So, today, December 18th, is the 10 year anniversary of my husband Don asking me to marry him, on a 23 degree windy Sunday evening, exactly one week before Christmas. Knowing my obsession with the Christmas holiday and the the entire season, he took me to the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree, got down on one knee in front of hundreds of total…
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Far From Ideal
“Far from ideal”…just one phrase uttered by my friend Margaret during a recent conversation about the state of our lives well into year three of losing our husbands. It caught my ear because indeed…so much of our world now is far from ideal. We realized too during that conversation that our lives with our husbands were probably not…
Experimenting at Life~
I’m experimenting. I’m making decisions that go against my nature and against what I’d like to do, and, instead, I’m doing shit that is way out of my comfort zone. These decisions wouldn’t have been outside my comfort zone when Chuck was alive, but they have been, and remain so, now. Grief changes us, doesn’t it?In order to be…
Falling Water
There exists in Cuyahoga Valley National Park a small waterfall called “Blue Hen Falls”. For thousands of years, this ripple of water has been flowing over a sandstone ledge in 3 ribbons, proceeding on its course towards the Cuyahoga River. Spring Creek, it’s namesake being a natural seep about 1000 yards upstream, isn’t a…
Metaphors for Grief in Nature
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…
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,…