Jocelyn Luhr
Author
Jocelyn Luhr is a memoirest and visual designer whose work explores love, loss, resilience, the complex layers of caregiving, and life after losing the one person in the world you count on. A graphic designer and science communications specialist by trade, Jocelyn’s first book is rooted in her personal experience navigating the profound challenges of life, grief, and transformation.
My Story
What I’ve learned is that life goes on: it goes on after you graduate from high school and get out of the town you felt trapped in as a teen. It goes on after college where your expectations of what it means to be an adult don’t quite live up to what you thought they would be. It goes on after marriage, after children, after divorce, after another marriage and another divorce, and it goes on after you finally meet the person you’re convinced you’re actually going to spend the rest of your life with–only to lose them to cancer after only nine years together.
As you go on through this life you learn what it is to love and to lose that love. In that journey to loss you simultaneously lose sight of what’s in front of you while discovering what it is that is truly important.
Dan was a tremendous man who fixed things. He fixed broken airplanes and busted garbage disposals. He fixed up houses and kept cars running long after they should have been driven to the junkyard. He fixed broken hearts and became the glue that held my familly together after a devastating divorce and custody battle. So when he was diagnosed with stage 4 esophageal cancer at age 49, we were convinced that he would fix that as well: after all, he’d always came through.
For twenty months he fought the cancer that threatened to take away the happy lives we fought so hard for. In the end everything he tried simply wasn’t enough for such a huge foe: not the surgeries or the chemo and radiation.Not the alternative methods of ivermectin and apricot seeds and red light therapy.
The before, during, and after all feel like a lifetime in just a couple of years. Using journals, writing in real-time and pulling from Dan’s Caring Bridge entries I chronicle the days spent battling the beast, and the inevitable transformation of myself and my family that happen afterwards. It’s the piecing together of a man’s hidden life and the revelations of the things we, as humans, choose to keep from one another. It asks questions and it searches for answers. There are prayers and heartbreak but there is also hope and the focus on an uncertain but inevitable future. With our legacies and history comes the question, when is a person’s life considered to be finished? Is it ever? Or does it end when we do, simply leaving those behind to continue with their own stories.