For the last 6 months, I’ve had my head buried in the sand about the world around me.

It’s been a strange change of pace for a person who almost always started the day by scanning national and global headlines, and who spent a lot of time covering local news.

Sometimes I spend my sleepless nights trying to fish around to get at least a vague idea of what’s going on, but I have found it very hard to stay focused and engaged in things happening on the other side of the world when my immediate surroundings feel like a dumpster fire.

However, the actions of the Supreme Court last week were egregious enough to break through my brain fog. I’ve mentioned that Steve and I were diametrically opposed, politically, before.

We argued and disagreed about many things, and kept it respectful, for the most part, and seldom, if ever, managed to change the other’s mind. It was one thing, though, to respectfully agree to disagree and laugh about our votes canceling each other out at the ballot box, and another to be presented with termination papers after the 18-week-old fetus that you’re carrying is diagnosed with what is likely to be a terminal heart defect.

It was without a doubt the most difficult decision we ever had to make. However, it was a decision that was ours to make.

We were two college educated people, who had access to the best health care in the world, two solid insurance plans, and the composure to quickly do as much research as we could as to what our future could hold. We were also two adults in a very committed relationship that promised each other that we would see each other and our child through whatever the future brought.

With all of that in mind, we were able to make a decision that for the last 16 years, we never regretted for a moment.

Then one day, everything changed. I will confess that one of the first selfish things that went through my head, almost immediately after I regained my composure that day was that Steve had promised me that, together, we would provide A with the very best future he could possibly have, and now he’s left me here to deal with that future by myself.

I am beyond lucky that A is a mature, intelligent young man, and from a young age, he has been very involved in his self-care, and he is as functionally independent as he can be right now. In less than two years, he will be an adult, and his health care decisions will become entirely his own.

While I am confident that he and I, as well as G and E, and A’s medical team will handle whatever comes our way to the best of our abilities, doing it without Steve’s support seems virtually impossible.

The reality of that hit me the first time I filled out a permission slip that asked for a “parent #2’s” information.

On the one hand, there is not a single other person on the planet, other than maybe his main cardiologist, who could run through A’s medical history off the top of their head. On the other hand, there isn’t a single other person who knows what it was like to pace in that waiting room through all three of A’s open-heart procedures, or to sleep on a chair next to his bed for days at a time, until he was ready to come home from the hospital.

Between the two of us, we never had to leave him alone. Between the two of us, one of us could maintain a full-time job, and the other of us could cut back on work hours to stay home with A so he didn’t have to be exposed to a day care situation.

Although the two of us stopped attending all of A’s appointments together, particularly through the COVID restrictions, the other parent was always waiting by the phone for text updates and with a list of questions or concerns to remember to ask.

I just realized last week that Steve was the one who always scheduled the kids’ dentist appointments and they haven’t been there since he died. I feel woefully underprepared to handle this as a single parent, and that’s with three kids who are well over half grown.

One of the things that will haunt me forever is that the night before Steve died, I was on the phone with a friend who had lost her husband last year. I recall saying that I could not even begin to imagine what I would do if something were to happen to Steve. Less than twenty-four hours later, I did not have to try to imagine, I was living it, and it has been a hell worse than anything I could have fathomed.

All of this is to say that we cannot possibly know what situation another person may find themselves in. Through both of these situations, I have been beyond lucky to have resources that many do not have.

Steve and I together were a team that could handle anything that was thrown our way. If we could possibly have known how things would turn out, I wonder what decisions we might have made differently. Of course, it’s all a what-if game, and has no bearing on reality, but at the end of the day, I am both glad that we had the ability to make a choice, and glad that we made the choice that we did.

We also took full responsibility for the choice we made and we worked tirelessly to do everything we could to make sure that our choice worked out for the best. In some ways, our hard work has paid off. In other ways, we were just plain lucky.

What I have learned is that there are no simple answers. I wish that every pregnant woman could have the resources and support system that we had at our disposal. However, even my solid support system disappeared in a split second and changed everything. As hard as you try to imagine yourself in another’s shoes, until you’re actually in them, it’s impossible. Don’t we owe each other the grace and dignity to be allowed to make the best decisions we can for ourselves?