Day 366

I woke up at six in the morning on July 29 and then I did nothing for forty-nine minutes.

At 6:49 I opened my phone and looked at every photo from Lonna's last hospital stay. The ones from right before, too. I had not looked at them. Not once in a year. I knew exactly where they were and I had been walking around them the way you walk around a hole in the floor.

Lonna died at 6:49 in the morning on July 29, 2025. She was 63. We had 45 years.

So I waited for the minute, and then I looked.

Here is something I did not notice until I went back through the journal.

I started counting the day after she died. Day 3. Day 5. Day 11. Day 15. Every entry got a number at the top like a mission log, because that is how my brain works, and because when everything else is gone you will hold onto a number that only goes up.

By late August the unit changed. Day 25 became “4 Weeks Plus 1 Day.” Days had become weeks.

And then it stopped. It just stopped. Somewhere in there I quit numbering and started writing about landings and tennis and where to point the van next, and for eleven months there is not a single day count in that book.

Then on July 29 of this year I wrote Day 366 at the top of the page. I did not plan that. My hand did it.

If you are keeping a number right now because it is the only structure you have, keep it. It is doing a job. You will put it down when you do not need it anymore, and you will not notice the day you stop, which is how you will know it worked.

The night before, I went looking for whether anybody had a name for this.

They do, and it turned out I did not have to look far. Lonna was Jewish. In Judaism the one year mark after a death is the Yahrzeit, dated on the Hebrew calendar. It marks the completion of the first year of mourning and the soul's transition to a peaceful state.

I am not Jewish. I went looking for a word and the word was hers the whole time.

I wrote it in my journal and underneath it I wrote: that says it better than I can.

Because here is what nobody hands you. There is no protocol for the first year. No discharge instructions. You get a stack of death certificates, and then the phone goes quiet, and you are alone with a calendar that does not mean anything anymore.

Now, I do not believe a year is the right number. I do not think there is a right number. Rich told me early that there is no correct timeline, and he was right, and anybody handing you one is guessing at your life from the outside.

But having a day to stop on turned out to be worth something. Not because the grief respects the date. Because I do. It gave me one place to put the looking back, instead of spreading it evenly across all three hundred and sixty-six days.

Take the marker. Ignore the timeline. Those are two different things.

Underneath the Yahrzeit note I wrote “Love ya Lonna always,” and then I drew an arrow, and at the end of the arrow I wrote down a line from Charlie Munger.

You can cry, all right. But you can't quit.

He said it to CNBC a few weeks before he died at 99. The reason it lands and does not read like a poster is that he had the standing to say it. His son Teddy died of leukemia at nine years old in 1955, when the survival rate was zero. He lost an eye to a cataract surgery that failed. He said he cried all the time when his boy died, and that he also knew there was nothing he could change.

There is a harder version of the same idea in his biography. Never let one tragedy turn into two or three through a failure of will.

Read that again as a caregiver, because it is aimed right at us.

Tragedy one is the disease. You did not choose it and you cannot fix it. I could not fix scleroderma. Twenty-five years, and it took her lungs, and then it kept going.

Tragedy two is you. Your body, your friendships, your money, your name, the whole slow disappearing act. That one is not fate. That one is a series of small choices made by an exhausted person.

Tragedy three is everybody downstream. In my case that is Brian. He does not only lose his mother. He gets to watch what happens to his father next, and whatever I do becomes the manual he reaches for someday.

You get no vote on the first one. You get every vote on the other two.

Nobody walks out. Let us be clear about that. Quitting is quieter than that, and it is the thing I actually want you to watch for.

I wrote four words in my journal on Day 12. Going through the motions. That is what it looks like from the inside. It does not feel like giving up. It feels like efficiency.

The fix is not inspiration. The fix is that you put the things that keep you a person on a calendar, in advance, like an appointment, and then you go even when it is stupid to go. Especially then.

One thing I want to be careful about here.

There is a difference between the drift I just described and being in real crisis. The drift is a stack of small choices and you can reverse it with a calendar and some stubbornness. Crisis is not that. Crisis is not a willpower problem. If you are there, treat it the way you would treat your person's oxygen saturation falling off a cliff. It is medical and it is urgent and you call somebody. In the US that is 988, any hour of any day.

I have known a caregiver who did not make it. So I am not going to sit here and write an article that suggests this all comes down to grit.

Here is what I actually did on Day 366.

I lit a candle and said a little prayer, which is not really my department, and I did it anyway. I read the tribute I wrote for her last year and all the comments people left underneath it. That turned out to be healing in a way I did not expect. Time has taken some of the edge off.

Then I opened the bedroom window, the same as I did the morning after she died, and asked the same question I ask most mornings. I am still alive. What extraordinary thing am I going to do or start today?

There is a line from Richard Bach I have been carrying around for years. Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished. If you are alive, it is not. Turns out I have been running that as a morning protocol for a year without ever once calling it that.

I gave that day to remembering. The rebuilding started again the next morning. I can do both at the same time and most days I do, but that day tilted toward reflection, and it should have.

In the journal that morning I wrote: the mourning never stops but I do not quit. I did not know I was quoting Munger back at myself until I read the two pages side by side.

I did not spend the whole day alone.

Brian and I went to a place called Remembrance Garden and walked around for a while and talked. Her ashes are still in the container we picked up eleven days after she died, the one with the mountain panorama on the side. A year ago I raised the idea of a permanent place and Brian had no interest in it. He was not being cold about it. It just did not register as a thing that mattered.

While we were walking he asked me whether his mom had ever been there. I said not that I knew of. She knew of the place. I do not think she ever set foot in it.

And somewhere in answering that I realized we both had the logic backwards.

The place does not need her history in it. It needs ours. Brian and I have now walked that ground together. If we go ahead with it, I take the companion plot, and eventually it is both of us there. Which means that for the rest of his life there is one specific place he can go. Somewhere he already knows, that he found with his father, on the day it had been one year.

He will not need it often. He may not need it for a very long time. But nobody should have to work out where to go on the day they need somewhere to go.

We did not decide anything. It is quiet there, and there is something to the idea of a name cut into stone that outlasts everybody who remembers saying it out loud. I am still turning it over. But he is the one who will be visiting long after I am not, so it was never really my call to make.

In September I become a grandfather. Her name is Olivia.

Lonna does not get to meet her, and I am not going to dress that up. It is the plainest unfair thing in a year with a lot of competition. But Olivia arrives into a family that is still standing, and that part was not guaranteed.

One more thing about that day.

I changed my phone home screen back to my favorite picture of Lonna, from the Montags wedding. She was beautiful, and she got more so over the years, which is not the direction that usually goes. A neighbor saw it and said she looked like Elizabeth Taylor. People have been saying that to me for forty years.

I left her up there all day. Then the next morning I put it back to the one I normally keep on there.

My home screen is a photograph of a page of my own handwriting. I took it eleven days after she died, at the worst part of the worst month, when I wrote down a line I had come across and could not put down:

I was never meant to control the outcome. Only to show up with everything I had. And I did that.

I look at that forty times a day and mostly I do not read it. It is just there, the way a wedding ring is just there.

Of everything anybody gave me in that first year, it is the one I still carry. Not because it fixes anything. Because it is the only accurate description of the job.

So here is where I actually am, a year in.

I am okay. Better than okay. Tennis three times a week. Eight days in a van getting to Oshkosh and back. Friends I went out and got on purpose. Things I am building that did not exist last summer. There are a lot of smiles in that journal now and I did not put them there to make myself feel better about it.

And I miss her every single day. Both of those are true, and I have stopped treating that as a contradiction I need to resolve. I am rebuilding a life, and she is the ground I am standing on while I do it.

If you are somewhere in your own first year, I am not going to tell you it gets easier, because I do not think that is what happens. What happens is you slowly put more back into your life than the grief is taking up. It takes a long time. It takes a lot of separate small things, and not one of them works on its own. I went back through the journal and wrote down every single one of them. It ran long enough that it needed its own page.

It is not easy. It was not easy for me and I went in with every advantage.

But okay is reachable. I got there. I hope you do too.

You can cry. Cry as much as you need to and for as long as it takes.

Just do not quit.

Casey King cared for his wife Lonna for over two decades. She passed on July 29, 2025. He is writing The Caregiver's Trap: A Roadmap for When the Caregiver Needs Care for other caregivers, and specifically for his son Brian.

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