This Is Healing

https://sarahlheringer.substack.com/Wife.Witness.Writer.Survivor.Reluctant activist.Relentless truth-teller.I did not ask for this.But I will not look away.On June 4, 2025, my husband Patrick was murdered in our home while protecting me from a man who should never have been free. A man with a violent record, with open warrants, with a past the city ignored—and a blade in his hand. Patrick died in my arms.There are no metaphors for that. Only blood, memory, and silence.What followed was the unraveling of everything I thought was safe.What I write here is not for spectacle. It is not curated grief. It is not a campaign. It is a reckoning.With systems. With silence. With myself.I write because I need somewhere to put it.The grief. The fury. The facts. The failures.I write about public safety because no one else will say the quiet part out loud: that our leaders are protecting power, not people. That our systems are engineered to delay, distract, and discard the victims. That negligence is not a policy—it’s a pattern.I write about trauma in real time. I record podcasts from the dead center of it. Not once I’ve healed, but while I’m trying to.You’ll hear my voice shake. You’ll hear me try to laugh. You’ll hear a woman unlearning how to be agreeable and learning instead how to be impossible.Because being impossible might be the only way anything changes.This publication is a record.A record of a woman fighting for her own life after the one she loved was taken.A record of a broken city pretending it’s functioning.A record of truth-telling in a landscape built on press releases and public amnesia.There is poetry here.Not the pretty kind. The kind found at the bottom of grief, where language turns feral and light only filters in when you stop pretending you’re okay.There is politics here. But not in the way you’ve seen it.This is not partisan. It’s personal.This is about justice that was promised and never delivered.This is about what needs to be said, what needs to be burn