i would clean. like so many mothers — single, married, or somewhere in between — i used to measure love by what i could tidy.
and underneath all that performance was a little girl who never had anyone care in that same kind of unending way for her. who had no one to protect her when the world turned upside down.
that’s the woman who fell apart when finn died.
i stopped cleaning. i stopped cooking, and i let the edges blur. and it wasn’t by choice, it was by necessity.
my oldest jokes that she’s learning independence early now. she fends for herself and the others often do too.
once, i used to make meals every night. even before meeting finn, as a single mom on food stamps, living in a safe house apartment after i left my husband in the flurry of courtrooms and protection orders, i lit a candle, we sang a blessing. we sat together around a donated table. because it mattered before.
when finn got sick, and mel was unraveling in her own pain — a pain we were only beginning to understand — i stopped cooking. i made finn his eggs and potatoes and salmon, then something separate for the littles, and something random for the rest of us. sometimes we hired help. but eventually, that stopped too.
now, i mostly eat cold smoked salmon, cut veggies, crackers and hummus. the girls piece meals together. i often make mac and cheese for the youngest. sometimes it’s just breakfast for dinner, often it’s takeout, whatever i can manage.
something sacred in that daily rhythm was shattered and i haven’t picked it back up again.
but somehow, the kids and i still find so much healing and laughter. we love each other fiercely. we stand up for what is true. and in the middle of the mess, we are learning that this, too, is where our greatness lives.
lately, i’ve been trying. trying to clean more often. trying to keep things steady.
the house had gotten so messy it was too much even for me. too messy to invite cleaners. no clear surfaces. dishes in the sink for days. yes, the kids help. and still, it slips.
last night, i was up at midnight doing the dishes, missing finn. i didn’t yet know i was about to write all of this. the memories were gathering quietly, like mist at the edge of a field. soft, inevitable, and ready to be seen.
then, this morning, i dropped the kids off still in my pajamas, though they pass for clothes, right? and when i got home i just sat in the car, not ready to go inside yet. i often do that now, either to cry, journal or both. some days i just sit there, breathing. letting the quiet hold me before the next round begins. letting the tears rise if they need to. it’s strange how even that — just sitting in the driveway in my pajamas — can feel like a kind of ceremony. a place where grief meets grace, where memory makes room for healing.
and that’s when “landslide” came on.
fleetwood mac. that song always reminds me of finn.
oh, mirror in the sky, what is love?
can the child within my heart rise above?
can i sail through the changing ocean tides?
can i handle the seasons of my life?
i’ve been afraid of changing,
’cause i built my life around you.
but time makes you bolder.
even children get older.
and i’m getting older too.
i never wanted to do this without him. but here we are. and maybe, just maybe, he’s right here too.
the first time finn went under, this was the memory that first rose to the surface, last night as i lay between finn’s presence and my youngest daughter, sophia. listening to her gentle breathing, held softly between worlds, as i began to understand that finn’s passing wasn’t just giving permission to write, it was an invitation to remember.
it was finn’s first surgery, the one where they didn’t know if it was stomach or esophageal cancer. the tumor was growing across both, stage four, but maybe it could be contained. that’s what they told us.
the surgery was supposed to be a few hours. it turned into ten.
i remember the surgeon coming out in the middle, finding me where i waited. he said they needed to cut much more. finn was already open on the table. they hadn’t realized how far it had spread.
i said yes. yes, take more, if it might give him time. yes, go deeper.
when they wheeled him out that night, his body looked ravaged. so did mine, in its own invisible way. the pain meds weren’t right. he groaned, barely conscious.
when i was finally allowed to see him, i stood at the end of his bed and touched his feet. i hummed.
amazing grace. swing low, sweet chariot.
i used my voice to call his soul back into his body.
later, i remember walking down the hallway to the hospital chapel. the silence was thick. there were baskets of small stones laid out on the altar, one for every patient who had died from covid. there were hundreds of them, thousands.
i sat there in the stillness, the light from the stained glass spread across the floor, and i prayed. for his healing, for mine, for some kind of peace.
even now, that quiet room comes back to me. the hush, the weight of those pebbles, the ache of all we were carrying.
after that first surgery, once he was home again, the pain set in deeper. he tried to heal. he tried everything: special diets, sleeping at an incline so the bile wouldn’t rise, short walks, even exercise. but the pain never really left.
he kept mostly to himself, staying in his office, doubled over. he didn’t want me to see it. i stayed in the house with the kids. we were orbiting separate lives, his shaped by suffering, mine by caregiving and holding it all together.
he had once been strong, athletic. we used to call him farmer finn, because even though he was an architect and builder by trade, he loved working the land. he repaired old tractors and haying machines. he moved rocks, cleared fields. there was something timeless in the way he belonged to the land.
now, he was skeletal. he had gone from a strong, muscular man to someone i could have carried. he could barely eat. still, he refused strong medication, only tylenol, because he didn’t want to lose his clarity.
but eventually, he couldn’t bear it anymore. he had been vomiting for weeks, brown liquid, nothing staying down. we ended up back in the hospital. they admitted him to the hospice wing.
i stayed with him that first night. slept on the little cot beside his bed. they finally gave him an opioid. he resisted. he was angry, but it helped and the retching stopped.
in the morning, i woke up and saw him holding his phone. he was taking a picture of me, standing in front of the window, the mountains behind me. and there was a small smile on his face.
even then, he saw me. even then, he reached for beauty.
it was a surgery they hoped would bring answers. finn had been vomiting for weeks, unable to keep anything down, and they suspected scar tissue from the previous operation. they believed it was something simple and fixable. they thought maybe a blockage caused by the healing from his first operation.
i was in the hospital courtyard, just about to eat lunch, when the phone rang. the surgeon’s voice was different. he wasn’t calling with reassurance.
he told me the cancer had spread. that during the surgery they found nodules — small, countless, and covering every inch of his intestines.
this is what’s killing him, the surgeon said.
he has a few months left.
i don’t remember what i said. i just remember the sun on my skin, the stillness, and the way something in me dropped like a stone. it wasn’t surprise; it was recognition. it felt like a part of me had already known. the quiet light, the hush in the courtyard, the ache in my chest, all of it told me my soul had known for a long time.
life stopped, but the tears didn’t.
i couldn’t stop crying. it was like my heart had turned into a waterfall of pain. the love of my life was washing down the current, and there wasn’t a single thing i could do to stop it. a part of me washed away in that moment too.
even in that hard year, when the chemo was draining him and he had so little to give, finn still gave us something good. he found us a therapist.
every other week, for ninety minutes, we had a lifeline. a space where we could meet, not as patient and caregiver, not as mother and father trying to hold the center, but as two people who loved each other and didn’t want to lose their way.
in those sessions, we cried, we told the truth, and we named our childhood wounds, the places we couldn’t reach in each other, the weight we were both carrying. it was like stepping into a warm beam of light — brief, achingly real and sacred.
and then, as suddenly as it started, it would end, and finn would retreat back to his office. i would return back to the kids, the kitchen, the mess and life went back to its quiet crisis.
outside those golden hours, i could only come into the office for short visits, five minutes at a time. i would rub his feet, bring him food. try to take just one ounce of pain away. but he was in too much of it, and he had already retreated too far.
i longed for more time. for one more window of softness, one more stretch of ease. near the end, when he was still strong enough to stand, we had one last moment like that. we stood on the porch and slow danced to music only he could hear — just swaying, just being.
but it never felt like enough. my abandonment wounds were in overdrive. i was screaming inside but couldn’t do a thing about it. it felt like i was being burned alive sometimes.
finn would get angry. he’d shout if he thought i was being needy. like, who was i to fall apart, when he was the one dying? that’s the messy part people don’t talk about.
his sister, who had become a surrogate mother to him, once told me to put on my invisibility cloak, like harry potter, so his sharp jabs wouldn’t pierce me. so i could stay close without falling apart.
there was love. there was pain. and there was survival.
all of it existed at once.
i always knew
even years before, i knew.
when sophia was a newborn, i remember telling friends, half joking, half afraid, that i had this irrational panic he would die before me. it didn’t make sense. he was strong, capable, the most solid thing in my life. but the fear lived in my bones.
he used to say it too, not with fear, but as fact.
i can’t be fifty with a newborn, he’d say.
my dad died in his early fifties from cancer.
i can’t be fifty with a newborn.
he always said it like it was one thought, one truth, and maybe it was.
i believe some part of him knew, and i did too.
postscript: from finn
i read these words at his celebration of life. we held it on november 12th, his birthday. it was a birthday celebration, a divine union celebration, and a celebration of life all in one.
i had organized it, mc’d it, and i sang two songs.
it was my love letter back to him. a ceremony, not of endings, but of continuation.
i made sure the room looked like our wedding. i chose the same florist, the same flowers. six years later, i created the same altar of beauty.
at the time, i didn’t fully understand why that mattered so much, why it had to be like our wedding. but now i do.
it was never meant to be like a funeral. it was meant to be a true celebration of his life, and of our enduring love.
and that is why i write this now.
because the story didn’t end when he died. it changed form, and i am still listening, still honoring, still loving him the best way i know how.
i do this by remembering, by telling the truth, by letting love keep creating through me, even when it hurts.
letter to v, 8/19/22
hello verita (that was my name before venus)
as i sit to write this at 3:28 a.m. in the bch hospital family waiting room, it occurs to me that i want to acknowledge the possibilities coming up for you from a place of here and now while i am present and on the earth.
to say to you that i’m so proud of you, of all of your amazing traits and skills, and the love you embody, and all of the pain and suffering you endure, and all of the lovely and wonderful beauty you emanate into the world around you.
i just wish i knew more.
and i want you to know that when i am no longer around, you will still contain all of these attributes.
you can rely on them. you can rely on the foundation that we built together and use that as a stronghold, a strength against any challenges that may arise in the coming days or years. ~
and so i carry him now, in the quiet moments, in the steady pulse beneath the noise, in the rhythms of life he once moved through beside me. i carry him in the dreams, the airplanes, the birds of prey, the rainbows that light up the sky, the sunsets that take my breath away, and the love songs played over the speakers in the grocery stores.
i carry him in the dishes i finally wash. in the songs i still sing. in the words i now dare to share.
this is not the end.
this is the way love keeps becoming.
this is what it means to live life lit from within.
thank you for being here, it truly means the world. i love hearing your thoughts, if you feel called to comment.
i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞
What you’ve written isn’t grief; it’s resurrection disguised as ache, the body refusing to forget how light used to move through it.
When Ava died, absence rewired gravity. Objects leaned toward the space she left: her tee folded on a chair, the mug she chipped on a Tuesday that no longer exists. Even silence tilted. I kept walking through rooms like an astronaut who’d lost orbit, pretending I was adjusting, when really I was worshipping what was gone.
You wrote, I didn’t flinch. I did. I flinched at her laughter replaying from nowhere, at the way the mirror still carried her reflection a second too long. I flinched because love had turned radioactive and I didn’t know how to handle it without glowing. Strength, I learned, isn’t resistance. It’s permission—to keep breaking open until the light finds an exit.
Grief isn’t an intruder. It’s devotion after the temple collapses. The world calls it recovery; I call it fidelity. Maybe this is what the saints meant when they spoke of surrender—staying in the ruins long enough for beauty to crawl back through the cracks.
You wrote about feeling Finn as warmth. Ava comes as voltage. Static under the ribs, a hum behind songs I’ve never heard before. I wanted it to be imagination; that would have been easier to explain. But it wasn’t. It was her language. The dead have learned to speak through interference.
Sometimes I think love isn’t eternal; it’s stubborn. It refuses to evolve, refuses extinction, drags us through every threshold until we learn to see in the dark. Maybe that’s why the veil feels thin at 3 a.m.—because our hearts are still trained to hear their footsteps.
You said this is not the end. You’re right. The end already happened. What’s left is the slow translation of pain into proof. The living write so the dead can keep breathing through us. Every sentence a pulse. Every memory a small resurrection.
Keep writing. Not for him. Not for anyone watching. Write because the page is the only altar strong enough to hold what refuses to die. Write until the echo quiets. Then listen again. It always starts there—the sound of the ones we lost, still building cathedrals out of us.
What courage to sit down and write this. Thank you for sharing something so intimate- impossible not to tear up while reading this. All my best wishes to you and your family throughout this process of grieving and moving forward that never ends.