October 12, 2022 is forever etched in my memory. I was walking behind Jill when she simply said, “I don’t feel well.” In the next instant, she collapsed into my arms.
One sentence separated the life we knew from the life I would have to learn to live.
Afterward, I remember sitting in my chair with my hand on my chest, feeling my heart beat and thinking, “How can it still be beating when everything inside me feels dead?” That question stayed with me.
I wasn’t looking for an analogy in cybersecurity. I discovered that the same principles I had relied on for years to restore compromised systems described what had happened to my own life. They gave me a language for something I couldn’t otherwise explain. I often tell people that I was drowning in a sea of words like grief and loss—words that felt limitless, without parameters or constraints.
I didn’t try to solve my grief. I tried to find a way to move through an irreversible event when there is no rollback and no returning to the version of life that existed before.
In this TEDx Talk, I explore how life-changing disruption requires something similar to system recovery: discovering what still works, what remains true, and restoring myself based on what responds.
This talk was given at the TEDxPortsmouth event on May 8, 2026.