I’m always astounded at the things nature teaches me about life and grief. This week I went for a walk at a park near my new house. It’s a wilderness park, with one trail that makes a 2 mile circle surrounding a prairie. For years, this area was farmland, and the park system has now preserved it to allow the landscape to fully restore back to it’s…
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An Empty Ritual
My Christmas tree is up. It nearly didn’t happen. Again. I had that moment where I didn’t see the point, with the same questions I’ve asked myself for the preview two years since he passed. I thought ‘I live alone, I won’t even be here on Christmas day – I’ll be at my sister’s house. It’s so depressing to decorate a tree on your own, why…
At the End of the Day
I feel like I have covered this grief topic in writing at least 10,000 times since my husband’s death. I also feel like no matter how many times I express it, there really is no way to ever properly express what this is. This, being the loneliness and longing that comes at the end of the day, in that space where my husband’s life used to…
Mileage
My new car is awesome. I never drive it or think about it without a wistful wish that Mike were here sharing it with me, but it is still awesome. He would have loved it too. A brand spanking new car with bells and whistles like I’ve never had before. My Subaru was a 2003 and Mike’s truck is a 1996 so I feel like I’ve been dropped headfirst into a…
Bearing What isn’t Bearable but is Borne~
How do we bear it? Bear the unbearable, I mean? Husband, wife, lifelong partner…there are so many names and relationships, so many labels that our world uses to describe the love between a man and a woman. Or two people of the same gender. It doesn’t matter, really, does it? It’s just about the love and then it’s about the death of…
Paying Grief Forward
I enjoy road trips. Given the time, I would happily drive across the country and back just because I can. This past weekend, Shelby, Sarah, and I drove 7 hours or so from Ohio to upstate New York to visit Sarah’s sister and her family. Being an odd person, a 400 mile drive through fairly boring terrain excited me in and of itself. We…
A Grieving Friend
On Thursday I received a phone call from a woman who wanted advice on how best to support her friend whose husband died two months ago. She was at her wits end with her friend who called her crying hysterically because she’d just left a drive through restaurant that she and her husband used to frequent together. This friend said to me, “I just…
The Trades We Make to Live On
I was reading an article today about grief, one of the best I’ve read in a long time. One of the things that really stuck in this article was about the platitudes people throw at you when you are grieving… mainly, “It happened for a reason”. They make the assumption that, if you became a deeper,…
Surprised by the Loneliness
Last week I wrote about how excited I was to be heading off on a holiday with my family and it was a wonderful break. I have a close family and adore my three nephews. Spending time with them playing on the resort waterslide, watching them learn about a different culture, even accommodating four-year-old cranky tantrums (when routine is broken…
Nobody Else Can Die
I got some news last night that I did not want to hear. A phone call from someone in my family, letting me know they were diagnosed with something. Honestly, I don’t mean to be so vague and mysterious, but I feel the need to write about this because that is how I cope, and because I cant really think about much else right now except THIS. At the…
Missing Pieces
I will never get used to death. Even my faith does not really help in that regard. Sure I might believe in a hereafter which brings some measure of comfort that the person we love is ok somehow and somewhere, and even that we might be reunited one day, but what we go through in our here and now after loved ones die is just downright disturbing…
Holy…What is~
Today is 2 years since I began my Odyssey of Love, towing my pink-trimmed T@b Teardrop trailer behind my pink car. December 1, 2013. I was riddled with anxiety, never having towed or camped prior to my beloved husband’s death. I knew, even on the night he died, that continuing a life on the road without him would require changes in how we had…