Yesterday I had one of those encounters with people who REALLY don’t know what to say to a widow. You know the type, they rattle off every cliche in the book with very little understanding of what they’re actually talking about. Furthermore, they usually have zero ability to pick up on the fact that the words of sympathy and wisdom they are…
Blog
Maybe
Last night, I had tickets for “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.” They took a long time to get, like months and months and months, and it finally happened. I was finally there in the audience. I have lived in NYC for two decades now, so I have been to tapings of quite a few shows over the years. David Letterman, Saturday Night Live, and others.
Triggered
The other day I went into Sports Authority looking for something – it’s not a store I need to go to very often but it was one of Mike’s favorites. He was so excited when we heard a big sports store was coming to our little island town all those years ago. As I was walking around I was hit with a flood of memories of being in there with him. I…
Knowing in the Now~
I used to think a lot of things about grief that I don’t think any longer.I used to think that you couldn’t hold two thoughts in your head at one time. Wrong. In the 2 years and 3 months since Chuck died, I’ve realized that I can carry on a conversation and be engaged with others while simultaneously flash-backing in my head to times and…
Compromise and Guilt
Photo: Circus skills class As this pregnancy draws closer to the end, I’ve found myself thinking about how different John’s early childhood’s been from what Ian and I had wanted – particularly what I’ve done and how I’ve engaged with John as a mother. We all have grand plans of the childhood we hope to give our kids. Play…
Stripped
Last week, I was unable to write for this blog. I had developed a migraine on Sunday, and I was feeling tired and spent. These past few weeks, I have found it difficult to write. It seems I am pouring over the same old themes: sadness, longing, attempts to make myself anew. How many ways can I express it? So I decided to try something…
Start Where You Are
I’m feeling a bit worn down today. I’ve been trying hard the past few weeks to keep a new schedule and really buckle down on getting work done. Working for myself has been the hardest possible thing I could have added to my life these past few years since he died. It never seems to get any easier… unlike the grief, I don’t know that it’ll ever…
An Unexpected Reason to Smile
Yesterday marked the two year anniversary of the day I lost my husband to depression. It’s the hardest day of the year for me. I miss him always and there are obviously times that are harder than others, like our wedding anniversary, Christmas and birthdays. However while those days bring sadness, it’s his death anniversary that has me…
Any Other Day
Any other day, I would have opened my eyes at 6:00 A.M., sleepily rubbed my eyes, and shifted my way to the edge of the bed. I would have woken Shelby up, as always, and gone about the mindless morning routine of feeding the dogs, making coffee, watching the news, and determining what clothes I would be wearing to work. Today isn’t any other…
She is…
She stands alone on her porch gazing up at the night sky remembering all the countless nights in years past she stood there together with her lost love. She remembers how they gaped at the star-filled sky, the Milky Way, the shining moon, here in this remote outback of the world, so far from any big city lights…the excitement they shared over a…
The W Word~
Widow. It’s a loaded word, isn’t it?I use the word in reference to both women and men, or I write the word widow and just add a slash and an er at the end. Because I’m a bottom line type of person, I appreciated best the definition from Thesaurus.com. Noun: woman with dead husband. That definition suits me primarily because it isn’t…
Silver Linings Playbook
I’ve noted a shift in my overall attitude since Megan’s death. I was somewhat of a pessimist in years past; always finding the bad news in any nugget of information that may have come my way. Perhaps it was the shock of losing my wife that finally changed my outlook in everyday life. I now take events or news with a different eye, one…