Sean

“The pandemic was kind of secondary,” Sean Hotchkiss recalls of the last two years.

While coronavirus has consumed news headlines and anxious Google searches, gutted graduation dreams and separated us from those we love, it has also been, for many, the background noise of a lived life.

For Sean, whose wife Kris was diagnosed with small-cell stage IV lung cancer in early 2020, quarantine was simply the landscape across which his family’s situation unfolded.

A month after her diagnosis, the world shut down.

Sean already worked from home. His son was also living at home; his two daughters were finishing high school. The family stayed close while Kris underwent chemotherapy and radiation.

She didn’t want to know the prognosis, but Sean did some online research and eventually asked her doctors. “The treatments were just buying her more time,” he says.

Despite COVID restrictions, Sean was always able to be with Kris in the hospital. Only one of their children at a time could visit, so they took turns. Knowing how the virus separated many families at the moment of death, he’s grateful that he was able to be by her side.

“COVID was still part of our daily lives, but it wasn’t the biggest concern. It was just another thing that we had to navigate to try to keep Kris healthy and try to give her as much recovery as she could,” he says.

Kris was a gardener and do-it-yourself Sean describes her as “kind and empathetic.”

“As she got a little older her compassion and empathy were kind of tempered by a little bit of intolerance for people being stupid,” he laughs.

Kris passed away in January 2021.

Moments after she passed, Sean says his children surrounded him: “My kids gathered around me and we agreed—any of us can grieve however we need to, as long as it’s not self-destructive.”

Sean doesn’t think that his family tragedy had much to do with his decision to go back to school, but he does say that it wouldn’t have happened while Kris was alive; he wouldn’t have taken the time away from her.

Now a business student based at the Sylvania campus, Sean has done IT and marketing support for many years. As business slowed during the pandemic, he began to wonder if it was time for a change. Then his children started applying for college.

“They were filling out their FAFSA and I thought, what the heck,” he says.

Sean returned to school in winter 2022 after a 30 year hiatus from college. His 12 credits from 1991 carried over, and he’s now studying for his Associates degree in Marketing. He’s still grieving, and he’s also still living.

“It's probably going to be one of the worst things that ever happens to us,” he says. “But you can either let it consume you, or you can – I don’t like using the phrase move on, but you can accept it and learn to live with it.”