Seven years ago, I woke up in a dystopian nightmare. Sean was gone. The battle against his cancer was over. After suffering a seizure just after seven the evening of August third and being rushed to the hospital, he succumbed to the cancer at the hospital at 5:41 AM on August 5.
The third was the hardest night. We were sitting on the couch watching Boss Baby. I put the movie on while Sean slept on the couch. He’d fallen asleep after a long day of visiting with family, still seemingly unaware that he wasn’t going to survive his cancer battle. Shortly before he nodded off, he’d been talking to Uncle Wayne about how wonderful he thought the deck Wayne had built behind his Louisiana house was and his own plans to expand our patio into a deck that led into the yard. He was still planning.
While we sat on the couch, when to my left, Sean started convulsing. I put my laptop down and froze. Lillianne, six, jumped up and shouted, “What’s happening?”
“Go get my phone,” I told her pointing toward the kitchen. Is this what death looks like? Sean’s head jerked sideways, his teeth chattering. I braced my arms around him.
I heard the phone clatter to the floor and watched my frantic six-year-old dash back into the living room. Hands shaking she said, “I broke it.” The case had snapped open.
“It’s okay,” as my own trembling hands dialed my parent’s number.
Sean’s head lolled back, his mouth agape as the convulsing continued. “Is my daddy dying?” Lillianne, now standing to the right, shrieked.
“I don’t know. I think he’s having a seizure.” I really didn’t know. I’d never seen anyone have a seizure like this.
My mom answered, and I said, “Get here now. I think Sean’s having a seizure.”
I hung up and dialed 911. While it rang, I opened the message app on my laptop and hastily typed a text message to Sean’s mom, “You need to come back. Sean’s having a seizure.”
Then I followed the prompts on the call. Sean had tipped over onto his side. We needed to get him laying flat on his back. I issued orders to my dad and as directed by the 911 operator. A few minutes later, my mom came in the door. “Take them to the back,” I said, referring to our daughters, the younger two who’d been on the couch by the window and who had been otherwise invisible throughout the ordeal. “Prepare them for the journey he’s about to go on.” Somehow I knew this was it.
There hadn’t been a chance between our return home from UAB on the second nor throughout the day of the third to tell them that their dad wasn’t going to survive. It would be up to my mom to do that now. She obediently ushered the girls to Lillianne and Eilie’s room in the back corner of the house.
In a matter of moments, the Delcambres were spilling into the house. Pops said he’d flagged the medics who’d arrived on their heels. I scooted back from my positions at Sean’s side and allowed his parents to crowd around their son, and I told Sean they were there, not knowing if he could hear us or not. I told the 911 operator they were there, and I ended the call. Michael let the medics in the front door. The medics came in and got to work.
Lillianne, our little daddy’s girl, came out of the bedroom to my side. Beseeching the room, she asked if she could “give her daddy a kissy”.
I said, “Of course you can.”
She leaned over and kissed his cheek and said, “I love you, Daddy.” Then, the medics lifted the stretcher and carried Sean out of the house. I hastily gathered Sean’s things—his wallet, his phone, and then, too, my bag, and I followed them out of the house, climbed into the back of the ambulance, and sat quietly beside the stretcher on the ride to the hospital.
Sean’s parents got to the ER before we did. The medics told me that it could be days before Sean regained any kind of faculty, but as the stretcher was rolled across the parking lot to the ER, he raised his hand, squeezed mine, and said, “I love you.”
That night, I would leave Sean’s parents in the ER for the amount of time it took for me to hurry home and get a few things. I was going to stay with Sean until it was time to let go.
My nerves were beyond shot. When I got back to the ER, another small miracle—the first having been his lucidity on the third that allowed him to spend time with his family who were, should we have been asked, just visiting on their way back home from the beach, something Sean had always wished they’d have done. It was bittersweet because it was untrue, but it was also a way to grant one of his long-held wishes before time ran out.
This miracle came in the form of a lifelong friend who happened to be the doctor on call in the ER. After we sat on the phone for 20 minutes, me sitting uncomfortably in a hard plastic chair, hunched over the end of Sean’s bed where he lay resting in the ER, my friend clinically explaining that future seizures would be likely and that the preventative measure would be to rectally insert a capsule that would stop the seizure, I finally said, “I’m not doing that.”
I added, “My girls have seen enough. Sean is my number one priority right now, but they are 1.1.” And it was true. They had seen enough. They didn’t need more memories of their dad fumbling down the hallway, rambling, before kneeling in front of the toilet and peeing on the floor, like he had on the night of August 2. They didn’t need to see him have another seizure. They didn’t need more memories that were such a dramatic malformation of the happy, handsome, helpful, loving father they’d otherwise known.
“I understand,” he said.
It was after sunrise when we were moved to a room on August 4. That day would be the last day that Sean’s parents saw their son alive. They visited around midday and were happy to rush to Cammie’s Old Dutch and get Sean a malt. Ice cream was his favorite, so it was fitting that this last meal be a malt from Old Dutch. I sat on the bed and held it up while he drank as much as he was able to. It was also a full-circle moment that his parents, the ones who’d given him his first meal, gave him his last.
Before they left, I told them to make sure that they treated every parting like it could be their last. I’d been watching the telemetry box, and something told me that the days to weeks they’d suggested we had on the first of August had been condensed to hours.
Later in the evening, his lifelong friends, Matt and Sean, came to visit. They’d been roommates when Sean and I met, childhood friends from Sean’s life in Picayune, and they had all joined the Air Force Reserves at Keesler together. A band of brothers, indeed. All sweet. All silly. All unselfish. All just decent guys. A rarity in today’s society, a hard lesson of the past seven years.
I genuinely believe Sean held on for that visit. After they left, Sean’s siblings and I bathed him. His faculties were failing. They had a condom catheter on him again. His body was bare beneath the blankets. Sweaty. Limb by limb we bathed him with a cloth and a bucket of water that Jake filled in the bathroom. Sean liked to feel clean.
When they left, it was just us. Sean muttered and talked. It was mostly incoherent. But then he had a vision of our son Jude, and he told him he would go be with him. I knew then that he fully understood, and he was prepared to let go.
I stayed with him the whole time. At 5:40 on the fifth, I prayed with him in his final moments, and I told him it was okay to let go. He did. Outside of the room, a torrent of rain spilled from the clouds.
The sun was blazing by the time my parents picked me up, when I could go no further with Sean or his body, when they’d wheeled his remains to an elevator that would take him down to the morgue.
Lillianne was in the truck when my parents picked me up. I was numb.
I have spots of memories in the days and weeks that followed. Pictures and videos help.
Everyone left on August 5, and it was just the girls and me at the house that night. I woke up every hour that night.
The next morning while Lucia, our 19-month-old clung to my leg while I robotically did dishes, Eilie and Lillianne sat at the kitchen counter bar making pictures for daddy. Lillianne asked if I could send a text message to daddy in heaven. My heart dropped into my stomach as my throat closed up.
“Baby, Daddy can’t get text messages in heaven. And he can’t reply.”
Still, we sat on the couch and made a video.
“I miss you daddy,” she cried.
In the background, Lucia shouted, “Daddy!”
“I miss you and, um, I love you, and I wish you wouldn’t died.”
I said, “I’m so sorry honey. I’ll see if I can send it to heaven.”
I do believe they can hear us, but the lack of a tangible response, particularly in that moment, was deafening.
—
That was the beginning of our life seven years ago. When Sean died, that version of me went with him. The ensuing seven years were a matter of growing up, healing old wounds, and learning to truly be on my own. But they were more than that. It was being exposed to a world I never knew existed. I’d been so insulated. First, insulated by a conservative middle-class upbringing where I drank the Kool-Aid that was fed to me, believed what I was told, and was otherwise a “good girl”.
When Sean died, I no longer felt like a “good girl”. Emotionally, I felt isolated, and I felt punished for being so raw with my emotions, for not being able to “get it together” and just be okay. I couldn’t pull myself up by my bootstraps, and if I could’ve gotten my hands on any bootstraps, I’d have just strangled myself with them in those early months.
But that wasn’t an option. I had those precious, innocent children to take care of, the ones who believed you could send a text message to heaven. That still breaks my heart.
I had to figure out how to live. I wasn’t living for me at all at first. I was living for them. I had to figure out how to find a will to keep going. I just…didn’t know how to love myself. I didn’t know how to show myself compassion. As I said in the last piece I wrote—I didn’t know how to even let myself acknowledge my own fear.
There have been multiple times I’d rather just give up over the last seven years. Many of those times were a direct result of the myriad abuses I suffered at the hands of my former partner, a person who decided that authoritarianism and entitlement and selfishness were better than any personal growth or character development. They relied on their self-abasing humor combined with a sense of grandiosity that hinged on having peaked in their mid-20s when they were in a moderately popular band in a cliched college town, working as a bartender, doing lines of blow between customers with their lone “best friend”. They made it sound like the glory days. I never had that experience. I’d kept my head down and earned three degrees, completing the last one a month before Sean died, and because of that loss and everything that ensued, doing not that much with it.
All of my professional aspirations took a hit so much so that I feel like I’m in the thick of trees, lost in a darkened wood, trying to find my way through and back to a path that feels right for me.
One of my favorite poems is “The Road Less Traveled”. Perhaps some part of me knew that would be my path, that the traditional journey of marriage and children wasn’t for me and that I’d somehow make my way outside of convention. I’m okay with that. What I’m not okay with is how “not okay” the people I needed the most were with my being on that journey.
But I’ve grown. My latest dark night of the soul has been over the course of the past couple of months. Burning out from the survival mode of being stalked and realizing that it’s only my attention that ultimately matters in the grand scheme of things. Regardless of what other people think, say, or do, and regardless of what this shitshow we call a government and a culture says, thinks, or does, what I give my attention to is my reality.
I told my Substack friend one day a couple of months ago that I had “one of those nights” where I woke up, and I wanted to go back to sleep forever. I meant that. If I could’ve just closed my eyes and fallen into a depth of blackness that went on in perpetuity, I would have. Happily. I was exhausted.
The naivety where I believe that people are just good, that they’re just kind, that they’re just loving, had been demolished by every person in my life having some kind of agenda, using me in some kind of a way. I am not mad about that. I allowed it. But it broke something inside of me to realize just how profoundly selfish some people are, even if they’re otherwise “good people”. The hardest thing was when someone who said they genuinely loved me not even bothering to check in when I said I was not well. No ask of “how are you feeling” or “can I bring you something”. Just a desire for the parts of me that pleased them, the parts that were convenient. It wasn’t overt cruelty, and it wasn’t intentional. But it was hurtful, and the reality is that I did it to myself.
I’d allowed myself to be used. Not used in the way people think of but treated as an option and not a priority. It’s a form of self-abandonment that once I walked away from it with that person and with anyone else who presented as an option, I had to sit still with it. Why was I allowing this? Aside from conditioning. What was I not giving myself what I deserved?
So, I started to practice being alone. Really alone, and that meant revisiting the aloneness that came after losing Sean, the loneliness that I avoided seven years ago. It meant, too, giving compassion to that past version of myself. It meant not avoiding. It meant realizing that it was up to me to find value in myself enough to even want to keep going. This was especially true as when I got Covid earlier this year, my oldest and sometimes my middle daughter started staying more at my parent’s house, much as they did in 2025 when I was being driven out of my mind my group and cyberstalkers, when I first learned of the 70,000 misogynists on Telegraph who hate strong, independent women like me. And I know that group doesn’t just include men, though, it’s mostly men. It’s also the weak pick-me’s, the kind of people who gladly drink the Kool-Aid and refuse to try anything else. They’re the types who blame the other woman when their husband cheats on them…like he didn’t DM the other woman first.
It was a hard couple of months because I had to look beyond my daughters as a reason for living. This isn’t an easy world to have dreams in or goals in or to even love yourself in when half of the world dismisses you if you’re not compliant with the status quo and the other part only wants you if they can use you. I’m not so indestructible as to not admit that hurt deeply. I had to not only sit with the discomfort of all of my perceived mistakes but also to acknowledge that I am still living with C-PTSD and that somewhere inside of me there is a purpose, and that’s worth living for.
That purpose is not to let go and fall asleep forever even though that was such an appealing option. Did I still lean into my love for my daughters as a reason to keep going as we approached the year seven benchmark? Yes. But equally, I had to just remember that life is meant to be lived fully. It’s meant to be experienced entirely, and I have so much more that I want to do, and I have so many stories that I want to tell, and, I hope, so many people I want to help.
Because these are insane times, I know that. But I also truly believe we are so close to turning that corner that marks the difference between those who will survive and those who will solidify into pillars of salt, like Lot’s Wife. Those who can’t stop looking back to the past and wanting it to remain the same as it was, those who romanticize abusive, authoritarian, and sick eras in our history. I cannot wait to watch those times go by and those adherents dissolve into the forgotten ether.
In the meantime, I will keep going. I did turn a corner with the depression that weighed me down so heavily. As I said—I remembered that life is to be lived. I got through the hard days where the gravity of memory is undeniable. I took my daughters to the waterpark and the beach for a few days. My youngest child got sick. She’s still recovering. We came home without doing anything on Thursday, and I couldn’t help but remember and be reminded of the need to show up selflessly for someone I love when that happened. Of course, you show up for a sick child. It doesn’t matter if you’re on vacation. Much in the same way I showed up for my sick husband and let go of everything else including my own emotions (perhaps I should have at least acknowledged them more), I did what I had to for my own child.
I’m not the same person I was seven years ago nor even five years ago. I don’t get upset when I’m stressed. I am happier. I am much happier to have resolved so many old wounds. I’m happy that I chose myself. And I know I’ve made the right choice every step of the way. I might miss a conversation or the presence of a comforting soul next to mine, but if that person isn’t willing to put me first when I’m at my weakest, then with all due respect, I don’t want them. And while that’s not my only threshold that I’ve learned in the last seven years for what makes a selfless man versus a selfish one, I also know it’s the little things that matter. People either choose you or they don’t, but as I learned last spring, it’s much better to have already chosen yourself than to hope that someone else will because the disappointment in realizing that someone would not put you first even for a moment when you’re not well hurts.
I think I’ve hurt enough. I’ve sat still with my demons. I’ve made amends with my mistakes. I’ve acknowledged the ways I could’ve handled things better. I’ve taken action to change the things that needed to be changed. The recency of any faltering is inconsequential. Change is available at any time, and that includes letting go.
If I’ve learned anything in the last seven years, it’s who I am and what I’m worth. And I’ve also finally stopped prioritizing people who don’t recognize that worth and to simply focus on my children and my goals. It might be lonely in some ways, but I also know that there’s nothing more lonely than choosing someone who doesn’t choose you—just as I know from Sean that there’s nothing more rewarding than choosing someone who also chooses you.
I cannot imagine settling for less ever again. I hope I have finally escaped the patriarchal matrix. May it be and may the patriarchy and everyone who clings to its entitled hierarchal programming burn.
