The Leaving Kind

In 2023, a large medical study found that women with serious illnesses are more than six times as likely to be abandoned by a spouse as men with the same diagnosis. The Leaving Kind is the story that statistic cannot tell.

In five movements-The Diagnosis, The Disappearing, The Discovery, The Collapse, and The Dying-this narrative hybrid collection traces one woman's final chapter through poetry and prose. Her husband does not leave in a single dramatic moment. He leaves the way fog leaves a room: gradually, quietly, until she is alone in a bed he once shared, in a house full of his absence, dying without a hand to hold.

What Tyler Tittle has written is not elegy. It is testimony. The voice in these pages is raw and often resigned, but it does not look away. It watches the door that started getting locked. It notices the car that stopped coming home. It speaks to a husband who will not answer, a mother who cannot bear the truth, and a dog who remains loyal when no one else does.

There are no recoveries here. No reconciliations. Only the accumulating weight of being left behind, and the courage that it takes to keep moving forward anyway.

The Leaving Kind was written for every woman who dies quietly. For every goodbye that never came.