Rashel Fitchett, whose spouse has ALS, shares her journey from an unexpected love story to building a life in the remote Cascade mountains. She reflects on the shift from their dream retirement to navigating Doug’s diagnosis, the lifestyle changes they embraced to support his health, and the balance they’ve found between humor, presence, and resilience.
Transcript
My name is Rashel Fitchett, and I live in Anacortes, Washington, and I am the spouse of a person with ALS.
Doug and I met literally at the hospital. We were born in the same room together. Our mothers shared a birthing room, and we didn’t know this, of course — until 21 years later when we locked eyes and had an instant connection. And I would call it love at first sight.
When we got to talking, we realized we had the same birthday, and we were really surprised by that. And the same year, of course, and in the same hospital. And so I talked to my mom the next day, and she was like, “Oh, yeah, I remember his mom. We shared a birthing room together.” And from there, it was, history began itself. We married four months later.
Doug retired from a lifelong naval career right after 2020, and we had made plans at the same time to sell our home and move off to the mountains and build our forever home, because we had been moving every few years for our entire lives, and we just wanted to settle and get roots.
So we did that. We built a cabin in Winthrop, Washington, way out in the forest. We’re the last house on the road — mail doesn’t even come to us. Like, you know, we’re way out there. And Doug created a recreational snowmobiling business. So he was doing guiding and rentals out in the snowy Cascade mountains.
I’m a silversmith, so I was working from home, and it was just him and I out there in the forest doing our thing in retirement — we’re empty nesting. Our three children have grown and gone, and yeah, we were just doing our thing until Doug started noticing some symptoms.
Since Doug’s diagnosis, I’ve been navigating our relationship with loving-kindness. That’s the base of everything. Like, how can I love this human? How can I support him? How can I allow his body to stay in a healing state so that his body can do what it needs to do to slow down the progress?
Doug is a really funny guy by nature, so he always keeps things light and lifted with a joke. I’m not the humor girl. I am more of the spirit — stay centered in your heart. Stay in the now — let’s read an Eckhart Tolle book. Let’s go meditate. He’s the joker.
So we have moments where things get uncomfortable, and then on the flip side of that, Doug will make a joke about it. The advice that I would give another caregiver or spouse is to go out and do reading about how to help support a person whose body is having troubles with normal function, and there’s so much information out there — and take it in and apply what feels right to your lifestyle.
Doug and I made lifestyle changes immediately based on what we had read about nutrition and stress and sleep and the healing state — just what the body needs to heal. And Doug’s body is going through a lot, so it’s really important that he have a small amount of stress, and he’s sleeping well, and he’s eating the right nutrients.
I would even suggest reaching out to a doctor that you feel drawn to, and ask to sit down and talk with them and see what they have to say about lifestyle changes you can make to increase your person’s ability to heal well.
When we made all the changes — and I mean from bottom to the top: nutrition, sleep, what we were reading, what type of media content we were bringing in to our bodies — all of it has created an entire new life. We’ve really started a new chapter. Everything that was before is now something different.
We moved out of the forest. We went into a town with a lot of people, so we could be around upbeat energy and not be so isolated, and making all these changes really helped us cope with the severity of the situation.
And so now we’re just filling our days with as much love and light, and smart decisions as we can, and it really helps us have a sense of control over a situation that feels a little out of control.
