At just 25-years-old, Edmonton forward Colby Cave passed away in April of this year from a brain bleed and the complications stemming from it. The seemingly healthy hard-nosed player managed 67 games in the NHL before his death, mostly with the Edmonton Oilers, although he also played three with the Boston Bruins. He had several seasons under his belt in the AHL and was well-liked by his teammates and respected by his opponents. His wife, Emily, has written an account of his last hours for ESPN that includes some heart-wrenching details.

Emily describes how she and her husband had been married for just nine months. They were both quarantining with Colby's parents in Ontario after the NHL had shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Cave had been told by Oilers assistant GM Keith Gretzky that when the league returned, he would be called back to Edmonton with a crack at suiting up for the playoffs.

At 11 p.m., Colby started complaining of a headache. He said he was in a lot of pain. Colb was never sick. He didn't get the flu, never caught a cold, he was the epitome of health. I messaged my sister, who is a nurse, and started looking things up on Google. Colby said, "It's probably just a migraine." I remember saying, "What if it's not a migraine, Colb? What if it's a tumor?" He calmed me down and told me it probably wasn't that.

But through the night, he got significantly worse. He got up and vomited about four times, but then would fall back to sleep. I took his temperature at 6:30 a.m. and knew he really wasn't well. He was mumbling, I couldn't really make sense of it. I put on a mask and gloves and ran upstairs to my parents and told them, "Something's wrong with Colb. I feel it in my gut." By the time the ambulance got there, he was hypothermic and completely unresponsive.

Cave was airlifted to hospital in in Toronto and underwent emergency surgery to remove a cyst from his brain. According to Emily, within 14 hours of her husband saying he had a headache, he was on life support. She was later told he was unlikely to make it and was urged to go into his room and say her goodbyes.

I remember begging the doctors to tell me he was going to wake up. "He's going to wake up, right?" There would be a dead silence after every time I kept saying it on repeat. It was all I could manage to get out of my mouth.

Because of COVID, I wasn't able to see a lot of people right after Colby passed. For five weeks, I was in my parents' house, and people would come to drop off food or gifts but leave right away. The first people I was actually able to hug other than my immediate family were Connor McDavid and his girlfriend, Lauren. Just being able to hug them, be with them, regain a little normalcy, meant so much.

During Colby's four days at the hospital, we reached out to family members and both the Bruins and Oilers, and started collecting videos of people to tell Colby to wake up. I put them all on his iPad. The plan was to drop the iPad off for the nurse to play for him since he wasn't allowed any visitors. Unfortunately, we never got the video to him. I still have the slideshow, though; it has more than 100 videos, hockey players and coaches, from all around the world, telling Colby: "Wake up."

I'm not ready yet, but one day I hope I will be able to listen to them all. When I was putting it together, there were some incredible stories people were sharing about Colby, and those are memories I want to live with forever.