Grief has a strange way of folding time. One minute you’re answering the phone, hearing the words that split your world in two. The next, you’re sitting on a porch in late autumn, half-drunk, laughing with a man you just met, but who already feels like home.
The year I lost my brother Austin was the same year I met Eli.
Austin died suddenly. Traumatically. There was no time to prepare, no chance to say goodbye. One day he was here, and the next he wasn’t. My world stopped moving, and everything I thought was solid felt like it crumbled beneath me. I carried that loss like a secret weight, just trying to get through the days without falling apart in public.
At the time, I was in nursing school at Montana State University. I was surviving on coffee, grief, and sheer momentum. One of my clinical rotations was coming up in Hardin, Montana, a small town I barely knew. I had been talking to Eli through social media, just casually at first. Something about him felt easy, like a break from all the heaviness I was carrying. We made plans to meet. I drove to Hardin a day early, nervous but strangely calm, and that’s where our story began.
Back then, I was holding everything together on the outside, but inside, I was unraveling. I had friends, yes. Close ones. But not a best friend. Not someone I could spend every day with. Not someone who would sit beside me in the quiet. I was lonely. I was vulnerable. I didn’t just need love, I needed presence. I needed a witness.
And Eli became that.
He was grieving too. His younger sister had died suddenly that same year, a brain aneurysm. We didn’t have to explain our sadness to each other; it lived in the room with us, heavy and unspoken. We were both unraveling, and we drank to survive it. To go numb. To feel something other than the ache.
We formed a trauma bond. Not a healthy love. But a real one.
His love felt familiar. A little wild. A little broken. I hadn’t met love like that in a long time. We were on again, off again. Married, divorced. Pulled close, pushed away. But always tethered to something deeper, something that refused to give up.
Eventually, we chose to heal.
We got sober. We got pregnant. We got remarried.
We sold our home in Montana, packed our lives into boxes, and moved to Arizona. A fresh start. New friends. New rituals. New kind of peace. A life we once didn’t believe we deserved—but built anyway.
Now we’re one month away from being two years sober.
Two years of clarity. Two years of choosing each other, even when it’s hard. A life we prayed for. A life Austin never got to see, but one I carry him through every day. In the light on our baby’s face. In Eli’s laugh. In the way I finally know how to stay sober, present, and rooted in love.
Grief brought us together. Healing kept us there.
And in the ruins of everything we lost, something beautiful grew.
“Sometimes when you’re in a dark place, you think you’ve been buried—but you’ve actually been planted.” — Christine Caine
All The Ways I Carry Him 