Every Haunting Begins With A Full Heart: The Life of Michael (Chuck)

Every ghost story begins with love. Every haunting begins with a full heart. Mine began when I became a widow at 38.

My husband, Michael Edward Fernandez, died on April 7th, 2025, just four hours after being admitted to hospice. He died in my arms, in a quiet room, with no huge last breath or cinematic gasp;  just a slow drift from presence to absence. The same electric spark that had ignited the universe was now gone from his body. From my husband to memory. And yet, our story didn’t begin there. Grief rarely does.

“When someone dies, a whole world ends. Billions of people and each one of them with a world inside.”

That line is from The Life of Chuck, a short story by Stephen King now adapted for the screen by Mike Flanagan.  When I first watched it, I cried so hard I startled myself because someone had finally articulated the shape of my loss. It felt like a film recognized a bruise I didn’t even know I had, quickly found it, and pressed hard and deliberately into that ache.  The Life of Chuck (expressly dedicated to The Kingcast’s Scott Wampler, a friend who also left us too young in 2024), wasn’t about dying. It was about the joy of ever having lived.

Michael and I were married for seven years. But before the rings, the promises, and the long hospital nights, I met him in the slow, intimate way that changes how love shapes your life from that moment on. We met in 2014, fell for each other fast, and then stayed together through surgeries, through a transplant, and through years lived on borrowed time.

Michael had been born with Cystic Fibrosis, a rare genetic disease that makes the body secrete excess mucus that acts like a poison. It’s a muck that sticks to and affects every organ, every breath and every word. Up until only a few years ago, it was primarily classified as a childhood disease. This bought him a front row ticket to his very own Make-a-Wish party that was granted when he was a boy in Miami. It was a big, Barney-purple treehouse with a sign that said “No Girls Allowed.” Newspapers wrote about how a cure was only a matter of time. The Miami Herald came out and told his story. Because everyone knew, even then, that kids don’t get castles unless they are dying. That the world doesn’t quickly enact monuments for those who had the luxury of a grand timeline. Michael always knew he was special, in both great and terrible ways. Michael always knew his time was limited. Even before I did. Even before the doctors confirmed it again and again. He wasn’t always afraid, not exactly. But he was certain about his life. And that certainty shaped how we lived.

Unlike other terminal conditions, Cystic Fibrosis can’t be irradiated out of the body. There’s no bell at the end of treatment for a job well done. Even transplanting new donor lungs doesn’t stop the CF gene from ravaging the body with complications. Michael had many, namely Cystic Fibrosis (CF) related diabetes and later, chronic rejection, respiratory failure, and total hearing loss that left him completely deaf. What many people don’t know is that lung transplants for CF are never a cure. If you’re lucky, a double lung transplant buys you two things: more time and quality of life.

We dated for 4 years, but when the time came to move in together and list him for new lungs, we didn’t wait. Cystic Fibrosis is a progressive disease, and our lives also quickly progressed. We married hastily in a courthouse ceremony in 2018, just weeks before the transplant center could call. They did. Four times. But only the last dry run when the lungs were viable. I remember throwing up that Friday night’s Taco Bell because I somehow knew it was the one. And I had to be awake for the drive. Awake and cognizant to witness the moment he got a second chance.

On August 25, 2018, Michael came out of surgery with new lungs. When surgeons come out of a surgery that long, you don’t know what to expect. You only see them walk in with tired eyes and limp hands and wait with bated breath while they hold your entire being in their next few words. You wait for them to smile or say everything is ok. The transplant had taken, and he was doing well. His skin turned from gray to pink. He looked alive in a way he hadn’t in years. Looking back, we thought we had more time. Those selfless donor lungs ultimately gave us 7 more years.

There is a line in Mike Flanagan’s Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House that I return to again and again. It’s a familial tale of loss, grief and forgiveness: “Forgiveness is warm. Like a tear on a cheek. Think of that and of me when you stand in the rain. I loved you completely, and you loved me the same. That’s all. The rest is confetti.” Before Michael passed, I learned to take vitals, read ABGs, administer IV antibiotics, decode x-rays, calculate pH. I learned ventilator and BiPap settings. I learned what love looks like when it’s medical, and still soft. These weren’t burdens. They were equations. Just math problems with love at the core. Knowing Michael, being loved by him, and loving him in return; that was my confetti.

I had the privilege of meeting the author of those words, Mike Flanagan, for five minutes on a red carpet in 2023. It was my first solo job working as a member of the press for my horror podcast (My Bloody Podcast). I told him it felt like kismet; being at the Overlook Film Festival for Oculus, a decade after he pitched it as a portable Overlook Hotel. Years before that, I watched Midnight Mass and cried through Erin’s monologue about death, where she talks about the soul dissolving back into the Earth, rejoining it all. It reminded me of Carl Sagan’s A Pale Blue Dot, of the sense that we are not just carbon, but that we are connected.

I tweeted at Flanagan about it. And when he liked it, on this impersonal social media platform, I felt this small, strange joy, a personal connection that my heroes love the same heroes I do. Carl Sagan meant everything to Michael and me. At Sagan’s funeral, his wife, Ann Druyan, said something that became a compass point for us: “I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.”

In The Life of Chuck, a man’s story is told backward; from his universe collapsing onto itself while on his deathbed to poignant parts in his childhood to nothingness. It’s a love letter to life, not the fear of death. But only a few weeks ago, death and I finally met head on.

On the day that he died, Michael’s body had been retaining too much carbon dioxide. Despite his transplant workup testing and many different antibiotics, therapeutics, and even a short stint with a ventilator after a surprise appendectomy, there was no real way to expel it any longer. His blood pressure spiked horribly. He was in and out of consciousness in the ICU. The CO2 in his blood gases kept getting higher. His other organs were no longer compensating for the work his lungs couldn’t do. That last day, he would wake up randomly, his eyes darting around until he saw me. He would look at me and smile and mouth “I love you!” “Hi, honey” or throw up the ASL “I love you…forever.” I know in my heart he was confused about what was happening, but somehow his dying brain still told him to smile when he looked at me. His gaze only softened when it found mine, and remembering that feels like remembering everything. 

A basic fundamental of physics is that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, it can only change form. Michael was cremated per his wishes. He changed form. I called the funeral home obsessively after he passed.  Even as stardust, I couldn’t part with his bones. I plan to take him to Japan, a place we never got to visit, and scatter some of him under newly-ripened cherry blossom trees. I want to tell him and others how proud of him I am. I want to tell him how much I miss him. I want to do everything he can’t as a tribute to him. I want him to know that I was a witness to his life, and that I am going to make the rest of mine a tribute to him. I will carry him with me for the rest of mine.

There are stars in the sky right now that can see us signing our marriage certificate in 2018. There are beams of light still traveling across galaxies that will carry a snapshot of our wedding day for millions of years. The universe has kept that moment. These moments are not lost to time, even in my early grief where sometimes the much sadder realizations eclipse the better ones.

The stark reality is that I will never get over the people I love being taken from me. None of us will. We can cleave tightly to their old t-shirts and smudged reading glasses and learn to take it day by day. But I think some pain isn’t meant to be healed. I think the only thing you can do is admit it’s there and honor it. Sit with it and let it speak to you. The Life of Chuck spoke directly to my heart, to the innate core of who we all are; billions of little souls;  tiny parts of a whole bigger universe experiencing itself. 

Grief will always live in my voice. It shows up in my eyes when I’m laughing with friends in movie theaters. In conversations about video games and medical equipment. In every picture or video when I scroll too far back into my phone. In every film I love, in every ghost story I hear, in every moment I laugh and think ; I wish he could have seen this. I wish we could have seen this.

Watching The Life of Chuck after losing the most important person in my life felt like I was finally being seen. To be truly seen is to be loved. I felt that King and Flanagan saw my grief right next to their own in the cosmos, and it will forever be my North Star to humanity. It acutely reminded me that grief and mourning out loud doesn’t make me dramatic or too much; it’s love’s proof of purchase. As Glennon Doyle writes: “Grief is love’s souvenir. It’s proof that we once loved. Grief is the receipt we wave in the air that says to the world: Look! Love was once mine. I loved well. Here is the proof that I paid the price.”

I am learning that you can be two things, 300 things, or as Walt Whitman once wrote; multitudes-at once. I can be grateful for the 11 years I spent with Michael and terribly sad that we didn’t get 80 more. Both hope and anxiety can co-exist. That I can also muster up and find joy within my heart when it feels like it’s fallen to ruin. The loss of my husband made me a widow. But love? Love made me a witness. A witness to a human life! A storytelling partner to a blink in the cosmos named Michael, who deserved to be known. As we all do.

We are all stupid carbon lifeforms that aren’t remarkable in the vastness of elements in the universe. But we are all stupid carbon lifeforms that deeply matter to each other. As Stephen King wrote: “How old was the man in the hospital bed? The man did not fade as ghostly apparitions did in movies, he was just gone. I will insist that he wasn’t, and I will live my life until my life runs out. I am wonderful. I deserve to be wonderful, and I contain multitudes. He closed the door and snapped the lock shut.”

37 Great Years, Michael Fernandez.

Thanks, Mike!