The Camera

I was at the Broadmoor in Colorado on Day 23. Playing tennis. Playing golf. Having dinner with friends. Doing everything right — everything the Earth Gym asks of you. Getting out of the condo, being in the world, staying in motion.

That evening I opened the home security app on my phone to check on the cats. We had two cameras active. I tapped the living room feed.

And there was Lonna.

Not really. I knew immediately it wasn't real — a stored frame from the last time the camera had been active, frozen on the screen instead of showing live footage. But for one completely disorienting second, there she was. In her chair. The chair she always sat in, because the couch was too hard to get up from. In the position she always assumed when she was waiting — patient, still, completely herself.

Waiting for me to help her up.

She was such a good girl. She would wait for me to help her up. Gutted.

I wrote that in my journal that night. Just those two sentences. Sometimes two sentences are everything.

Grief ambushes you. That's the thing nobody tells you about the After — not because they don't know, but because there's no way to prepare someone for the specific shape their ambush will take. It won't always be the big moments. Our wedding anniversary — September 3 — that first one without her was hard. The van trip itself was partly about getting through the first stretch of difficult dates, moving through them rather than sitting still inside them.

But the ambushes don't announce themselves. They arrive as a stored frame on a security camera at 9pm on a Tuesday when you're thirteen hundred miles from home checking on your cats. They arrive when you're sitting in her car and you reach over and touch the red stitching on the dashboard and you just hold it there for a moment. They arrive as the empty chair in the movie theater that you reach toward without thinking.

It will be exactly the thing you didn't see coming.

I have thought a lot about what it means that the frame was frozen on that particular moment — her waiting. Not a random frame. Her in her chair, in her posture, present and patient in the way she always was. She never complained about needing help. She never made it feel like a burden to be needed. She chose that chair specifically because it was easier to get up from — practical, adaptive, never dramatic about any of it. She just waited, gracefully, for whoever was coming to help her.

For twenty-five years, that was me.

I don't know what to do with a grief that arrives as a ghost on a phone screen from thirteen hundred miles away. I don't think you do anything with it. You feel it. You write two sentences in a journal. You close the app. You go to sleep in Colorado and wake up the next morning and play tennis and keep going.

Because that's what she would want. Not the frozen frame — the forward motion. She was never one for standing still.

The camera is still there. I haven't turned it off. Some mornings I open the app and look at the living room and it's just the chair and the morning light coming through the windows I now keep open. Empty. Quiet. Ours.

That's enough.

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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