Mike - 21 years together, 1 year after: "She died when she was 39 and I was 40. We met in high school, traveled to college together, traveled around the world, ended up here together. It was kind of crazy because we became adults together and so everything that I knew about being a functioning adult was a skill set that I had developed in tandem with somebody else. And, so all of a sudden being single, it was really disorientating. I mean, beyond everything else that goes with coupledom, everything that I loved about her and everything, I mean, everything that was her, that was lost. And not having a sounding board.
We were definitely planning decades out and it was the type of thing where she got sick and the whole time she was in the hospital, which was two months, I saw a transplant at the end of it and thought that, like truly thought, that everything was going to be fine. And then the day before her transplant, she went in for preparatory surgery and had a heart attack on the table and died.
And then two and a half months later after thinking about this whole thing, I decided that I was going to go after creating
Janesi Comfort . And that also gave me a focus because it felt like something that my wife would have been happy about. The idea of spreading comfort to people that were in her situation is something that I think would have really made her happy. And so having a big goal that was a really encompassing thing that you could spend a whole lot of time and effort on, that also would be kind of something that was done in both her name and with her ethics and ethos I found to be really therapeutic.