2025 was the most challenging year of my life and it wasn’t even close. And 2024 was the second most difficult.

Being educated, white, straight, and male in the wealthiest country the world has known made the other sixty one largely a breeze. Especially when you add a successful hardworking dad, an extremely loving mother, and and an extremely loving wife into that mix. I was pedaling downhill with the wind until I wasn’t.

Occasionally, until Lynn was stricken with Multiple System Atrophy, I found my privilege so extensive as to be disorienting, wondering, “Why me?”

Was the cosmos was playing catch up? Not even Steph Curry can make 63 straight free throws. The odds had to be against me running the table.

And of course, 2024 and 2025 were way, way worse for Lynn. I was just collateral damage.

I spent nearly all day, every day caring for Lynn during the first eight months of 2025. Never travelled anywhere, rarely saw anyone else. I knew that type of intense, nonstop closeness was really bad for our relationship. For us, absence, whether for a few hours, days, or weeks, always, always, made our heart(s) grow fuller and fonder.

I felt like I was suffocating in the house doing the best I could to stay on top of Lynn’s multiplying symptoms. The few times I lost it and told her I was worried about my mental and physical well-being, she said I just needed to figure out how to get away for a weekend. Which was hugely deflating.

I understood that to mean she was way too overwhelmed by MSA to appreciate how far I’d slipped from my normal contented, happy, healthy self. I told her and A and J that what I needed was months with no responsibility to rest, recover, and heal. And I knew that was a pipe dream, so I kept grinding until I couldn’t anymore. Which turned out to be late summer, at which point A and J realized the seriousness of the situation and we pivoted to finding an adult family home, which of course, initially at least, added to the family’s trauma.

Like a burglar inside a vacant second home, MSA took its time taking everything from Lynn and me. Over a few years we lost the ability to be active in nature together, to travel, to go out to dinner, to be physically intimate, for Lynn to do anything for me, to work together to accomplish anything, to communicate, to know something of what the other person was thinking and feeling. And to add insult to injury, any ability to plan for a shared future.

Intensely sad, painful, compounding losses, but spread out over enough time I was able to fool myself that I’d be prepared enough for Lynn’s inevitable death that I would be alright and somehow piece together a new life.

But strangely, as it turns out, I was wholly unprepared for the most obvious thing of all, the permanence of the loss. I was deluded to think a break was possible. Now that the movie is over, forever, it’s jarring. To say the least.

It’s devastating to think that I’m never getting back any of the amazing, life-fulfilling things that were lost. Ever.