Thunder Road — Juliet Taylor

Often I do some of my deepest thinking when I’m alone in the car. I regularly drive 35 minutes to ride my horse, and I like to spend that time in silence. That’s when I think about people to contact or items on my to-do list for the week ahead.

I remember the first caregiving task that I completed for my late husband, Jeff, after he was diagnosed with ALS in the fall of 2018. His symptoms had started with a foot drop, and by the time of his diagnosis, his right foot had become paralyzed. It became my…

After the loss of my beloved dog Rudder when he was 12 years old, a close friend observed with concern that she hadn’t seen me cry. It was true, I hadn’t shed any tears publicly, and even privately I sat with my grief quietly and alone. Rudder had gotten me…

It was seven years ago this summer that I unwittingly and unwillingly became a part of the ALS community when my late husband, Jeff, began exhibiting foot drop and slurred speech, symptoms that were worrisome enough for us to seek medical answers. His relatively quick diagnosis of ALS that…

My late husband, Jeff, and I shared a love of the outdoors, even though our preferred activities were often different. I loved to hike and kayak, while Jeff, who’d been injured when a car hit his bicycle in 2010 and still suffered from orthopedic pain, preferred to relax. Whether at…

I remember the emptiness I felt the first September after graduating from college. I’d been a student for 16 of my 21 years at that time, and the void of not going back to school at the end of summer was disconcerting. For some years after that, I quietly regarded…

Sometime in my mid-40s, I wrote a list of goals I wanted to achieve before turning 50. I no longer have the list, but I remember a few things on it: Learn a second language. Complete one half-marathon each year. And my then-favorite, visit 50 countries by the time I…

The weeks immediately following my late husband’s ALS diagnosis were the scariest and most unsettling of my life. Even with Jeff’s physical symptoms pointing toward ALS, nothing could’ve prepared us to actually hear those words when they were delivered in a windowless examination room in Baltimore, in November 2018.

When I was growing up, many of my neighbors participated in the U.S. Naval Academy Sponsor Program, as we lived just a few miles from the school’s campus in Annapolis, Maryland. Under the program, local families “adopted” midshipmen, offering a home away from home to the students, who could come…

A photo I came across this week from when my late husband, Jeff, was living with ALS flooded me with emotions. It was taken in November 2019, the month we moved into an accessible home. His ALS was advancing rapidly at the time, which prompted our move. He could…

I was enchanted on the first date with my late husband, Jeff, when our conversation turned to work. It’s an odd thing to say, because we can be conditioned to believe that work should be a less important aspect of our lives. But what I noticed in Jeff was a…

The summer and autumn of 2018 brought uncertain and scary moments for my late husband, Jeff, and me as he battled progressing symptoms of what would later be diagnosed as ALS. His symptoms had begun with the seemingly benign experience of foot drop, which was frustrating but not painful.