‘It was always our plan to share this’

Published 1:30 am Thursday, March 26, 2026

“I’ll be 36 next month, and my birthday will land just about on the four-month mark since Paige died. I feel young, I feel old. I feel battered, I feel strong. I’m just barely beginning to feel in touch with my own timeline again, just barely beginning to feel my age again, and all of these are complicated feelings.”

It’s surprising to read this post on Mark Burkholder’s social media and find out he’s only 36. The reasons why aren’t immediately evident — his features don’t look older than that, necessarily. But there’s a wisdom to his eyes; a grief that shouldn’t align with so few years. The profile photo of his “Caregiver’s Guide to Cancer” account shows his wife, Paige, in a hospital bed behind him. He’s in the foreground, his knuckles covering his mouth as his chin rests in his palm, geometric glasses framing eyes that tell more about him in one still than any amount of writing could.

Writing used to be the only way to tell a story to people outside of your immediate proximity. Burkholder’s story is now reaching millions, though, and the technology we hold in our pockets means he can share even the most intimate details, moments, sounds and feelings from his life on this little island with people across the world without lifting a pen.

‘This is not a cancer we will be able to beat’

Those are the words Burkholder heard Dr. Gentry King tell them at their first appointment at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center in Seattle.

But Paige, who had a tumor the size of a softball growing in her abdomen, told her family, “This is a cancer we will focus on living with.”

In the war on terminal cancer, the various army members hold different positions, see things from unique perspectives and with distinct barriers. Paige needed to cling to hope as she took on the role of comforter to friends and family about the landmine inside her own body. Focusing on the good was a way she could help others cope; it was a way she could cope.

“Giving others hope gave Paige the hope she needed herself,” Burkholder can be seen saying in a YouTube video reading of the eulogy he gave at her funeral, three years after that meeting with Dr. King. “It gave her a promise to fulfill to everyone she loved. Every time she had an upswing, I would hear her on the phone, presenting just the little bits of good news, talking about how good she felt that day. And on the many downswings, she would retreat, and the fight would continue in silence until she had hope to give again.”

Meanwhile, Burkholder, as her caretaker, held the burden of the logistical, cold truths that accompanied difficult prognoses, continuing treatments and the harsh realities of a body meeting its end. Thus began Paige and Burkholder’s divergence. They each took their positions — side-by-side but irreversibly and permanently on different trajectories.

Rewind

Paige and Burkholder moved to Friday Harbor in the fall of 2021 so she could take a job as a teacher at the local high school. She was diagnosed with stage 4 Cholangiocarcinoma the next year, a death sentence from the beginning. After realizing information online mainly consisted of falsely positive cheerleading snippets of 10-second highlights, they knew they wanted to share their story in a real way.

“She wanted to put out the real stuff, the real cancer battle,” Burkholder told the Journal. “There’s so much rah-rah, ring-the-bell hope online, and that’s great. But it’s not great if you have terminal cancer. It’s kind of the cancer version of seeing a fitness influencer give you three simple things to get in shape, when really, behind the scenes, there is so much more happening.”

The two of them collected photos, stories, and advice into an archive that Burkholder thought he might one day put into a book. They wanted to offer a “field manual for the cancer trench” — something they wished they had when they entered the battlefield blind. He decided to put some things online to compile everything before possibly sending them to a publisher, but his first posts unexpectedly went viral the same week his wife died in December 2025. His and Paige’s previously private stories were seen by millions seemingly overnight, just as Burkholder was going from teammate to solivagant.

“My whole life, basically, was caring for Paige. Especially the past year or two,” he told the Journal. “So when she passed, I didn’t just lose her. I lost my career of caring for her, my purpose, my daily routine, my own self-care.” Witnessing the outpouring of responses to his early videos inspired him to shift that sense of purpose to caretaking in a new way — caretaking those who were experiencing some version of what he had just gone through.

Since then, he’s been writing, editing, producing and posting curated videos to tackle the very uncurated, unspoken aspects of caretaking and loss: his last text from her (not poetry, but asking for pain meds), how his dog Olive stopped waiting for her, what it’s like opening her ashes and his first visit to her gravesite. In the three months since he started sharing, Burkholder’s videos have had more than 50 million views, and he has almost 200,000 followers across social media platforms. People magazine did a feature on him in February, with other publications following suit. Burkholder is happy to continue his sense of purpose in this way.

“It feels like a really good way to honor her; this is something we said we would do,” he said. “It’s a way to turn the suffering into something.”

Global stage from isolation

Burkholder is now watching his videos impact lives across the globe from his home on San Juan Island, in the small town where he and Paige fought together to save her life.

“We waged our entire cancer war here. Paige would walk down the hill to her treatments at Peace Health,” he said. “In a city, we’d be driving through traffic, paying for parking, in a giant room with 40 strangers. Here, it’s two chairs with a zen garden, a bird bath, and floor-to-ceiling windows. It was invaluable having all the same nurses or being able to just pop in with a question.”

Burkholder even welcomes the seemingly less-pleasant aspects of small-town life — grateful that people know who he is and can offer support when he’s around town.

“At a certain point I just started telling the truth at all times — even when people ask how I’m doing,” he said.

Burkholder says it has helped him remember that he’s not alone because they all have things going on, too. And being open lets others do the same.

Telling his story to the world on www.markjburkholder.com is a more macro version of that same idea: being open allows others to do the same, which helps and connects everyone.

Watching his videos and hearing his stories, it’s fairly clear that while Burkholder’s joint story may have ended last December, his own has many chapters left to write.

He ends his post, where he shares about his 36th birthday coming up, with this: “There’s a strength and an experience emerging from beneath that feels ancient and eternal and durable and empowering. It’s just a seedling of a feeling, but that’s growth, that’s newness. Here’s to you, Paige. To carrying on, as you’d want me to do.”