I Lost My Wife To Metastatic Breast Cancer at 29 Years Old

I decided at some point, yes, she has cancer, but I'm going to marry her. There's no going back from that decision. There's no second guessing it. You just live in it. And it's tremendously rewarding when you do. It was amazing to see her become a mom. She'd been very clear right from the beginning. She's always wanted a baby. It was a great moment when she was pregnant and she had the baby because cancer didn't take that away from us. It became clear in the first days of January that she wasn't going to survive. Her heart just, it just couldn't keep up. Samantha and I met in 2015 when I started school at the University of Virginia. I joined the trumpet section of UVA's Cavalier Marching Band. Samantha was already there. Then I proposed to her in the summer of 2020 and we were married in March of 2021. She was first diagnosed in 2019. She had felt a lump in her breast. I gave her a hug and she felt something in her breast. She got it checked out, took them a while. You know, they did some biopsies and some tests and stuff but they were checking, oh, it's a cyst or it's an infection or this or that because at that time she was 22 years old. And so they weren't really thinking about cancer. Eventually they did a biopsy. They checked, it was cancer. And then they found it in her rib and in some of the lymph nodes. And so it being outside of the breast and outside of the lymph nodes in another part of the body like the rib made it stage four but it was a very early stage four. There was a little bit of surgery, a little bit of radiation, a lumpectomy in the breast. And then she was on a hormone treatment for a couple of years. It's true that she had to come off of her hormone therapy at a time when there was no evidence of disease and hadn't been for over a year. But she did come off of her hormone therapy to have a baby. You can argue about the clinical results. There's no one's tested that exact situation and all that. Some people have done it successfully. Some people haven't. Whether or not that contributed to her disease, there's absolutely no regret there. It was what she wanted to do. And if she couldn't do that, if she couldn't be a mom, then what was the point? What was it for? What was she fighting cancer for if not for her daughter and for her family? And so she, at no point, even no understanding what stage four cancer ultimately does, she was very clear-eyed about that. There was no regret, no wish that she had been more self-protective because that's not who Samantha was. I don't regret it either. Even having lost her, I absolutely am glad to have my daughter. And at that point for a couple of years, she was no evidence of disease. And that was the case until her cancer came back in 2023. My initial reaction was despair, right? I was, because it wasn't just back, it was in a lot more places than it had been previously. I was always more sort of bothered by bad news than Samantha was. My mind immediately went to the darkest possible conclusions, but then she could bring me back from that. From there all the way through the next two years or so, it was highs and lows, good news, bad news, no news, just waiting all over the place. I sort of think about the final year as kind of one unit of progression. Starting from the beginning of 2025, she had been on a treatment that wasn't particularly working. They found that out with the first scan. So they switched her to a new treatment. On that treatment, the results were great. So about a year ago at this time, we were celebrating really good results. And so from there, she was on that treatment all the way through, through the summer, through the fall. Then in December of 2025, we hadn't had a scan yet on the new treatment, I think. And we went on, we were on a trip at Disney World where Samantha loved to go. And she was just having a lot of swelling and in her legs, in her arms, in her extremities, in her abdomen, and just retaining a lot of water. And the doctor thought that at that point, she was probably in some sort of early heart failure. Her heart was failing to maintain what it needed to do and that was causing swelling. But at that time, she had had a head MRI just a few days before. And so we got to, as we were driving to the hospital, Samantha got the results of that on her phone through her patient portal and found out that there was some cancer in her brain there, which is something that we never even had to deal with. So there was that, and then there was also cancer in her liver from her most recent PET scan. And that's really what they were worried about as the immediate threat. Then on the new treatment that we had done through December, the liver spots had gotten smaller, but there were more of them. And so that was concerning. So we were starting a new treatment. We're going to start a new treatment to focus on the liver. They gave her the chemo eventually and it had good results, but then that resulted in a large amount of electrolytes in her system, which is a result of something called tumor lysis syndrome, they're theorizing. Basically, you kill so much cancer, you release everything contained in the cancer, all these electrolytes, which can harm your kidneys. So now they're talking about dialysis, didn't ultimately do that. They just kept an eye on it, things got under control. So the numbers were sort of trending in a positive direction for about five days. And then all of a sudden things just kind of turned around. Her blood pressure was very low, too low for her to get any of her medications. They took her into the ICU and they just, they tried various things to increase her blood pressure and they just weren't having any luck with that. And so the going theory from there, she wasn't able to main, basically it was really blood pressure at the end of the day. Her heart was too weak to handle the other things that she needed, but all of those things combined and it was just, it sort of became clear the sort of the positive way the doctors try to spin things just got a little less positive over the course of a few days. And so there was no point at which anything really, any of the news was surprising. It was all sort of a logical conclusion of the thing before it. But it became clear in the first days of January that she wasn't gonna survive. And she was in the ICU. She understood at that point, she was on some pain medication and everything, but we said, goodbye, I love you, all of that. And she was intubated. And then she was unconscious for the next 24 hours or so, but that was it. There was really nothing they could do at that point. I mean, I'm still navigating it, but I've got no concerns about Samantha's soul. I know that she loved the Lord. I know that she was saved in that sense. I grieve with hope is sort of a phrase that our pastor used at Samantha's funeral. I chose to marry Samantha and continue dating her despite her diagnosis. And it was something that resulted in us having a lot of conversations that a lot of people don't have sometimes before they're married or this soon after they're married or sometimes ever. So we had a strong relationship as a result of tragedy. We knew each other very well for people who are married five years. And I say that not knowing anything about other people's marriages to compare them to, but we had an extraordinary connection because we had worked through so much. I think being young, it means that there will be a future without her in a sense that there won't be if we were much older, if we were at the end of our lives and our daughter will grow up without her. It's been the hardest part. Navigating it with our daughter, telling her, explaining it to her, to a three-year-old has been by far the most difficult part of all of this. Her not having her mother. And I think, you know, Samantha would see it the same way. Samantha not having her daughter is the most difficult part. I decided from the beginning, I would navigate it with complete honesty. You know, I've explained to her that her mother died. I explained why, to the extent a three-year-old can understand it. If she asked me a question, I tell her the truth. And I think that that will serve her well in the long run. I explained that too, that her mother is with Jesus in heaven. And she asked questions about that and I answer them to the best of my knowledge. But it will be years of understanding, of learning, and there will be difficult things, you know, as she goes through school, where she doesn't have the same thing other people have. I have every hope that she will understand it as well as I do, which is an imperfect understanding. And that she will be able to get through it with all the help that she has. Samantha taught me a lot about how to love people in every sense. Her, our daughter, her family. She brought a lot of people into my life who I love, like my family or who are my family. And she's expanded that. And so understanding how to take pleasure in serving them, in loving them, has been one of her greatest gifts. Samantha built so much in the time that she had is extraordinary to me. And in that way, I feel, it's an extension of the selflessness she showed during her life. But I feel indebted to her that she invested so much in my life and in our daughter's life that she won't get to reap the rewards of. And she invested it knowing that she probably wouldn't ultimately long-term. She knows the statistics, the five-year survival rates and such, which she beat from 2019. She was just an extraordinarily beautiful person inside and out.