In life, in culture, we are encouraged to connect with others, with community. As girls, we imagine who we’re going to marry (a high percentage of us anyways). Who will we fall in love with? We date, fall in love, get engaged, marry, and build a deep connection to our person, and society applauds us. Then our person dies and we’re…
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Father’s Day Gift
Father’s Day 2017. For once, we had a weekend day where there was nothing to do. We had visited with both mine and Megan’s dads on Saturday, specifically planning to have an open day wedged into the seemingly constant stream of other events that have been taking time on our weekends together. Sarah was awake and moving well before i was (a…
I wear my heart on my arm
Everyone has their own kind of therapy when someone they love passes. Mine was tattoos. It was nice to sit in a room and feel a different kind of pain, a kind that I could control. Physical pain seems to be so much easier than mental pain. So over the course of six months I filled my entire left arm with different things that reminded me of Joey.
Post-traumatic Growth
Did you know “post-traumatic growth” is actually a thing? A friend mentioned the concept to me recently and I made note of it, thinking it was a clever concept invented by us grief sufferers, but when I typed it in a search online, a bunch of very real psychological studies came up. Mike used to say, repeating an oft-used phrase, that what…
Pay it Forward for Don Shepherd Day …..
…is just one month away. July 13th, 2011, is the day that rocked my world forever. That is the day that my dear, sweet husband died very suddenly of a massive heart-attack at age 46, after only 4.5 years of a beautiful and loving marriage together. In 2012, I started the first ever PAY IT FORWARD FOR DON SHEPHERD DAY. My husband was the most…
Return To Me~
Return to me… Please come back… Return to me, with your strong arms That wrapped round me… And made me feel safe and secure No matter what was going on around us.Return to me, with your broad shoulders Upon which I rested my head And listened to your heartbeat… Until our breathing became one breath and I felt reassured and knew, always,…
“Share your memories! (3 Years Ago)”
“Share your memories! (3 years ago)” Yeah, that’s what Facebook likes to do to me every year on June 9th. It helpfully pops up a notification, showing me a picture I took on that date in 2014, that I might like to share with the world. It’s such a heartwarming gesture by the team at Facebook (or timehop, or Google Photos, or any other…
Growth and the Gifts in Grief
Tomorrow marks the first day of the summer session for my eCourse that I am teaching now for the 3rd time. I create this class last year as a way to share much of what I had learned in my own grieving process about creativity. For four weeks, my students will be diving into lessons and creative prompts in writing, photography, and painting, with…
Pieces of Her
Heartache she can feel not just in her bones but within every inch of herself. Pulsing through her like rapids over a fall. A heaviness that holds her heart with every thought of loss and of love and the thoughts can be so consuming. Love is glorious, beautiful and healing, to lose love is the painful part. Memories, she replays. Sweet, soft and…
Back to You
Im wondering, for real, because I really do want to know, will there ever be a time, when something goes wrong in my life, when a relationship ends, or someone else breaks my heart, Again, or I lose a job opportunity, or something happens with my health, or I continue to struggle financially, or my parents get sick, or my kitties die, or ANY…
Soul Searching
I saw my therapist today, for the first time in about two years, we figured. She was the one who first helped begin to lift me out of the fog in those early weeks and months after Mike’s death. She knows my story, knows me. I had been thinking of her a lot this year, with all the issues and decisions I am facing, and low and behold, I literally ran…
This…This is Life. This is Love~
I’m going to tell you a story. It’s a Love story…my Love story….a Love story that lasted for 24 earthly years. My Love story taught me how to trust, it taught me how to love passionately while keeping my own identity, it taught me how to open myself to another person, how to ignite my passion, and how to knock down old walls that no…