The Lonely Chapter

I am so sad. I am so lonely.

I wrote those two sentences in the CaringBridge post I published the day Lonna died. July 29, 2025. Over 200 texts came in that day. The support was immediate, generous, and real. And I also wrote this, in the same post: I will be okay. I'm not one to mope around.

Both things were true at the same time. That's the thing about grief nobody prepares you for. It's not one feeling. It's several feelings running simultaneously, including some that contradict each other entirely.

The sadness made sense. The loneliness was something I hadn't fully anticipated. And they weren't the same thing.

What nobody warns you about is the gap. The old life is over. The new one hasn't started yet. In between is a stretch of road with no good name for it. I heard it called the Lonely Chapter recently, and that's as accurate as anything I've found.

The Lonely Chapter isn't about being alone. It's about being between — and having the discipline not to rush back to what no longer fits just to feel connected again.

Here's how the gap actually forms, because it doesn't happen overnight.

Scleroderma had been in our life for twenty-five years. Mostly manageable for the first twenty — Lonna dealt with Raynaud's, esophageal issues, calcium deposits, finger ulcers, and a rotating cast of complications that would have broken most people. She didn't complain. She adapted. We adapted. And we still lived — the Camino de Santiago, Colorado every summer, tennis, travel, building something real together.

Then the lungs started going. The PAH medications ran $30,000 a month retail. The oxygen tanks got heavier. The trips to Houston multiplied. The clinic schedule became the architecture of daily life. By the last couple of years, most of the day was spent close to home. I could move around enough to pick up food, play some tennis at 10am, handle logistics. But the untethered adventure — the spontaneous week away, the things that require you to be unreachable — those had gone quiet.

And yet the people didn't disappear. Let me be absolutely clear about that. On April 19, 2025, we threw a party on the 55th floor of our building. We called it the second anniversary of LonnasLungs. Everyone there knew what it really was — a celebration of life while she was still here to attend it. Over a hundred people showed up. I put together a three-hour playlist — the first six songs all about breathing, the rest with some special meaning. Lonna loved it. That room was full.

So it wasn't the friendships that contracted. It was the activities. That's an important distinction. When caregiving ended, I looked up — the friendships were intact. The activities were dusty. And the wide-open version of life I kept thinking was coming hadn't started yet.

That's the gap. That's the Lonely Chapter.

I had the diagnosis before the symptoms fully arrived. On Day 4, sitting by the pool on the same couch where Lonna and I had spent countless hours, I wrote: it makes me feel great to talk about Lonna. But this is the honeymoon period. Soon time will go on and I'll be more alone and isolated unless I work really hard.

So I got to work. Day one I drove the Sprinter. Day three I had lunch with the Nerdy Tech Friday Group. Day nine I went to the Counter Cafe and came home with invitations to a monthly motorcycle club meetup and a weekly Old Farts gathering. Day eleven I spent five or six hours driving out to Georgetown Airport for an EAA meeting and then went to Salt Lick alone for dinner. Day twenty-three I was playing tennis and golf at the Broadmoor in Colorado.

None of it was comfortable. The F1 movie on Day 10 — I sat down, looked at the empty chair next to me, and reached out for her. All of it was necessary anyway.

Mine was both versions of the Lonely Chapter simultaneously. There's the chosen version — leaving an old life behind deliberately to build a better one. And there's the forced version — having your life restructured by something outside your control and finding your way forward from the wreckage of something beloved. I didn't choose this transition. But what I did with the space it created — that was chosen, every single day.

Brian proposed to Carolina in Italy using Lonna's first engagement ring. She was fully onboard — we had talked about it. The circle continues. The story keeps going. I'm in the Lonely Chapter still, in some ways. Somewhere in phase two. And I'm not in a hurry.

A book I read in those first weeks had a surfer analogy that has stayed with me: you don't have to catch every wave. But you have to be in the water. Sitting on the beach waiting for the perfect wave is just sitting on the beach.

Someone said recently: if you're not willing to be lonely for a period of time, you'll never become who you're capable of becoming.

The world got smaller over six years. It's going to get bigger again. That's not optimism. That's a plan.

Get in the water.

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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