Bruce survived one cancer only to lose his life to another — mesothelioma, a terminal asbestos cancer completely unrelated to his Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He was just fifty-six. What makes it even harder to comprehend is that this disease was preventable. Warnings could have been given long before they were. Lives could have been spared. Families could have been spared. But they weren’t.

Losing Bruce shattered me. He wasn’t simply my husband — he was my great love, my safest place, my once-in-a-lifetime person. If soulmates exist, then he was mine. I learned very quickly that grief is not confined to the heart. It moves through the entire body. Every cell grieves. Every thought aches. Even breathing can feel exhausting.

For a long time, I could not imagine who I was without the man I had loved beside me for more than thirty years.

Eventually, I put my cookbook writing aside and began searching for what life might still hold for me beyond the devastation of loss. That search became a journey.

Travel slowly became both my medicine and my salvation. I fell in love with the sound of a suitcase zipper closing — the quiet promise that somewhere new was waiting for me. I found healing in conversations with strangers, in the generosity of unfamiliar cultures, in train stations and airports and tiny cafés where nobody knew my story. The world that had once felt impossibly large suddenly began to feel welcoming again.

There were evenings sitting alone in softly lit bars with moody music drifting through the room, moments watching life unfold from café windows, mornings wandering streets with my camera in hand. Photography helped me notice beauty again. Writing helped me survive it all. I filled journals with observations, gratitude, longing, and small moments of wonder.

I began reading airport departure boards the way other people read novels — full of possibility, mystery, and the quiet hope that perhaps life was not over after all.

It was simply asking me to become someone new.