ChantelleMcVey
A collection of chapters moving through grief, memory, anger, love, and survival.
The Ones Who Had to Stay Breathing is a reflective nonfiction work told through two voices and two real stories, exploring what happens after the moment that changes everything.
Through loss, envy, anger, love, and the memories that refuse to fade, it explores the things grief leaves behind - the words that were never spoken, the futures that never arrived, and the love that still has nowhere to go.
This is not a story about moving on.
It is about the people left behind.
The ones who have to keep living with questions that will never be answered, carrying memories they cannot put down, and finding a way to exist in a world that kept turning when theirs stopped.
Two perspectives. Two losses. One shared understanding.
We were the ones who had to stay breathing.