The Days Have Too Many Hours in Them

I wrote that in my journal on Day 11. Eight words. I didn't elaborate because there wasn't much to add. It was just true.

The days have too many hours in them.

Everyone prepares you for the sadness. The waves of grief, the unexpected triggers, the moments when it hits you that they're really gone. That part is real and it comes. But there's another part that nobody names accurately — the operational emptiness. The sheer volume of unstructured time that appears where the caregiving used to be.

For years, my days had a shape. Medications at specific times. Lab values to track. Appointments to coordinate. Calls to make, supplies to order, a log to maintain. But also — and this matters — a full life woven around all of it. Planned trips. Movies. Dinners out. Friends. The caregiving was the structure and the life was what happened inside it. Both of those things are gone when the caregiving ends. Not just the logistics. The whole shape of the days we built together.

The caregiving brain ran at full capacity every day. It knew what to do next. And then it didn't.

You don't just lose the person. You lose the purpose. And then you lose the community that came with it. All at once.

Here's what nobody talks about. The caregiving network disappears overnight. The doctors who called with results. The post-transplant coordinator who knew Lonna's case better than anyone. The Houston clinic days, the pharmacy calls, the transplant families in the waiting room who understood exactly what your days looked like. These people were part of my daily life for years. And then they weren't.

And then the caregiver peer community. The other partners, the other families, the people who got it because they were living it too. I couldn't stay in that world either — not fully. I had crossed a line they hadn't crossed yet. I had graduated, as painful as that word is, to a different group. The widowed community. A club nobody applies for and everyone eventually joins.

Three communities gone simultaneously. The medical network. The caregiver peers. And the ordinary social world that had contracted during the caregiving years and now needed to be rebuilt almost from scratch.

What I felt during this period wasn't depression. I want to be precise about that because the distinction matters. Depression is a weight that pins you down. What I had was closer to apathy — a flatness so complete that I genuinely didn't care if I lived or died. Not suicidal. I want to be clear about that too. I just didn't care about anything. The urgency that had defined my days for years was simply gone, and nothing had arrived yet to replace it.

Everyone's path through this is different. Some people need therapy. Some need medication. Some need time and solitude. I needed to be around people and doing things. That was my path — not a prescription for anyone else's.

The evenings were the hardest specific time. Not 2am — after dinner, before bed. That window when the day's momentum runs out and the quiet arrives. Lonna and I had always watched TV together in the evenings. Now I couldn't. I tried and couldn't make it through. Even shows we had loved together — new seasons of things we'd been watching — I couldn't sit with them. It's not the content. It's the empty seat. I still watch live sports because live sports have energy that doesn't require a companion. Everything else is harder.

So I wrote. Every night, before bed, I wrote in the journal. Not because I had a plan for it. Just because it was something to do with the hours and the feelings and the cognitive capacity that had nowhere else to go. That journal is now the source material for this entire section of the site. Which tells you something about writing as a survival mechanism — you never know what it's going to become.

The apathy passed. Not overnight — over months. The structure helped. The people helped more. Getting into the wild with friends, creating new experiences, committing on Day 1 to not disappearing into the condo — that was the decision that made everything else possible.

The days still have more hours than they used to. But they're filled now with things I chose, people I sought out, and a purpose I'm still building.

That's enough. For now, 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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