What Actually Worked

My wife Lonna died on July 29, 2025, after twenty-five years of scleroderma and two years after a double lung transplant. I kept a journal the entire way through, before and after.

A year later I went back and read all of it to find out what had actually helped. This is that list.

It is not the list I would have predicted. And there is not one thing on it that would have been enough by itself.

Two weeks in, a friend named Rich sat down with me. He was three and a half years ahead of me on the same road. He told me hospice has grief services and to use them. He told me to get out of the house even when it is hard. He told me there is no correct timeline. He told me to see a lawyer and an accountant because there is a step-up basis thing you do not want to miss. And he told me I should write, because I am good at it. Find somebody further down the road than you are. Not beside you. Ahead of you. It is a completely different kind of help and almost nobody tells you to go get it.

So I wrote. That is six filled journals over twenty years now, and this past year is the densest of them. The book is where the things go that are not fit for anybody else.

Then I did something you are not supposed to do. I read up on the models of grief and graded myself against them. Kübler-Ross gives you denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Bowlby and Parkes give you four phases. A journalist who lost her husband has five of her own. I copied all three into the journal and put check marks next to the ones I had cleared and dashes next to the ones I had not. A month later I went back and annotated it again.

Every grief resource I have read says do not do this. Everybody is different, the stages are not real, do not compare yourself. Fine. But I am an engineer, and a system you can observe is a system you can stand. Having something to check myself against told me the one thing I most needed to know, which was that I was moving. That is not everybody's medicine. It was mine.

Related, and just as useful: get the word right. Rich split it into grief, guilt, and relief and asked which one I actually had. Ninety percent grief, as it turned out. And in the worst stretch I wrote down that I did not care whether I lived or died, and then wrote directly underneath it that this is apathy, and apathy is not depression, and it is not the other thing either. Naming it accurately kept me from treating it as something it was not.

Reading, especially early, and mostly whatever was in front of me. The Stoics, because a friend named John Keating kept handing them to me, and Letters from Seneca fell open at the one about retirement at a moment that made it look deliberate. Dan Brown's The Secret of Secrets, which is a thriller and not a grief book, and which helped me on the consciousness question.

And I Am Pilgrim, which is a very long thriller that had no business being relevant and was. There is a thing in it called the Pilgrim's Compass with three parts. Sacrifice. Resurrection. Release. At thirty days I printed off a summary and put it at the front of the journal, next to the letter from Lonna. It is still there. I still read it.

Podcasts were a separate stream entirely. An Anderson Cooper episode on grief sent me to Francis Weller and The Wild Edge of Sorrow, and I copied a full page of him into the journal.

People. This is the one that matters most and it is not close. Everything else on this list is scaffolding built around it.

Nobody brought me a casserole. What I got was friends who turned up with food, and every single time I made them sit down and eat it with me. That was the actual medicine. The food was just the excuse to get in the door.

Beyond that it was deliberate. UT OLLI, which is classrooms full of strangers. I liked it enough that I upgraded to the Scholars level in October. Online communities too, which I did not expect to matter and did.

And saying yes. Seventeen days in, two neighbors caught me in the building and invited me to church downtown. The entire journal entry for that is their names and the word WTF. I went. That has been roughly the standard since: if an invitation is strange and the only reason to decline is that I do not feel like it, I go.

The exception came on the anniversary itself. Somebody offered me a ticket to the Olivia Rodrigo ACL taping that night and I said no. Not because I did not feel like it. Because being alone with that particular day was the truer thing. The rule is say yes unless you have an actual reason. Once in a while you have an actual reason.

Six weeks in I watched a video by a woman named Dr. Carrie West and did a sixty second exercise out of it. You write down your categories. Biological family. Chosen family. Widowed community. Friends. In-laws. Groups. Local community. Then you put actual names in them, which is the part that stings, because the empty boxes are right there in your handwriting.

Then three questions. Who is your three in the morning person. Who will be honest with you. Who will be your cheerleader.

I wrote a star next to my answer. Lonna was all of this.

That was the whole problem stated in five words, and I did not understand for another ten months that the answer is not to find a replacement. There isn't one. It is a village now. Brian. My friends. The people I have gotten close to this year. Books, even. You cannot ask one person to be all of it, and I spent a while resenting that before I understood it was simply true.

Tennis, as often as I could get on a court, and I logged the weeks I did not manage it. The van, and the long drives where there is nothing to do but think. And picking something hard on purpose. I went back to the guitar with a program that made me learn barre chords and a blues shuffle, and I went back to aviation. Not because either one is soothing. Because being a beginner at something occupies the part of your head that grief otherwise gets to keep.

Music. Her playlist, all three hours of it, which took me more than one sitting to get through the first time. And live, constantly. Jon Batiste and Ryan Bingham at ACL tapings. Springsteen. Billy Strings. The Red Clay Strays. Clay Walker. A Tom Petty tribute band in December. The Eagles at the Sphere for my birthday. Standing in a room with a few thousand people and a loud band is not thinking, and some nights not thinking is the entire objective.

The Jon Batiste show was a different thing entirely. I wrote in my journal that night that I needed to write about the impact it had on me. This is me finally doing that, nine months late.

I went alone. I was expecting a New Orleans revival party. Loud, joyful, two hours of not thinking. Instead he opened by himself, down on the floor in the area where the standing room crowd normally stands, and played half a dozen songs. Lean on My Love. Lonely Avenue. And then Do It All Again, which was the best of them and the hardest.

I was crying. So was the woman next to me, and not quietly. Both of us fully gone, in public, at a television taping. She was carrying something of her own that she did not explain. She told me that Batiste's wife had been through cancer, more than once. Then she disappeared into the crowd and came back with two bottles of water, one of them for me.

A woman crying as hard as I was noticed a man coming apart and went and got him some water. That is the entire argument of this article, delivered by somebody who owed me nothing and did not have it to spare.

And country western dancing, which I would not have guessed. Mercer Dance Hall in December, then actual lessons, and I have since been promoted to level two. Dancing is community and movement and music running at the same time, which is three separate things off this list stacked into one activity. Life extending is not too strong a phrase for it.

And a project. Not a deadline, because there are no deadlines in retirement and there are certainly none in grief. Just something being built that did not exist before, with a next step always sitting there. It did not fill the hours so much as it showed me what I wanted to do next.

What did not work: replaying it. The nights between eight and ten, every time. The what-if loop, which for me is a very specific loop about her kidneys and what I told them and whether anybody listened. Seeing transplant anniversary posts from people whose spouses are still here, and feeling flatly cheated.

And I will not pretend it is all handled. I have drifted from things I said mattered. The guitar, because I hurt a finger. Flying, because I got busy. The gym, because of a calf. Three friends died this year. How do you process that. There is no good way, and I am not going to invent one for the sake of a tidy ending.

None of these worked alone. That is the actual finding, and it is the least satisfying one, because everybody wants the single thing.

There is no single thing. What there is, is a lot of small separate things applied over a long time, most of which you have to go out and get rather than sit and wait for.

Start with people. Everything else is scaffolding.

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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