Sherry Pagoto, a clinical psychologist and longtime friend of the man who died, wrote in HuffPost that she and the deceased’s wife, identified as Robyn, formed an unexpected new friendship while grieving the same loss.
Pagoto traced the relationship back to 1989, when she and the man known as Mike met as teenagers outside Detroit while working at the same restaurant. The two lost touch after college but reconnected 14 years later and spent the next 16 years running together and supporting one another through life events, including the death of Mike’s father and infertility struggles. After a training run in August 2023, Mike discovered a lump in his armpit that was diagnosed as an aggressive lymphoma. In June 2024, a doctor told the family, “There’s nothing more we can do. He has about a week left.” Mike died seven days later.
Pagoto said she spent Mike’s final week at his side after flying in when prognosis changed, and that she and Robyn first sat together moments after he died. In the days following the funeral, Pagoto returned home and tried to hide her grief in routine. Robyn, by contrast, faced immediate logistical and emotional burdens: closing accounts, experiencing panic attacks, and confronting the work of managing a household without her partner. Pagoto described their contact expanding from occasional check-ins to daily calls as they navigated the early months after the death.
The two women, Pagoto wrote, used repeated conversations to process the months of medical treatment and to ask whether anything had been missed. Over time, those conversations shifted from rehashing medical details to seeking distraction and small comforts. They watched television simultaneously across the distance, sending one-line reactions and brief exchanges as they streamed series and reality shows together. Pagoto cited the HBO series Somebody Somewhere and the reality program that the pair nicknamed “The Golden Bachelorette,” saying the shared ritual of watching and commenting provided a tether in months when ordinary pleasures felt inaccessible.
Pagoto said the holiday season after Mike’s death was especially fraught for Robyn, who had practical reminders of her husband’s absence and struggled with the music and rituals that had been part of their life together. The two friends adopted a strategy of treating holidays as ordinary days to avoid the rituals that amplified their loss. In spring they began more active forms of connection: outdoor conversations while gardening and shared plans for home projects. Pagoto described small acts — sending a photo when new flowers were planted, coordinating television viewing times — as part of a steady rebuilding of daily life.
The essay also recounts a continuation of rituals that had mattered to Mike. Pagoto and Robyn picked up the deceased man’s race bib for a marathon he had registered for at the start of chemotherapy, an act Pagoto said honored his tendency to cling to goals in the middle of crisis. A photograph accompanying the essay shows the two in October 2024, four months after his death, after collecting that final race bib.
Pagoto wrote that the practical and emotional labor of mourning brought the two women into a deep, candid relationship. They reportedly moved from mutual shock and anger to shared routines, laughter and small plans for the future. Pagoto described the anniversary of Mike’s death as a milestone they had feared and yet survived together, noting that the first year had been sustained, in part, by their companionship.
The essay situates those developments in Pagoto’s professional and personal perspective: she is a clinical psychologist who said she is working on a memoir about love and loss. The HuffPost piece presents the friendship as an example of how grief can produce new social bonds that help survivors navigate ordinary life after a major loss.
Pagoto’s account offers a timeline of events and detailed scenes from the months around the diagnosis, the hospice week and the ensuing year, and emphasizes concrete coping strategies the two women used — repeated conversations, shared media consumption, mutual errands and seasonal work in their yards. She said that Mike’s influence remained present in their talks and that stories about him continue to surface in their exchanges.
The essay appears in HuffPost’s Relationship section and is presented as a first-person account by Pagoto. The piece underscores the role of intimate friendships in bereavement and the ways ordinary routines and shared rituals can assist people who have lost long-term partners or friends to build new patterns of connection while continuing to remember the person who died.