There is a precise moment where a life cleaves in two. You don’t recognize it when you are standing in it; you only see it later, looking back across the canyon of what used to be.

For me, that threshold was a completely ordinary Tuesday morning.

The house was still quiet. The dogs were sleeping on my bed, their tails thumping softly against the floor, ready for the routine of the day ahead. I walked down the hallway to wake Glenn, my mind already drifting to the normal logistics of the morning—the shifts to schedule, the coffee to brew, the mundane details of a life built on a comfortable, predictable rhythm.

I opened the bedroom door, and the rhythm stopped.

Glenn wasn’t in bed. He was on the floor.

In that single, fractured second, the world didn’t tilt; it entirely upended. The man who had walked miles of rugged alpine ridges beside me, who had been my steady anchor, was suddenly grounded in a terrifying, heavy silence. His eyes were wide, filled with a raw, clear-headed panic as he looked up at me—trapped entirely behind an invisible wall where his voice used to be.

“Glenn?”

The word left my mouth and hung in the quiet room. In the space between that breath and the next, the entire structure of the “Before” collapsed. I was no longer just a wife, a sociologist, or a hiker. Without warning, without a map, I had just crossed the border into the territory of the Must.