Some Nights Stay With You
On graduation, grief, promises kept, and the moments that quietly alter the direction of a life.
I know I went MIA for a few weeks and got quiet. Okay it has been more like a month or more at this point! I am sorry! I know! I just stopped writing.
When life gets hard, I tend to do one of two things. I either throw myself into writing and document every detail like I’m personally responsible for preserving the historical record, or I shut down completely and disappear. This time, unfortunately, my brain chose option B.
Almost a month ago my ex-husband passed away. I still find myself staring at that sentence every time I write it because it doesn’t quite feel real yet.
I won’t get into how he passed or what happened because, truthfully, I don’t know. I’m still trying to piece things together myself. There are a lot of unanswered questions, and I don’t want to fill in the blanks with assumptions or say something today that I may later learn wasn’t true. So for now, the answer is simply that we don’t know.
And we may never know. That has been one of the hardest parts for me. I am the person who wants answers. I want explanations. I want things to make sense. If there is a puzzle missing pieces, I will spend an unreasonable amount of time looking for them. The idea that some questions don’t get answered is a concept I understand intellectually but apparently not emotionally.
The reality is that I spent 13 years of my life with him. Thirteen years is a long time. Long enough to accumulate a thousand inside jokes, shared memories, old stories, and versions of yourself that only that person remembers. Long enough that even after you’ve gone your separate ways, pieces of that history still follow you around.
Our relationship wasn’t perfect. Far from it. We hurt each other, frustrated each other, and spent more than our fair share of time driving one another absolutely insane. But time has a funny way of softening some of the sharp edges. The anger wasn’t what it used to be. The resentment wasn’t what it used to be. Somewhere along the way, I think we were slowly finding our way toward something that looked a lot more like friendship than hostility.
I don’t know if we ever would have fully gotten there. I just know now we’ll never have the chance to find out.
Finding out he passed wasn’t just sad. It felt like one of those moments that divides your life into a before and an after. Most of us have a few of those. The moments where you can point to a specific day, a specific phone call, a specific decision, and say, “That was it. That was the moment everything changed.”
You usually don’t recognize them while they’re happening. Life doesn’t come with dramatic background music and a narrator announcing that you’re about to enter a new chapter. It just quietly changes direction, and years later you look back and realize nothing was ever quite the same afterward.
The day I got that call of his passing will be one of those moments for me.
Ironically, the post below was the one I was writing and getting ready to publish the day I found out he passed. I never hit publish. Life had other plans. But I’m publishing it now because it talks about another one of those defining moments in my life: my graduation night.
And honestly the older I get, the more I find myself thinking about those crossroads. The tiny moments that seemed insignificant at the time but ended up changing everything. Had we gone left instead of right. Had we stayed home instead of going out. Had we made one different decision on one ordinary day. Where would we be? Who would we be? We’ll never know, of course. That’s part of the deal.
What I do know is that my graduation night changed the trajectory of my life in ways I couldn’t have understood at the time. And now, so has the day I learned my ex-husband passed away.
Neither moment is the entire story.
But both moments will forever be chapters in it.
The following was originally written on May 21, 2026:
Happy Graduation, LHHS Class of 2026
Twenty-one years ago tonight, I stood on that football field under the stadium lights in my cap and gown, surrounded by proud families, camera flashes, restless graduates, and that strange, fragile kind of hope that only exists when you are eighteen and still think the future can be planned.
I was a good student. Top 10% of my graduating class. I had dreams. I had ambition. I had a whole version of my life mapped out in my head, neat and polished and deeply unrealistic because apparently eighteen-year-old me had not yet been informed that life enjoys taking your five year plan, lighting it on fire, and using the ashes for dramatic effect.
By the time I went home that night, I had made one of the biggest decisions of my life. I was moving to Tucson.
Why I made that decision belongs to Season 1 of my life, otherwise known as my high school years, and Readers, we do not discuss Season 1. Not because it didn’t matter, but because some stories cannot be told without pulling other people into the wreckage. And as much as those years shaped me, as much as they still echo through parts of my life twenty-one years later, I have no interest in destroying anyone else just so I can explain myself.
So no, we won’t be unpacking Season 1. Not here. Not ever. Just know that eighteen-year-old Sarah had her reasons for wanting a fresh start, and at the time, I thought I was choosing a city and a college. What I didn’t realize was that I was choosing the road that would shape almost everything that came after.
Because none of my plans involved spending the next two decades trying to emotionally unpack everything that happened during those four years of high school.
None of my plans involved befriending Bestie. And they certainly did not involve chasing his gay ass around Tucson, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and whatever emotional disaster zone he happened to be standing in at the time.
But here we are, Readers. Life is funny like that. And by funny, I mean rude and in desperate need of supervision.
Graduation night is supposed to be one of those glowing memories. The cap toss. The hugs. The parents crying in the stands. The feeling that one chapter has closed and something bigger, brighter, and less emotionally damaging is waiting just beyond the football field.
And maybe part of it was that. Maybe part of me really did stand there believing I was free. But when I think back on that night now, I do not just remember the ceremony. I do not just remember walking across that field or hearing my name or feeling that strange mix of pride and terror settle in my chest.
I remember what came after. I remember the way the night shifted once the crowd started thinning out. Once the celebration began to fade. Once the football field stopped feeling like an ending and started feeling like the edge of something I was too young to understand.
That was the night my life quietly split in two.
And no, Brenda, before you pull out your judgment clipboard and start highlighting my emotional instability in neon yellow, I know I have a habit of making my trauma sound cinematic.
I know.
I am self-aware enough to admit that sometimes I take the ugliest parts of my life, give them dramatic lighting, add a soundtrack, and call it storytelling because it feels safer than saying, “This still hurts.”
But this one? This one still does. Because that night, after almost everyone else went home, I had a choice to make. One of those choices that does not look life-changing in the moment. It just arrives. A person, a conversation, a decision, a door you either walk through or don’t.
And at eighteen, you think one night is just one night. You think one choice can be undone later. You think loyalty is noble, secrets are temporary, and the people who pull you into darkness must only need someone brave enough to follow them in.
Which is adorable. Deeply tragic. But adorable.
Maybe some people would say I chose wrong. Maybe the healthier version of me, the one with boundaries and a functioning self-preservation instinct, would have walked away. Maybe she would have gone home, taken off the gown, washed the hairspray out of her hair, and let graduation night become nothing more than a few pictures and a fading memory.
But that is not what happened. I chose the door. And twenty-one years later, I still live with the echo of it.
The complicated truth is that I do not know if I would change it. I know that sounds ridiculous. I know it sounds like something only a person with a highly questionable relationship with chaos would say. And yes, Readers, I am aware the evidence against me is extensive.
But some choices become part of the architecture of your life. They become load-bearing walls. You can hate them. You can question them. You can cover them in sarcasm, iced coffee, bad jokes, and overly dramatic essays on the internet, but you cannot remove them without wondering who you would even be without them.
That night changed me. It cost me things I did not even know I was handing over at the time. But it also led me here. To this strange, messy, beautiful, impossible life. To the people I love. To the stories I tell. To the version of myself who can finally look back at that girl on the football field and say, “You had no idea what was coming, but somehow, you survived it.”
And maybe that is the part that gets me the most. Because for all my sarcasm, for all my jokes, for all my “we do not talk about Season 1 on this channel” nonsense, there is still a girl inside me standing under those lights.
She is eighteen. She is proud. She is scared. She thinks she knows what loyalty means. She thinks she knows what love is supposed to cost. She thinks she has time to become someone else before the consequences catch up.
And God, I wish I could hug her. I wish I could warn her. I wish I could tell her she is not as grown as she thinks she is. But I also know she would not listen. Because I know her. Because I was her. Because in some ways, I still am.
Some things belong to the past. Some things belong to promises. Some things are still not mine to fully tell. But twenty-one years later, I can admit this: My high school years still haunt me sometimes. Not every day. Not in the loud, overwhelming way they once did. But quietly. In songs I forgot existed. In the feeling of summer heat at night. In the sight of stadium lights against a dark sky. In the memory of standing on that football field, believing my whole life was about to begin, while having absolutely no idea how much one single night could alter the direction of everything.
That is the part no one can really prepare you for at graduation. Everyone tells you to chase your dreams and follow your heart and be excited for the future. And you should be. You really should. But no one tells you that some nights stay with you. No one tells you that some decisions echo. No one tells you that one day, twenty-one years later, you may still be trying to understand the person you were under those lights.
So tonight, to the LHHS Class of 2026, I hope you celebrate. I hope you take too many pictures. I hope you laugh with your friends until your cheeks hurt. I hope your families embarrass you just enough that one day it becomes a funny memory. I hope you feel proud of yourself, because you should.
And I hope you understand, even just a little, that tonight matters. Not because you have to know exactly where your life is going from here. You don’t. Most of us didn’t. Some of us very much did not. But because this is one of those rare moments where you get to stand between who you were and who you are becoming. And that is beautiful, even when it is terrifying.
So enjoy it. Hold onto it. Let yourself be young and hopeful and excited. Let yourself believe in the future, even if it doesn’t unfold exactly the way you planned.
And if I can offer one piece of advice from twenty-one years down the road, it is this: Do not spend your whole life running from the moments that changed you. Even the painful ones. Even the complicated ones. Sometimes those moments become the stories that shape you the most. And sometimes, years later, you finally find the words for them.