So I bought a table. It was only forty dollars, and it’s a little round glass patio table. Shelby and I spent an hour or so unpackaging it, laying the parts out, and assembling it. I know this sounds completely mundane, even boring, but bear with me. This table symbolizes something. It’s not sentimental, really. It wasn’t…
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Wear Your Damn Watch!
I wanted to share someone else’s story today… one that she shared with me recently that I felt had such a powerful message for us all. I met Tara at my first Camp Widow back in 2014, and I remember having a great conversation with her one night over a few drinks out on the patio. She made an impression on me that night that has always stuck. A…
Ready to Step Up
I’m posting my Widows Voice blog a bit late today. I’m scheduled to publish it at 5pm every Saturday, Australian time, which is midnight Saturday over in the USA (I live in the future, you see!). I’ve been late before but never missed a week, however as my scheduled time rolled around yesterday, I felt so overwhelmed with everything I had…
Free To Be Me
This past weekend, I attended and gave my comedic presentation at “Camp Widow” in Tampa, Florida. It was my ninth time attending and being a presenter at camp. Nine times. There are now 3 camp locations, and 3 camps per year. One in Tampa, one in San Diego, and one in Toronto. Each one has the same basic structure, as far as what happens during…
Trying to Treasure
I’m still working my way back into life on the island from the last two weeks I spent in New Orleans helping out my stepdaughter and her family. Two weeks of helping care for a four year old and a two year old with a newborn there as well pretty much knocks out everything else one might otherwise be doing or thinking about. Having never raised…
The Pulse Beat of Love Over Everything Else~
I have to remind myself, as many of us do, I expect, that this widowhood is, as I learned in AA, a matter of progress, not perfection. Because I, for one, consistently seem to expect more of myself than is realistic. By which I mean, I continually scan my body and mind and heart to see where I am in this grief and why I’m not further along, even…
Perspectives from Camp Widow
Sarah and I have just returned from Camp Widow, in Tampa. This was our third camp together, and our first time returning to Tampa, where we met last year. If you’ve read her sunday post, you know that we had great expectations of what this Camp was going to be like, and for the first few days, it seemed as if everything we had planned for…
Reminders from Grief
Things are coming to a close here in Tampa this morning. We expected it to feel exciting to return back here a year later… except this time, so many things have gone wrong. The pool at the hotel has been closed, creating some difficulty to finding quiet places to talk with fellow widows. On Friday, we looked at the time wrong and missed the…
Visiting with Old Memories
This Wednesday marked my husband’s 37th birthday. This was the third I’ve had to mark without him and surprisingly, I found it to be somewhat different to the past two. I woke up thinking about what we might have been doing if he were still here. On his last birthday, his 34th birthday, I’d snuck out of our room the evening before and…
A story story
Mike was always at the forefront of new technologies… Ha now there’s a sentence which is surprised at having been strung together. Mike was certainly not the most adept at such things…probably what I meant to say was that he loved to see all the techie gadgets that came along during his lifetime and then buy them and try and figure out how…
This Seemingly Never-ending Road~
Is it just me? I wonder, even as I know it isn’t just me. Logically and because I literally know otherwise, it isn’t just me. There’s a boat load of men and women through time immemorial who have lived this shit that I’m living, that we’re all living. And yet, my brain doesn’t let up about it.Why are you still so traumatized, Alison?…
The Simple Life
My wife suffered from a long-term illness, Cystic Fibrosis. When I say “long-term”, what I actually mean is “life-long”. There wasn’t a day that I knew her where she didn’t have some sort of symptom or complication directly due to her condition. Even after her transplant, every day was filled with special medications, dietary and…