Grief is Not the Opposite of Love
Grief Is Not the Opposite of Love
Cindy Mich walked alongside her partner Michael through stage four lymphoma, became his fiercest advocate, and then had to figure out who she was in a life that had been built for two. This is a conversation about love — what it requires, what it leaves behind, and what it asks of us next.
In this episode of Who We Become — Life Beyond Change, Amanda Lentz sits down with Cindy Mich — film festival director, journalist, caregiver, and partner — for a conversation about the chapters of life that arrive without warning and without an instruction manual.
Cindy spent years by the side of her partner Michael: first navigating a long-distance love story between Wisconsin and New York, then flying back and forth monthly during a pandemic for his chemotherapy treatments, then managing emergencies, hospital visits, impossible decisions, and finally an ending that gave her no proper goodbye. She has spent the four and a half years since learning how to carry everything that love left behind.
This conversation is for anyone who is caregiving right now, for anyone who has lost someone, and for anyone who has ever found that grief — real grief — doesn't move the way the world expects it to.
A Love Story That Started With a Short Film
Cindy had lived 48 years without Michael. She had been a single mother, careful about relationships, not looking. Then a director in her film festival submitted a short film with an actor she didn't know — a gentleman who didn't answer her complimentary message on social media for a week, which, she learned, was entirely on brand for him.
He came to her birthday party. She had forgotten he was coming. She was briefly interested in someone else. By 7 a.m., Michael was walking her to the subway, and something had begun. Within a month, she was, in her own words, just crazy in love.
"He taught me patience. He taught me what love really looked like. He taught me what commitment and sacrifice looked like. I thought I had had this before — and then he came along."
— Cindy MichMichael was Italian, handsome, an actor, incredibly stubborn, and not naturally built for the steady rhythms of a long-distance partnership. He was, as Cindy describes him, everything on the list — meaning his answer to everything she needed was simply that it was on the list. He drove her gray. He made her want to scream. She watched him all the time, even when he didn't know it.
Noticing Before the Diagnosis
By the end of 2020, Cindy had noticed that Michael was losing weight. Not the kind of weight you lose for a role. The kind that doesn't stop. She pushed, she persuaded, and eventually — after a great deal of persistence — he went to an emergency room. They admitted him. They did a full workup. And then he called her while she was at a hair appointment with her son.
He told her on the phone: he knew something was wrong, and now they knew for sure. The initial read was stomach cancer. The oncologist corrected it to stage four non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. There is a difference between the two — and there was also the unsettling fact that someone had already told Michael a diagnosis before the full picture was in.
Cindy was on a plane to New York before the week was out.
"The minute he started losing weight, I didn't need a diagnosis to tell me this."
— Cindy MichWhat Caregiving Actually Looks Like
Cindy came to caregiving with some background — years as a mother, four of them spent managing her son's seizure condition. But she is clear that caregiving a partner is a different kind of labor entirely. With a child, you are the authority. With a full-grown adult you love — one who is also stubborn, independent, and privately telling people you're his hero while outwardly ignoring half your instructions — there are different rules.
In practice, it looked like this: flying between Wisconsin and New York every month during a pandemic for chemotherapy and immunotherapy treatments at his doctor's office on Long Island. Paying for hotels because there were no free accommodations available to them. Managing every side effect that meant she couldn't put him on a plane — running him to urgent care in Wisconsin, learning in real time when it was serious and when it wasn't. Keeping his diagnosis a secret for months, at his insistence, while holding everything together without visibly carrying any of it.
"Michael, you need to drink more water. I'm fine. Michael, take this. Michael, do that. And a lot of times it was just constant pushing and nagging — because he had strict things he needed to do."
— Cindy MichThere was no caregiver's manual. There was no instruction for how to be financially devastated during a pandemic while also being medically and emotionally responsible for someone you love. Cindy improvised. She researched everything. She showed up.
And Michael, behind her back, called her his hero.
The View From the Caregiver's Side
One of the most quietly devastating moments in this conversation comes when Cindy talks about how she saw herself versus how Michael saw her. From her vantage point, she was the person who couldn't get him to drink enough water. The person he didn't always listen to. The person working with imperfect information and no roadmap, making constant judgment calls, feeling perpetually behind.
From his vantage point, she was his hero.
"One of the main things I've tried to do in my life is to see myself the way he sees me — because it's such a beautiful view of myself that I don't get a chance to see now that his eyes aren't here."
— Cindy MichThis gap — between how caregivers experience themselves and how they are experienced by the people they care for — runs through the entire episode. Cindy's appeal to anyone caregiving right now is to try to bridge it. To let in the possibility that what you are doing is being seen, even when it doesn't feel that way.
The Early Days of Loss
Michael had a heart attack at home and spent eight days in the ICU. COVID protocols meant Cindy had almost no access to him during that time — no proper conversations, no real goodbye. By the time she had made it through security on the final day, he had already passed. She was given an hour with him alone.
What followed was the grief no one prepares you for. The numbness that keeps the full weight of loss at bay for weeks or months. The autopilot of logistics — two memorial services, one in Wisconsin and one in New York. The immersion: watching his films, wearing his clothes, surrounding herself with him, staying consumed.
And then the more private forms of not-accepting: waiting four months before going to the courthouse for his death certificate because she genuinely believed they had made a mistake. Researching whether DNA could recreate someone. Turning down a cardboard cutout offered in his likeness. Looking for any door back to him that science or technology might provide.
"I know it might sound insane to someone who has never suffered a loss this significant. But you get pretty desperate."
— Cindy MichFour and a half years on, she is more adjusted. Most of his belongings are no longer scattered through the house — she has given herself that. But she is honest: this journey doesn't end. Grief doesn't have a finish line. And the well-meaning phrases people reach for — he's in a better place, you're so strong, you need to move on — land differently than they're intended when you are the one carrying it every day.
"No one asked me if I wanted to be strong or not. I was just left with this. There's no choice here."
— Cindy MichBuilding a New Identity While Half of You Is Somewhere Else
Cindy describes the hardest part of her new identity in a way that is unusually precise: it's not Michael the partner she misses most, though she misses him terribly. It's Michael the best friend. The person she needed when her father died fourteen months ago. The person whose confidence in her was the scaffolding she used to try things she'd never done before. Without him, she says, half of me is not alive anymore.
She is trying to recover that half. She has a list — not of obligations, but of joyful, ridiculous things she used to do before life got this heavy. Dancing in fountains. Dancing on tables. Doing something absurd just because she felt like it. She hasn't done any of them yet. The goal is 2026.
She is also working toward a rage room. She says this with the clarity of someone who has been carrying an enormous amount of controlled sorrow for a long time and is finally ready to put it somewhere physical. She is also making a film — a short film about her life with Michael, something she has resisted for years and is now doing because she believes that for artists, putting something on a screen is the way to finally make peace with it.
There is also something she has been carrying that she names here with remarkable directness: the last thing she said to Michael was no. He had asked for help from the bathroom. She had COVID and was terrified of infecting him. She said no. She had no way of knowing it would be the last conversation they'd have while he was fully conscious.
"I would have given him anything in my lifetime. So now looking back on it, I not only feel guilty about not having a proper goodbye, but even more guilty about the fact that the person who referred to me as his hero — I was not the hero in this case."
— Cindy MichThe film is, in part, her answer to that guilt. The people around her have told her she saved Michael in ways she can't see from where she's standing. She is making the film so that she can finally see it.
What Cindy Would Say to Someone Caregiving Right Now
Having lived it, Cindy offers four things she wishes someone had told her before she took it on:
Why This Conversation Matters
There are chapters of life that arrive without warning and without instruction. Caregiving is one of them. Grief is another. And what Cindy Mich has shown — over years of doing both, often at the same time — is that neither of them has a clean edge or a predictable shape.
She is not over it. She does not expect to be. She is not the person she was before Michael, and she doesn't want to fully be — because some of the best parts of who she became were made possible only by loving him. The work now is to carry those parts forward, to find the ridiculous joy she used to have, to make the film, to get to the rage room, to ask her best friend — who happens to be gone — to send her some peace anyway.
As Amanda closes the episode: grief is not the opposite of love. It is love continuing, finding new shapes, asking new questions. And to be rerouted — even by the most painful thing imaginable — is not to be lost. It is to discover that the path you're on now is still leading somewhere real.
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