I have not felt your lips against mine for over two years. It has been almost a thousand days since I have heard your voice outside of my memory. And, it is starting like I knew it would. I am starting to forget your voice. I’ve tried to keep the sound of your voice clear in my mind by replaying our conversations again and again, but it…
Blog
Finding Power when Powerless
“Sometimesthe most important part of the journey is just deciding to go.” I read this quote the other day in a book and I liked it. I tend to spend too much time overthinking things and not enough time just doing them. So this was refreshing to read. But it also got me thinking about widowhood, and decisions. And how much of the difficulty…
A Hallmark Heartbreak Kind of Holiday
My birthday was hard. Thanksgiving was hard. Christmas and New Years were both hard. Yet it is the “Hallmark Holiday” that seems to burn more than build the wave of sadness.Every Valentine’s Day growing up, I wrote out cards and put them in classmates construction paper mailboxes but only for the girls. Life is different now and kids can like…
A Life Unfinished …
It hangs in mid-air, swaying through the trees, like an echo, sometimes, and other times, like a scream. That life unfinished, the one we didn’t get to have, because you died. It lingers there, in the breeze, like a hundred-thousand question marks, and never any answer. That life unfinished haunts me sometimes. I wish I had a book I…
Trying to Start Over
My wife and I have always enjoyed mixing our favourite coping mechanism, comedy, with accomplishing important tasks. Sometimes, the best remedy for the worst life stresses is proactive humour. Natasha came up with the term “cancer card” as a way to deal with life’s day to day challenges. We would often jokingly ask each…
Sunshine and Roses. Not~
I’m 5 years and 9 months into life without Chuck. I don’t think I’m supposed to call it that. Life without Chuck, I mean. I think I’m supposed to structure it, this life after him, in a more positive manner, according to society at large. Whatevs. The one thing I’ve done really well since Chuck died is be real about this widowed life shit. And it…
Paradox
Anniversaries are, in general, a prompt for looking back. They’re an annual reminder to be reminded of the past. While oftentimes, an anniversary is also a milestone, it still remains that, simply put, an anniversary measures the passage of time. They don’t really MEAN anything to widows. Our person is neither more, nor less dead on…
Lifelines
This is not how I imagined my life. We should have been in our new house for over two years now. Mike and I should be celebrating our two year Wedding Anniversary August 20th, 2019. But, he died. And, none of this happened or will happen. There is no shared home. There will not be a Wedding Anniversary. There won’t be anything. …
Sticks and Stones
Sticks and stones…They were wrong, words do hurt…. Today I went to pay bills and my computer needed to be restarted. It had erased a password to sign in and pay the water bill. I knew I had it written down somewhere but, of course, my life has been tuned upside-down for the past 10 months and things are not organized like they should be.
When Love Wins out Over Fear
It’s been a little over a month now since Mike proposed. I’ve had a few hard triggers. Trying to think about planning a wedding has been tough at first. The last time I was going to marry someone, he died before we ever got to the big day. He died before we ever even got into the true planning. So needless to say, that part of me that remembers…
Superbowl Sunday and a Brand New Life
The year was 2005, and it was a cold day in February. I looked out the window of my New Jersey apartment, which sat on the Hudson River. NYC looked back at me. I put the coffee pot on, and started making the meatballs and sauce. My Nana Mary’s lasagna recipe, with bow tie pasta and meatballs and ribs on the side. I had made it for Don the…
Grief and the People I Meet
I have to expect that my widowed parent journey is, and will always be, just that: MY widowed parent journey. It is unlikely that I will meet another single parent who like me stood over his father-in-law, mother-in-law and wife while they all took their last breath. Whenever I share this fact, most people’s jaws drop in surprise,…