This was me, back in 2009. The week Drew and I began dating, we jumped out of a perfectly good airplane. It was a pivotal experience for me… and changed my beliefs in myself and how I dealt with risk and fear in my life. I have always been a cautious person, but every so often, I discovered after this day, I am able to make some pretty big leaps.
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The Champ
So let’s get right to it. For the first 3.5 years after my beautiful husband died, the very idea of dating or “someone else” literally made me sick to my stomach. It made me feel physically ill, and I couldn’t even discuss it without having a slight panic attack. Around the beginning of year 4, there was a slight shift inside me, for no reason…
No Magic Answers
I wish there was a magical device that would tell me exactly the right decisions I should be making in my life. But there is not. Without Mike as my partner and sounding board, I feel especially in the dark about making the right choices for myself. I feel very let down, in a way. I had thought I had made that most important decision of one’s…
What I Can’t Tell you~
I feel compelled, now that I’ve passed the 3 year mark of my widowhood (as of April 21), to write one of those numbered lists of what helped me get through to this mark… Really, honestly, though, I couldn’t tell you how I’ve gotten here. All I can tell you is that I look in the mirror at myself and ask how the FUCK have you done this? How…
Just Do Something
For the past week, maybe two, I have been in a complete and total funk. There hasn’t been any specific trigger. No anniversaries, birthdays, significant dates to remember, or big “firsts without Megan” that have occurred. It is the same as always…I wish she were here and I miss her, but the grief of losing her is not overpowering. I…
Being a Widowed Mom
Revisiting a blog I wrote about six years ago. Wow has the time flown. But, these words still ring so true for me. Raising grieving kids has been one of the most difficult experiences of my life. And yet, I didn’t seem to break my kids or ruin them or doom them to a life of despair, somehow we all made our way through the death of our Phil…
Broken Hearts Club
For the past week, I have poured myself into the creation of my new grief workshop. It’s finally getting real now. Which is scary and exciting all at the same time. The fundraiser is over, and by the end, I raised $1700 to help with the creation of all of this. Amazingly, 95% of those donations were from widowed people. None of my close non-widow…
1000 days
Dear Dan, This week we reached another milestone, albeit not exactly a traditional one. On Tuesday, it had been 1000 days since I kissed you goodbye. The reason I know this is because I put a ‘countdown’ ap on my phone after you died, so I’d always know how many months, weeks or days since you’d been gone. Isn’t that a strange thing to want to…
Prince Died Today. And I Can’t Tell You.
When the person you thought you would spend your whole life with is dead, there’s this weird thing that happens each and every time a person of fame or celebrity dies. It kind of goes something like this: Holy Shit! Prince died! I have to tell Don, he LOVED Prince! Oh, shit. I can’t tell Don that Prince is dead, because Don is dead too. Well,…
Getting Old Sucks…
…but it’s better than the alternative. At least that’s what they say. I’m not sure who they are. They probably have never been widowed and had to live with the idea of getting old without our spouses, when we hadn’t planned on it… and they are definitely not being specific enough. Who wants to live a long life if you’re sick and…
Upon This, I do Insist~
I wonder, frequently, when grief changed from a normal, human response to the death of a loved one, to a condition that, seemingly, must be gotten through (with all due speed, thank you very much for your consideration), with clinical protocols assigned to it? When did grief get designated as complicated and unhealthy and uncomfortable and…
Getting Around to It
In the spring, before Megan died, she and I decided to have a deck built on the back of our home. Nothing too fancy. It was to be a 12 foot by 12 foot square, with a new sliding glass door leading to it. We had wanted to have one on our house for years, and we were finally going to get it done. We shopped out for a few different…