I was surprised to get a message from Maria, Raj’s wife, yesterday morning, asking if we’d be free to catch up over a video chat this week. Obviously, we’d been wanting to chat with her since we found out about Raj’s passing, but we figured she was overwhelmed with being a new mom and all the new responsibilities around that, not to mention grieving her husband, and so we just let her know we’d be free to chat whenever she was ready.

We ended up chatting with her this evening, and I just couldn’t help but get emotional. I don’t think it takes any difficult guessing to figure out that life has been really hard for her since he got sick and died so suddenly. And it’s only been made worse by the fact that no one, not the doctors or anyone at the hospital, have any idea what brought on these seizures out of nowhere… they know nothing until this day. One by one, his organs just started shutting down, and the end finally came. And he was hospitalized just days after bringing their baby home.

Maria expressed a lot of confusion and anger at the world that something like this could happen to Raj, and it was easy to understand. “Why Raj? Why him?” she said through tears. “He’s such a good person… Why did he have to get taken away, and like this?”

The world isn’t a fair place. It’s no wonder I get angry at life and the world so often; it’s when things like this happen. Maria has been so strong, partly because she has no choice given she’s responsible for an entirely new human being now. I just can’t believe how strong and fierce she’s been; it was so admirable to see.

It just felt so strange, though, to be on that Zoom chat with just her. It’s almost like I still don’t believe Raj is gone, like all this is some awful joke being played on us, and that out nowhere any second, he will pop into the Zoom frame and say hi to us. I can’t believe she’s actually a “widow” now. That is just too strange to me to think about. My heart just hurts.