Amy Nelson

August 18, 2026

I've needed to write this for six years.

↓

An obituary to my old life

My Former Life died April 2, 2020, at approximately 6:45 in the morning pacific time. Seattle, Washington.

The date fell on a Thursday. Sharp knuckles fell on the glass door.

It went fast. Two people on the front step. Two letters handed over. My husband was the target of a federal criminal investigation and the government intended to take every dollar we had. The whole thing took maybe ten minutes.

There was no illness. No decline. No hospice, no goodbyes, no chance to say the things you say. One minute I was a CEO married to a happy real estate developer in a house I owned with four daughters asleep upstairs, and the next minute I was standing in a doorway in my pajamas watching the floor disappear.

If you have never watched a floor disappear, I hope you never do.

A word about the word

I know what an obituary is. Some of you have written a real one — for a parent, a partner, a child. You sat in a room and picked the photograph. I am not setting my Thursday next to your worst day.

Nobody died. Everyone in this story is still breathing, which is more than a lot of people get, and I know it.

But there is no ritual for this one. There is no casserole for the loss of the life you built. Nobody mails a card that says so sorry the federal government took everything you ever earned. You wake up the next morning in the same body with a different life stapled to it, and you are supposed to do what, exactly — update your LinkedIn?

I have needed to say goodbye to her for six years. Out loud. In writing. With a date on it. I can't move forward in a real way without doing this.

So I am borrowing the form. If the word bothers you, take the word and leave the rest.

In her time, she was something. She earned a law degree, traveled to over 60 countries, held an advanced PADI scuba dive certification, guided trips in the remote Boundary Waters Canoe Area, and worked with two American presidents. She founded The Riveter. She raised $30 million in venture capital while visibly pregnant, which people still tell me is impossible. She scaled from an idea to 130 employees and clubs in six states. She had a Forbes column. She had a fourth baby in the middle of it and shipped breast milk home on dry ice from business trips. She was tired in a way that felt temporary.

She thought the hard part was the juggle. The mental load. Those things.

Cause of death: false allegations and civil forfeiture, a legal mechanism that lets the government take everything you own based on suspicion alone — no conviction, no indictment, no charge. Over two decades, state and federal governments have seized more than $68.8 billion this way. My husband was never charged with a crime. For 22 months we were not even permitted to fight the allegations we were being destroyed by. (And we have still never been able to see the warrant used to take every dollar we had ever earned.) In January 2024, nearly four years in, the DOJ closed its investigation. Pleas from alleged co-conspirators were vacated, thrown out, "not in the interests of justice." A federal judge later ruled my husband had not so much as breached his employment contract.

We were right. It cost us everything anyway.

She is survived by four girls who have attended six schools in four states. A husband who was abandoned by nearly every colleague he had. My mother, who FaceTimed me while I sat shaking on a bathroom floor and said get up. A father who was gifted a new kidney to save his life a few weeks into this mess. A sister with a basement. A father-in-law with a condo in Hawaii. Parents with a townhouse in Ohio. And a very small number of people who kept texting when it stopped being fun to know us.

The years in between

This is the part nobody puts in an obituary.

I did not rise like a superhero. I froze. Nine weeks, maybe ten. I lost twenty pounds. My body shook on its own. I needed medicine to sleep. There were mornings I could not get dressed, and for two years I woke up every single day already in fight or flight, before my eyes were even open.

We sold the house. We sold the car. We emptied the retirement account to pay lawyers. I took a job at a Silicon Valley startup for a million dollars a year and they fired me on day five, when they read about the forfeiture online. A landlord for the home my family needed to rent made us pay a year of rent up front. I had to borrow the money from my mom. The startup community that had put me on its stages decided it had never met me.

And I was ashamed of all of it. Not the forfeiture — the freezing. The weeks I lost. I have carried that around like it was evidence against me.

So let me do this here, publicly, in writing, where I cannot take it back:

I forgive her.

I forgive her for the ten weeks on the bathroom floor. Freeze is a nervous system doing its job, not a character flaw, and we only ever talk about fight or flight.

I forgive her for the Xanax and the shaking and the twenty pounds.

I forgive her for the mornings her daughters got a mother who was physically present and emotionally in another universe.

I forgive her for being envious of women whose lives were still intact, and for being angry at people who said everything happens for a reason.

I forgive her for wanting it to be over in ways she has never said out loud.

I forgive her for believing, for a long time, that surviving badly meant she had not survived.

She got up. Not gracefully. She moved four kids to Hawaii, then to Ohio, and just kept moving because motion was the only thing available. That counts. It all counts.

In lieu of flowers

Don't send me anything. Send it to someone in year one of their own thing.

And don't send them advice. Send groceries. Send a Venmo with no note. Text the person everyone else stopped texting — the one whose name got weird to say at dinner parties. You will not know what to say. Say it anyway. I remember every single person who did, and I remember every person who didn't, and I promise you the second list is longer.

The one that's still open

Here is where an obituary would normally say the family requests privacy. We are not doing that either.

The civil case is still open. It belongs to a Very Big Tech company, and six years later their lawyers are still filing.

Let's review the tape. The DOJ closed its investigation. The pleas were vacated. A federal judge ruled my husband had not so much as breached his employment contract. Every serious question in this thing has been asked and answered, and the answers were not close.

And they are still going. Still filing. Still scheduling. Still paying lawyers who bill in an afternoon what our family lived on for a month, to litigate against a man they have already lost to, on facts that already went his way.

To what end? I have no idea. I have stopped assuming there is some sophisticated strategy in there that I am too dumb to see. Sometimes an institution simply cannot put a thing down.

So let me call it what it is. This is stupid.

It's ridiculous, and it's an epic waste. The company booked $77.7 billion in profit last year — roughly $213 million a day — and some slice of that is being lit on fire to keep a case breathing against one guy in Ohio. The real cost got paid in a currency they don't track: six years, four childhoods, one career, one house, one company, one entire life.

What a fall from grace. And I don't mean ours.

Ours was not a fall from grace. Ours was a demolition we didn't order. A fall from grace is what it looks like when a company that built its brand on obsessive care for its customers, and told the world it wanted to be the best employer on the planet, spends the better part of a decade demonstrating otherwise, in public, on the docket, against a family of six.

Let them be mad. (Why are they so mad?) We're still standing here.

Services

There won't be any. I'm doing it here instead, six years and four months later, from a desk in Ohio, in a life I did not plan and would not trade.

Grief is not the opposite of hope. Grief is evidence that what you lost was real and worth having. I loved that life. She was good at it. I am allowed to miss her and still be glad I am not her.

Someone told me years ago that my husband and I — a Leo and an Aquarius — were living inside a seven-year cycle that would take everything apart and then, eventually, let us go. Uranus had been sitting in Taurus since 2018, squaring both of our signs at once, which is astrology's way of saying every stable thing in your life is going to be rewritten. It left on April 25 of this year. Then on June 30, Jupiter walked into Leo for the first time in twelve years.

I am a lawyer. I am not supposed to find this persuasive. But I do.

Because what it has felt like from the inside is somebody rolling out a red carpet.

My four girls are in one school district. My husband has somehow rebuilt his career out of the ashes of a fire that could have been — in all likelihood, should have been — burning him for generations.

And I am building again — more than I have let on, more than I have said out loud to anyone but the people in the room with me. In 2025 my brain came back online: the creativity, the dreaming, the part of me that makes things. I thought the trauma had taken it permanently. It hadn't. It was buried under an exhausting fight to survive, and it waited for me.

The other side is not theoretical.

This year I stood on a TEDx stage. I wanted that for a decade, and I got it in the life I did not plan, in the body that spent two years waking up already in fight or flight. I hope to share the talk soon.

In October I'm hosting a national summit.

I'm also on the planning committee for my second daughter's fifth grade graduation party. (Yes, I have opinions about the cupcakes.)

I'm lifting weights again.

And this summer my husband and I hiked waterfalls and paddled a canoe in northern Minnesota, in the same corner of the world where I used to guide trips in that other life. Same water. Different woman. We have been through the thing that ends most marriages, and we stood there in the mist taking pictures like a couple of tourists.

It's glittery and gold. There is so much about it that I love.

But it is important to tell you who is doing all of that, because it's the entire point of this goodbye.

The new me is doing it.

The old me isn't here. She did not come back at the end, dust herself off, and resume the tour — that's a comeback story, and this isn't one. She's gone. What I have is not her life restored to her. It's a different life, built by a different person, out of parts that woman never had.

So this is the eulogy and the birth announcement, in one document.

To whoever is sitting in their own before-and-after right now: you do not have to be brave about it today. You can be on the floor. The floor is a legitimate place to be for a while. The only thing you owe anyone is the next small, strategic step, and you are allowed to take it terrified.

And here is the thing I did not know on April 2, 2020, standing in that doorway in my pajamas: the life on the other side is not the consolation prize. It is not the sad, smaller version you get stuck with. It is just the next one. But you don't get to meet her while you are still holding onto the last one.

So — goodbye. Thank you for the sixty countries and the thirty million dollars and the four babies and the nerve. I loved being you. And never forget that while you never should have had to fight, you fought well and with integrity. I've got it from here.

Rooting for all of us.

There is so much more coming.

— Amy, August 18, 2026
​