Scrolling Facebook recently, I came upon this brilliant bit of medicine by John Roedel. Thank you, John, for this viral post. Deep bow to you. The world consents to the wisdom in these words. Note: The art of this piece is in both the words and in their placement. Due to limitations I am experiencing […]
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Old Habits Meshing With New Ones – aka – From Sergy to Scheveningen Overland
All photos my own I am on a Thalys train, sat at Rotterdam Centraal, awaiting the departure to Paris. I have had a very short, end-of-week (as opposed to weekend/week-end), break to see Megan who is studying in The Hague. I am on my way home, and door-to-door, it should take me 11 hours if […]
Halloween Changes
Today is Halloween and per usual my feelings are complicated. I have always loved Halloween, it’s right before my birthday, I love dressing up and expressing some creativity. Before Tony and I had kids, we used to have a big party every year and we usually put a lot of thought into our costumes. Once […]
Wedding Planners and Grief Counselors
Thursday, October 27th, was my wedding anniversary. To the dead guy. It would have been 16 years married to each other. But instead, it was and will always be 4 years and 9 months. Now that so many years have gone by since his death, our marriage seems even more tragically cut short than it […]
Good Thoughts and Prayers
I’ve found it difficult to recall the rapidly unfolding events that occurred this week one year ago. The beautiful fall weather in the South features lack of the nearly year-round humidity. Clear Cerulean Blue skies. The Scarecrow Festival in downtown St. Marys, GA, the place I now call home. I wasn’t able to recall experiencing […]
Nothing new.
Sometimes I feel like I have nothing new to say or write about my grief or even about Boris. Like all of my grief thoughts have already been written. My sadness. My loneliness. My missing him. My regrets. My flashbacks of the trauma of his death. And then sometimes I feel like I have so […]
Today and yesterday (and weeks, months, years prior) . . .
. . . sunflowers continue to bring joy! Do you ever feel “off” in your day…in your body…in the events that transpire between waking in the morning and lying down at day’s end? That was me today. Sitting down to get a head start on my blog post for this week, I drew a blank. […]
When not to mention the death of a child…
Image by Vlada of Oświęcim on Unsplash I went to see an extraordinary film last night – “Simone, Le Voyage Du Siècle” (in English, it’s been translated as, “Simone, A Woman of the Century”. The Simone in question is Simone Veil, French (and European) political, women (and human) rights activist, and Holocaust survivor. A woman […]
Stress Manifested
Last Monday, I was feeling a small sense of calm after weeks of high stress. I’d been stressed with the daily tasks of parenting and adulting my household alone. While grieving heavily as the longevity of this loss came into focus. Monday afternoon I sat down in the chair at my hairstylist because shocking, these […]
Toronto Blues
So here’s the thing …. I wont be attending or presenting at Camp Widow Toronto this year. I just cannot make it work. Almost always in the past, I have been able to somehow make it work. Lots of people in the widowed community have helped to make that happen some years when things are […]
Hope as a Helpful Diversion
After I’d edited and saved last week’s post, The Fine Art of Inoculation, my home experienced a powerful surge followed by a brief power outage. I later found out, however, that some of my neighbors had experienced a longer period of time without power. Because of the precise timing of its occurrence, I suspect that […]
Decluttering
“Decluttering” seems all the rage these days. Just check the internet, which contains enough information and articles on the phenomenon to easily fill an entire basement and a garage: spend an hour, a day, a week discovering for yourself the “10 Rules,” the “27 Simple Steps,” the “50 Strategies,” ad nauseam. The hype surrounding the […]