There’s an episode of Grey’s Anatomy called “If/Then.” It imagines an alternate version of the characters’ lives, the ones they might have lived if a few things had gone differently. I watched it again last Friday, and afterward my friend Jules said something that’s stuck with me: I should write my own “if/then” for Emily. For her 30th.

Tomorrow is that birthday. Emily would be turning 30. I’ve spent a lot of time imagining what that life looks like. Not to torture myself with what I lost, but because imagining it is a way of still loving her out loud. So here it is. This is what I think her 30th year would have looked like, if she’d had the chance to live it.

Career

When Emily died, she was less than a week away from taking her LMSW exam. She’d been studying hard for it, the way she did everything: thoroughly, a little anxiously, determined to get it right.

Had she lived, I have no doubt she’d have logged her 3,000 clinical hours by now and already sat for her LCSW exam. She would have stayed at the psych hospital the whole time, too stubborn to leave a job she loved. She thrived in that fast pace, and she talked about her patients the way other people talk about family.

With her LCSW in hand and real experience behind her, I think she’d just be starting to ask herself “what’s next.” Not ready yet to open her own treatment center. That was always a someday dream, not a right-now plan. But she’d be laying groundwork for it in small, deliberate ways. Outside of work, I think she’d have become a real voice in eating disorder awareness, for patients and for the clinicians who treat them. She always said the field needed more people who understood it from the inside.

The Wedding

I proposed three weeks before she died. We’d started looking at spring 2024 dates, and I think we would have landed on mid-March. We were torn between venues in Middle Tennessee and East Tennessee, but in the end, I believe Knoxville would have won her over. It always did.

Our wedding party would have been a beautiful mismatch: different genders, different decades of friendship, family folded in with friends like there was never a line between them. Her youngest niece as flower girl. Her two older nieces and my kids as junior bridesmaids. I would have been a wreck the second she started down the aisle. She, utterly composed and probably laughing at me, wouldn’t have shed a single tear.

And the reception would have been one hell of a party. Put the Scullys and the McCoys in the same room, and somebody is dancing on something by 9 p.m. That much I know for certain.

Family

Not long before she passed, Emily had started seeing a geneticist to find out whether her congenital heart defect had a genetic component, something that could be passed to a child. That answer would have determined whether it was safe to use one of her eggs. We’d already ruled out her carrying: the medication changes and the strain on her heart made that too dangerous. So the plan, if the genetics checked out, was for me to carry a child that was biologically hers.

If she’d lived, I think we’d be mid-process right now. I’d probably be pregnant, both of us counting down the days until Victor Max arrived. She’d have the nursery finished already, and she’d be driving me completely up the wall with her OCD running through every “what if” imaginable: the crib sheets, the birth plan, every complication that can happen to someone pushing 40 having a baby. I’d give almost anything to be annoyed by that right now.

We’d be in our first house together, bought not long after the wedding. Her dad would have inspected it top to bottom before she’d let us make an offer, obviously. Meredith and Eleanor would each have their own room. There’d be a backyard with a shade tree and a hammock, and a pool if we could swing it. And a dog. There is no version of this future without a dog.

How She’d Celebrate

We’d be spending her birthday weekend in Knoxville. Her dad would make his red velvet cake, the one nobody else is allowed to attempt. We’d get coffee in the morning, spend most of the afternoon in the pool, and have dinner with her family that night.

Nothing extravagant. Just a day built entirely out of the things, and the people, she loved most.

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That’s the life I see when I imagine her at 30. I don’t know if writing it down makes the missing easier or harder, but I know it makes it feel less like she’s gone and more like she’s just somewhere else, still. Happy birthday, Em. I hope wherever you are, there’s cake.