When Emily Cave married the love of her life in July 2019, she never expected that she would be a widow before celebrating her first wedding anniversary.
The Barrie native met her future husband, Colby Cave, an up-and-coming young hockey player with the Western Hockey League's Swift Current Broncos, in 2013 after he had spent the previous two years messaging her.
“He had somehow come across my Instagram, and was in the locker room and told his teammates he planned on marrying me one day,” she tells BarrieToday, a sister site of SooToday.
Not only did the two live in different provinces at the time, they had never even spoken, let alone met, when he first made that declaration.
“Colby was persistent and he continued to message me for almost two years," she says. "I wasn’t wanting to jump into anything, but eventually I did respond. I went to visit him in Providence (Rhode Island) when he was playing with the Boston Bruins organization — and the rest is sort of history.”
After dating for several years, the couple married in the summer of 2019. Their wedded bliss was short-lived, however. Nine months later, Colby died of a colloid cyst, which is a slow-growing and rare tumour typically found near the centre of the brain.
The couple had been staying in the basement apartment of her parents' Barrie home, self-isolating during the pandemic, when Colby began complaining of a headache.
On Monday, April 6, 2020, Colby was admitted to Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre. The following day, he was airlifted to Toronto's Sunnybrook Hospital and placed in a medically induced coma before undergoing emergency surgery to remove the cyst that was causing pressure on his brain.
Less than a week later, the Edmonton Oilers forward died on Saturday, April 11 in Toronto. He was 25 years old.
Given Colby’s association with the NHL, his unexpected death garnered attention throughout the hockey world.
Emily says she ultimately felt it was important to use that platform to help others, which is one of the reasons that she decided to write a book, a memoir of the young couple’s life together titled For Colb.
“Colb’s nickname for me was his little world changer. When he was in the hospital, I made a vow to him that I was going to fulfill that nickname,” she says.
Using her own Instagram account, it was a way to share Colby’s story as well as her own grief.
“When someone passes away, I think a lot of people assume you just get over it, but that’s not the case at all with grief," Emily says. "You learn to live with it, (but) you never get over it and you’re never fully healed. I have been really open about that the past few years.”
With all of the media attention around his death, Emily says she decided she wanted to write a story that came from the person who was closest to Colby: herself.
“So many people had this idea of what happened, or what grief should be like and I just wanted to be very raw and vulnerable and share the story of what happened from the person closest to Colb and who was there," she says. "I always knew I wanted to write a book — I just needed some time to get to that place."
As challenging as she says it was to revisit that vulnerable place, hearing the feedback from others from around the globe as she shared her own personal story of love, loss and a road toward healing has helped motivate her to keep going.
“I was left with this big platform for the worst possible reason, but (wanted) to use it to help other people,” she says.
The book, which was officially released May 9, spent the first 24 hours in the Top 10 in Canada and has now become a bestseller on Amazon.
“The response has been amazing. The continued love and support of people, whether it was strangers or friends and family or the hockey community, is obviously so powerful," she says.
It’s been three years since her husband’s death, and while Emily says that loss is never something she will “get over,'' she is learning to live again without Colby.
“You never move on, you just move forward. There are still very hard days, but you get to a point where you want to continue to live for them," she says. "I always say if not with Colb, then for Colb … so it’s learning to honour them in whatever ways you can, but also realizing that you never get over grief.
"It’s been really hard, but I try to honour him in ways and make an impact, because he made an impact on so many people.”
Emily hopes that anyone who reads her book can walk away having learned at least one important lesson: that joy and grief can co-exist together.
“In the beginning, that’s very hard to accept and understand, but as time has moved forward, I have realized that you can be excited about the future, but also be sad about the past and that’s very normal and valid and OK.”