Thunder Road — Juliet Taylor

Yesterday was my wedding anniversary, the fifth one I have spent without my late husband, Jeff, who died of ALS in 2020. Jeff Sarnacki’s daughter, Makelle, holds her daughter while enjoying a show at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom in October 2025. (Photo by Juliet Taylor) In the…

Autumn has a very specific feeling where I live on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Right now, the daylight is getting shorter, the temperature is more brisk, and the lush greens of summer have given way to more muted hues as leaves get ready to change color and fall from…

While my late husband, Jeff, was living with ALS, a close family member was diagnosed with colon cancer and required immediate surgery. Fortunately, the cancer had been caught early, and the surgery was successful in eliminating it without complications. The unexpected cancer diagnosis meant that we now had a…

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…