For 294 days, Cherelle Griner felt as if she were holding her breath — began early this year for Cherelle, on Feb. 17, when her wife of three years Brittney Griner, 32, a WNBA All-Star, was taken into custody by Russian officials for carrying a vape pen containing hash oil.
The Phoenix Mercury center had been playing for the Russian Premier League basketball team UMMC Ekaterinburg during her offseason when she was stopped at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport, charged with smuggling illegal drugs, tried and then sentenced to nine years in a Russian prison colony.
In those 10 months, Cherelle, 30, finished law school, pleaded publicly and in private prayers for her wife’s release, tried to sleep at night and then got up in the morning to start all over again, never knowing Brittney’s fate.
It wasn’t until Cherelle entered the Oval Office on Dec. 8 and heard — along with the rest of the world — President Biden announce that Brittney had boarded a plane out of Russia and was heading home to the U.S. that she felt the pressure begin to lift. “I had thought about that moment a thousand times, and I thought I would be full of tears,” she says. “But I was overwhelmingly happy. It was the first time I was able to finally exhale, and I’m like, ‘Oh, thank God, this is such a great day.'”
Standing on the tarmac inside a bunker in San Antonio hours later, Cherelle saw Brittney’s face from the window of the plane and their eyes met.
Medical personnel boarded the plane first, to quickly evaluate Brittney.
Since returning to their shared home in Arizona — Brittney was cleared medically to leave Texas after two days of observation — the couple is settling in, though Cherelle admits their reunion hasn’t been the most restful.
For Cherelle, making up for lost time at the expense of sleep is an easy choice — especially when she considers the nightmare that kept her awake previously. Between the agony of her wife’s detainment and the logistics of international communication, she hasn’t had a peaceful night’s rest since that February day.
As Brittney and Cherelle rebuild their lives together, they realize that part of reconnecting is learning more about the people they’ve become while they were apart.
