When my wife Ana was dying of cancer, she worried about our kids, Mila, 9, and Tomi, 6, growing up without her. I told her I wished cancer had taken me instead. She looked at me calmly and said, “I would have chosen you again… even knowing how it ends.”
Ana was 36, full of life, poetry, and love. Even as cancer stole her energy and voice, her love for our family remained fierce. We had been together since college. When the doctors told us she was terminal, she wanted to go home. I held it together until she fell asleep in the car, then I broke down.
She wrote letters to the kids for birthdays until they turned eighteen, dictating them when her hands were too weak. “Grief needs something to hold,” she said. “Let them hold my words.”
Three months after her death, a letter arrived from Lia, a teenager Ana had mentored. It told how Ana had saved her life, helping her become a nurse and raise her own kids. That moment pulled us forward. Mila and Tomi smiled again as I read the letter to them.
Lia visited weeks later, bringing her boys, and gave us a folder with Ana’s letters—advice, stories, doodles—all signed, “Keep choosing light – Ana.”
Inspired, I created a website, Keep Choosing Light, sharing Ana’s story and inviting others to post about acts of kindness that shaped their lives. It grew, eventually becoming Project LightLetters—a nonprofit sending letters of hope to children in hospitals, foster care, and shelters.
Through the letters and the program, Ana’s love continues to ripple outward. One teen who lost her mother wrote: “I didn’t know people could care this much about a kid they’ve never met.”
Grief doesn’t vanish. It changes, softens, and shows you new ways to love. Ana’s story taught me this: death didn’t end our love story—it started a new chapter.
Keep choosing light. You never know whose life you’ll save, and you are never truly alone.