On Their 25th Anniversary, She Became a Widow. Then She Stopped Asking Someday.
On the morning she and her husband John were meant to leave on their 25th-anniversary cruise, Julie Spokus became a widow. What followed was grief — but not only the missing of him. It was the paperwork, the bureaucracy, the loneliness after everyone else's lives resumed, the surreal moments of laughing through tears. And underneath it, a realization that stopped her: she no longer recognized the person she'd been. Losing John changed her relationship with time. She stopped asking "someday" and started asking, "if not now, when?"
In this episode of Who We Become — Life Beyond Change, Amanda Lentz sits down with Julie Spokus — storyteller, self-described "recovering project manager," and, now, theater student — for a conversation about what grief revealed, what it required, and what it means to carry love forward while continuing to become who you're meant to be.
For years, Julie built a successful career in IT project management, always believing there'd be time later for the creative life that kept calling to her. Then that assumption — that there would always be a later — was taken from her in a single morning. What she has built since is the reason she's here.
John, and Twenty-Five Years
John placed an ad in the Baltimore City Paper — the app of its day — and Julie answered it. Their first date was October 2, 1998. Julie, who cheerfully owns her love of symmetry, wanted to marry a year to the date, so they did: October 2, 1999, with a ceremony that began at 2:10 — ten-two in reverse. She never imagined she'd marry a musician, but John wrote music, played more instruments than she could keep track of, and became her best friend.
They built a life full of shared adventures — like the trip to Nashville for the 2017 eclipse, which John was skeptical about right up until the moment the sky went dark and he turned to her and said, "I get it now." He had faith in her ideas, and, she says, ninety-nine percent of the time they were worth it. His music room was in the basement, just below where she now sits. The house is a lot quieter these days.
The Morning Everything Changed
It was November 13, the morning they were to leave for their 25th-anniversary cruise — a long flight to Asia and days at sea ahead of them. Julie woke to find John not beside her and wasn't alarmed at first; he'd meant to stay up for the trip, and she assumed he'd drifted off downstairs. She showered, finished packing, and came down to look for him. In a kind of tunnel vision she headed straight for his music room, then out to the yard, before she finally saw him. She knew instantly.
John had died of a massive heart attack — the genetics that ran in his family. Julie called 911, and from there the day became a blur of first responders, a body-camera review to rule anything else out, a police shift change, and the wait for the single Maryland coroner's office that serves the whole state. Through all of it, she kept noticing one thing about the people who came.
"This isn't their first rodeo. It was my first rodeo. And everybody that day was lovely."
— Julie SpokusShe called her friend Hunter, who came and stayed, and who quietly handled the things Julie couldn't yet face. Julie's own dark humor threaded through even that day — at one point telling the officers that if John hadn't wanted to go on the cruise, he could have just said so. It's the humor of someone who knew her husband would have laughed too.
"I hope everyone has a Hunter in their life — when this happens to them. Because it's going to."
— Julie SpokusThe Grief Nobody Talks About
What struck Julie in the weeks that followed was how much of grief no one prepares you for. Not the missing of him — everyone expects that — but the mechanics. The paperwork. The bureaucracy. The loneliness that arrives once everyone else's lives resume and yours doesn't. The surreal sense, as she puts it, of being punked, of waiting for someone to tell you it isn't real.
Out of that she's become a quiet advocate for how we handle grief as a culture — which, she says plainly, we do badly. The most helpful thing anyone did for her wasn't advice; it was a question.
"What can I do for you? What do you need? Don't assume. What worked for me might not work for you."
— Julie SpokusGrief, she points out, is something everyone eventually meets — not only in losing a person, but in leaving a job, or in the body's own changes over time. It isn't all equal, but it's all real. And when a culture can't make room for it, she believes, people are left to reach for the more harmful ways of coping. Her whole message is a kind of permission: however you're grieving is okay.
Three Losses, and a New Relationship With Time
John's death was Julie's third great loss in a handful of years — her younger brother in 2018, her mother in 2019, and then John. Somewhere in the middle of grieving, she realized the loss wasn't only him. She no longer recognized the person she had been. And the assumption that had quietly organized her whole life — that there would always be time later for the things that mattered — no longer held.
So she stopped asking "someday," and started asking a harder, better question: if not now, when?
If Not Now, When?
In early 2025, Julie took a play-reading class at Baltimore's Everyman Theater — reading plays, talking about them, and, to her own surprise, falling for the craft of acting. When she asked the instructor how to pursue it, the answer was simple: take a community college acting class. That fall she enrolled in Acting I, then decided to go all in — a full-time student pursuing an Associate of Fine Arts, on track to graduate in spring 2027.
And on July 31, 2025, she left the career she'd held for two decades. She's precise about the wording.
"I quit my job. I did not retire. I love project management — I just didn't love how I was doing it, or where."
— Julie SpokusShe's not walking away from her expertise so much as reclaiming it: she's launching her own project-management business, on her own terms. John was the musician, the openly creative one; Julie was the logical, IT-project-management half of the pair. Now, without quite planning it, she finds herself carrying both — the structure and the art — in a single life that's finally hers.
Carrying John Forward
Julie is developing a solo show based on this experience — the surreal day, the aftermath, and everything grief taught her. But at its heart, she says, the show is about John: she wants people to know he mattered, that he was creative, that he was loved. Not to feel sorry for him, and not for her. Just to offer one honest window into grief, so that someone else facing it might recognize themselves in it.
"Everything I've done, everything I do — I know John would say, 'That's so cool.'"
— Julie SpokusWhy This Conversation Matters
Julie Spokus is proof that grief doesn't only take something from us — it can also hand us back to ourselves. She trusted us with a story that's still unfolding, and with the memory of the man at the center of it.
As Amanda puts it in her closing: there's no finish line where everything suddenly feels okay again. Healing isn't about forgetting the person you lost — it's about discovering that you can carry your love for them while slowly building a life that feels meaningful again. It's permission to be changed by what you've been through without ever having to call it failure.
What have you been saving for "someday" — and what would it look like to begin it now?
Grief has no timeline, and you don't have to move through it alone. Talking with a counselor or a local grief-support group can help — and for the hardest moments, the Crisis Text Line offers free, confidential support 24/7: text HOME to 741741 in the US.
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