The night Teddy started vomiting blood, I realized something I wasn’t prepared to admit.
Life from this moment on was never going to be the same.
Not because of Teddy.
Because I recognized the woman sitting on the floor of the emergency veterinary hospital.
She was the same woman who had lost her husband.
The same nervous system.
The same grief.
The same questions.
This essay is about what happened after that.
About the stories our brains tell us after trauma.
About the kind of healing that doesn’t erase the wound.
And about a burned forest in southern Colorado that changed the way I understand what it means to rebuild.
I hope you’ll read or listen to it.
— Lady Heringer
Part I — Certainty
At three o’clock in the morning, Teddy was vomiting blood into the back seat of my car and before a veterinarian had laid a hand on him, before bloodwork, before anyone knew anything at all, I already knew how the story ended.
He was dying.
Not because it was true.
Because it had happened before.
The emergency veterinary clinic was quiet in the strange way hospitals are quiet in the middle of the night. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead. Someone behind the front desk spoke in a practiced whisper. My sister-in-law, who had arrived only hours earlier for what was supposed to be a weekend trip to Santa Fe, sat beside me while Teddy disappeared behind the swinging doors.
Objectively, I knew enough medicine to understand the differential diagnosis. Vomiting blood has a long list of explanations. Some are catastrophic. Many are not. Teddy was young. Healthy. A dog with an unfortunate history of occasionally eating things he shouldn’t and throwing them right back up again. Statistically, the odds were in his favor.
Statistics, however, have no authority over a terrified nervous system.
Before anyone spoke, before the veterinarian returned, before evidence existed in either direction, my mind had already assembled the ending. Cancer. A bowel obstruction. Internal bleeding. This is how you lose him.
I wasn’t considering possibilities.
I was remembering certainty.
The veterinarian emerged looking almost relaxed.
“I think he’s just got some upset guts. He should be fine,” she said.
I didn’t believe her.
She explained what she wanted to test. She wasn’t alarmed. Neither was the technician. Neither was my sister-in-law.
Everyone else in the room appeared to be living inside the same reality.
I wasn’t.
Over the next forty-eight hours, three different veterinarians would tell me some version of the same thing.
“We’re optimistic.”
“I don’t think this is what you’re afraid it is.”
“Let’s treat the symptoms first.”
Every reassurance landed somewhere just outside my reach.
I kept asking for another test.
Another scan.
Another explanation.
Not because they had found something concerning.
Because I was convinced they had missed it.
I couldn’t borrow anyone else’s hope.
I’ve spent years studying the human body. I’ve built a career helping people understand stress physiology, behavior change, and the strange ways our minds shape our biology. The people closest to me describe me as intuitive. The kind of person who notices subtle shifts before anyone else does.
But sitting in that emergency room, I couldn’t access any of it.
Not my training.
Not my intuition.
Not even the quiet part of myself that usually knows when something truly is wrong.
All I could feel was certainty.
Not certainty that Teddy was sick.
Certainty that I was about to lose someone I loved.
It wasn’t just a thought.
It was physical.
My stomach tightened into something cold and heavy. My chest compressed, as though breathing required conscious effort. Every muscle in my body prepared for impact before impact had occurred.
The sensation was disturbingly familiar.
Not emotionally familiar.
Cellularly familiar.
The body has its own memory.
It remembers things the mind has not yet named.
Sitting in that waiting room, I realized something I couldn’t yet explain.
The fear I was experiencing felt wildly disproportionate to the evidence in front of me.
But it felt perfectly proportional to something else.
I just didn’t know what.
Not yet.
Part II — Return
For the last year, people have called me resilient.
It’s always meant as a compliment.
Sometimes they say it quietly, with tears in their eyes. Sometimes it’s after reading something I’ve written. Sometimes it’s after listening to an episode of my podcast. Sometimes it’s after watching me laugh, travel alone, train at the gym, or somehow continue participating in a life that, by all appearances, should have stopped.
“You’re so resilient.”
Yet every time someone says it, there is a part of me that wants to shove the word right back down their throat.
Not because I don’t understand what they’re trying to say.
Because I reject what they need it to mean.
They need resilience to mean I’m bouncing back.
That I’m okay.
That somehow, against all odds, I’m returning to the woman I was before.
But none of that feels true.
I don’t feel strong.
I feel like I’m surviving.
Some days that has meant getting through the day.
Some days it has meant getting through the next hour.
Sometimes it has meant sitting in a chair staring out the window, waiting for time to pass because existing was all I had the capacity for.
People imagine resilience as someone getting knocked down, getting back up, and carrying on.
Maybe a little wiser.
Maybe with a scar.
But fundamentally unchanged.
I don’t believe that’s possible.
Not after this.
There isn’t a version of me to go back to.
She belonged to a world where Patrick was alive.
That world ended with him.
And here’s the part no one wants me to say out loud:
I don’t want to get over him.
I don’t want to become the inspirational story people tell themselves about tragedy.
I don’t want to be someone’s proof that everything works out in the end.
I don’t want to be admired for surviving something I would have given anything not to survive.
I don’t want to be anyone’s hero if the price of becoming one was losing the love of my life.
So when people call me resilient, what I hear is something different.
I hear them hoping I’ll eventually return.
But there is no returning.
That’s the lie hidden inside almost every sentence we offer people after loss.
Stay strong.
You’ll bounce back.
You’ll get through this.
You’ll be yourself again.
They are beautiful things to say because they are attempts at hope. They tell the person in pain that this version of life is temporary, that one day they’ll find their way back to the person they used to be.
The problem is that some losses don’t work that way.
Some losses don’t leave a person bruised.
They rearrange and derange them.
For most of my adult life, I built my identity around capability. I owned businesses. I coached hundreds of clients. I could hold a dozen responsibilities in my head at once. I answered every email. Solved every problem. Built systems. Managed people. Produced. Planned. Performed.
I loved that woman.
She wasn’t pretending.
She simply belonged to a world that no longer exists.
When my husband was murdered, I didn’t just lose him.
I lost the future that organized every decision I made.
I lost the assumptions underneath my ambition.
I lost the illusion that if you make enough good choices, work hard enough, love well enough, prepare carefully enough, =life will reward you with some version of permanence.
People ask whether I feel safe now.
What is safety?
Is it locked doors?
An alarm system?
A loaded gun beside the bed?
A healthy body?
Routine bloodwork?
Fresh tires before a road trip?
We build our lives around the idea that enough preparation can protect us from catastrophe.
Then catastrophe arrives anyway.
Not because we failed.
Because life has never promised immunity.
The woman I was before believed that safety could be constructed.
The woman I am now knows it can only ever be borrowed.
And that is why I struggle with the word resilient.
It quietly assumes the goal is restoration.
As if healing means returning.
Returning to who?
The woman whose husband was still alive?
The woman before cancer changed her body forever?
The mother before she buried her child?
The veteran before the war?
I’ve spent years coaching women who measured success by whether they could fit into the jeans they wore in high school.
As though healing meant shrinking themselves back into the body of a sixteen-year-old girl.
We are obsessed with return.
Maybe that’s because returning is easier to imagine than becoming someone you’ve never been.
But life doesn’t ask us to become who we were.
It asks us to become someone capable of carrying what happened.
Those are not the same thing.
And yet our language still insists on calling that resilience.
I don’t think resilience is returning to the person who walked into the fire.
I think it’s learning how to live as the person who walked out.
Part III — The Prediction Machine
If my body wasn’t responding to Teddy… what was it responding to?
For most of my life, I thought memory worked like a recording.
Something happened.
My brain stored it.
Later, if I needed it, I could pull it back out.
That’s how most of us imagine memory works. Like a library. Or a filing cabinet. The past is archived somewhere behind us, and when we need it, we retrieve it.
It’s an intuitive idea.
It’s also the wrong one.
One of the biggest shifts in neuroscience over the last few decades is the understanding that the brain isn’t primarily a recording device.
It’s a prediction device.
Long before we’re consciously aware of what’s happening around us, our brains are already making educated guesses about what’s about to happen next. They’re constantly comparing those predictions to incoming information, updating them when they’re wrong and strengthening them when they’re right.
Most of the time, we never notice.
You don’t consciously calculate how much force it will take to lift your coffee mug every morning. You don’t study the face of your best friend to decide whether you know them. You don’t relearn how to walk every time your feet touch the floor.
Your brain predicts.
Reality confirms.
Life moves on.
Prediction is one of the reasons we’re able to move through the world so effortlessly.
Until something happens that your brain never expected.
Trauma doesn’t simply become another memory.
It changes the model your brain uses to predict the future.
Before Patrick died, I knew—intellectually—that people could lose someone they loved without warning.
Afterward, my body knew it.
Those are not the same kind of knowing.
One is information.
The other is survival.
The brain doesn’t ask whether an experience was statistically likely.
It asks whether it was possible.
Once something has happened once, it no longer lives in the category of impossible.
It becomes part of the model.
Which meant that when Teddy started vomiting blood in the middle of the night, my nervous system wasn’t beginning with a blank page.
It was already searching for the last time someone I loved had suddenly been in danger.
The answer came immediately.
Death.
Not because Teddy was dying.
Because my nervous system had already learned that ordinary days can become catastrophic ones without permission.
I spent those forty-eight hours believing I was failing.
Why couldn’t I calm down?
Why couldn’t I trust three different veterinarians?
Why couldn’t I listen to reason?
Looking back, I was asking the wrong questions.
My brain wasn’t malfunctioning.
It was forecasting.
It had quietly taken the worst day of my life and promoted it from an exception to a rule.
Every emergency after that would be measured against the first one.
Every waiting room.
Every phone call after midnight.
It wasn’t asking,
What is happening?
It was asking,
What happened last time?
And the answer arrived long before the evidence did.
Understanding that changed the way I related to my fear.
It didn’t change the way I felt.
Understanding your nervous system doesn’t exempt you from having one.
It simply means you understand why your body is afraid before reality has answered the question.
Knowing that didn’t heal me.
But it was the beginning of a different conversation.
Part IV — The Desert
Two days after Teddy got sick, I drove south.
Not because everything was okay.
Because it wasn’t.
He was finally stable enough to travel. The veterinarians were still, ever optimistic. He slept almost the entire drive, curled into the passenger seat as if the previous forty-eight hours had belonged to someone else.
I, on the other hand, carried every one of them with me.
We were supposed to leave two days earlier for Santa Fe. Patrick’s cousin was celebrating his fortieth birthday, and friends had come from all over the country to spend the weekend together.
By the time I finally pulled onto Interstate 25 Saturday morning, I already knew I had missed the evening everyone would remember.
Later, my cousin would describe it to me.
Stories around the dinner table.
Old friends from different chapters of his life gathered in one place.
The kind of night people spend years trying to recreate and never can.
And I missed it.
Grief has a way of making every absence feel permanent.
So Teddy and I drove south anyway.
Not toward healing.
Just toward somewhere else.
The drive from Colorado into northern New Mexico begins without asking permission.
The mountains widen.
The sky expands.
The light changes.
There comes a point where the landscape grows so large your own thoughts begin sounding smaller inside it.
I stopped for coffee somewhere south of the state line.
I don’t remember the name of the town.
I remember the coffee.
I remember standing beside my car, the morning already growing hot, both hands wrapped around the cup, watching the desert wake up.
Grief has changed my relationship with ordinary pleasures.
Before Patrick died, coffee was coffee.
Now it feels almost sacramental.
Not because it solves anything.
Because there are mornings when the simple fact that something can still taste this good feels astonishing.
That weekend, Santa Fe was covered in hollyhocks.
They climbed adobe walls in impossible shades of magenta, crimson, peach, and white, reaching toward windows that had watched centuries come and go. They looked almost theatrical against the earth-colored buildings, as though someone had decided the desert deserved one extravagant gesture.
I found myself stopping mid-conversation just to look at them.
Not because flowers erase grief.
Because beauty still insists on existing beside it.
For a long time after Patrick died, I believed joy and grief were opponents.
If one entered the room, the other had to leave.
If I laughed too hard, guilt followed.
If I cried, beauty became inaccessible.
I imagined healing would eventually tip the scale.
Less grief.
Less fear.
I thought the pain would gradually lose its sharp edges.
I thought healing meant feeling better.
But that’s not what’s happening.
Standing in Santa Fe, I missed Patrick with an ache that was physical.
I was sad I had missed my cousin’s celebration.
I was still exhausted from two nights spent wondering whether Teddy would survive.
And I was completely captivated by the hollyhocks growing out of the sidewalks.
Every one of those things was true.
None canceled the others out.
I had been solving the wrong equation.
For a long time, I believed healing meant the thing that broke me would eventually hurt less.
That, over time, the pain itself would soften.
That one day I would wake up and discover it no longer reached quite so deep.
It doesn’t work that way.
Patrick’s death still hurts exactly as it always has.
It still marks me.
It is still something I carry.
Healing doesn’t erase the wound.
It integrates it.
The wound becomes part of the landscape of my life rather than something I’m waiting to get over.
Not because it’s fading.
Because it becomes woven into the life I am still living.
And that doesn’t protect me from loving things that can still be lost.
If anything, it does the opposite.
My heart becomes available to be broken again.
That is not failure.
That is healing.
Grief is an initiation.
It asks you to carry something you never wanted.
Healing isn’t learning how to put it down.
It’s discovering that you can carry it while remaining open to everything else life will ask of your heart.
Part V — A New Forest
On the drive home, the devastation stretched for miles.
Entire mountainsides stood black against the sky, as though the fire had only recently passed through.
It just kept going.
Mile after mile.
I found myself wondering,
When does this end?
Finally, I asked Grok in my Tesla what had happened there.
The Spring Creek Fire.
More than 100,000 acres burned.
2018.
Eight years?
I looked back at the mountains.
I would have sworn it happened a year ago.
Charred trunks stood where forests used to be. Hillsides stretched for miles without the deep green canopy I expected to find.
How can this still be this destroyed? It’s been eight years.
Then I learned what I couldn’t see.
Some of the old ponderosas had survived because their bark was thick enough to withstand the fire.
The aspens would come back first. Beneath the ground, they shared the same root system.
And the trees that didn’t survive?
They would remain standing for years before finally falling back to the earth.
Slowly decomposing.
Returning nutrients to the soil.
Rebuilding the foundation another forest would someday grow from.
Decades would pass before a new canopy stretched across the mountainside.
Not because nothing was happening.
Because almost everything that mattered was happening where no one could see it.
I recognized it.
It wasn’t just a mountain anymore.
It was my own life.
I had been measuring my healing by what was visible.
Am I happier?
Am I building again?
Can I imagine another future?
But regrowth doesn’t begin by reaching upward.
It begins by rebuilding what can hold the weight of another forest.
The mountain doesn’t care that it’s been eight years.
It isn’t working on my timeline.
It isn’t trying to recreate the forest that burned.
It’s creating the conditions for whatever comes next.
I had mistaken the absence of trees for the absence of healing.
I wasn’t the only one.
We celebrate what grows above the ground because it’s easy to see.
The new job.
The smile.
The relationship.
The person who “got their life back.”
We rarely ask what’s happening underneath.
What is decomposing?
What beliefs are dying?
What foundations are quietly being rebuilt?
From the open road, it looked as though nothing had healed.
The mountain knew otherwise.
One last thing...
Thank you for staying.
I’m trying something new by reading these essays aloud and turning them into a different kind of podcast. If you’d rather listen than read, I hope you’ll join me there.
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Thank you for reading.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you for helping me keep telling these stories.
— Sarah
