Images are my own creations This past week has been abominably hard. Violently hard. Or should I say, this past week has had some abominably and violently hard moments, minutes and hours in it. Yes. That’s closer. I once heard that Christopher Reeve (aka Superman) said, after his horse-riding accident in 1995 that left him […]
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Marry Me (2021 edition)
On May 25, 2016, he asked me to marry him. Then, he died before our wedding day. In 2018 when I originally wrote this, I sat re-reading those two sentences again and again and again. I just couldn’t seem to process the words the letters were forming. Now, nearly five years from the date, my […]
*But*
Tonight, my sister and I went to the movies. This may not seem like a big deal, but it was. I used to go to the movies at least 3 times a month, sometimes more, after Boris died. It was one of my favorite escapes. But then a global pandemic hit, which kinda messed up […]
Just-ified
“Just” – What a powerful word. “Were you just partners or where you married?” The word “just” has the power to completely negate every thought, word, blog, good deed I’ve ever done in Clayton’s honor. To some, we were “just”. Clayton and I were planning on getting engaged and married. If you are planning to […]
Last Friday
Hey Everyone! So today will be my last Friday Widows Voice post. Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere. I will still be writing here. I just cannot do Fridays anymore, due to my nutty work / multiple job schedule. Ive been fitting in my posts in between my morning and afternoon work shifts, which Im […]
Untitled and Off the Cuff
As many, if not most readers will know firsthand, grief shows up in myriad ways, often unexpectedly. I have been a widower for less than one year now, but already I have melted down driving home from the grocery store, reviewing tax documents with my accountant in her office, stumbling upon a dusty file or […]
Grief~
Cover yourself with their ashes. Rake them through your hair and paint them onto your skin. Curl into a ball on the floor, Arms wrapped around your body. Let your gut release the abject pain of grief. Of sorrow. Of devastation. Wail into the forever-ness of loss. Let it envelop you and seep through you […]
On Life as Mayonnaise
Image by Daniel Costa on Unsplash This isn’t a “deep” piece … just some in-the-moment noodlings, metaphors and wonderings. Sometimes people talk of “not being able to turn mayonnaise back into its component parts”, i.e., you can’t get your whole eggs back once you’ve beaten the hell out of them, mixed them with oil and […]
Being
There is a lot happening in my life right now and that is an understatement. And, despite all the uncertainty, I am surprisingly calm. Friends of mine notice a calmness in my voice when we speak and they are right, I am very “chill” considering the enormity of the changes I am living through right […]
Proud Widow
My husband Don and I were only married for 4 years and 9 months when he died suddenly from cardiac arrest. We were in the talking/planning/hoping/making changes stages of possibly having a family. We talked about moving out of NJ and into NY, or maybe even moving to Massachusetts so we could be closer to […]
The Gardener
Whether we were here at home or at Deer Tick Manor, friends and neighbors would drop by with their “green” questions for Lee or stop to solicit her recommendations about the best garden center while running errands on a weekend or ask her to provide the internet address of her reliable online supplier or identify […]
This Thing Named Grief~
Your loss is yours. How you grieve the death of the person you loved is on your terms. Nobody else’s. It is yours. Your timeline. Your tears. Your laughter…because laughter really is somehow tied up into the mixture of grief. There is no other timeline other than your own. There is no measuring tape for […]