It’s been a crazy week. I guess I am just in one of those general bad periods that just happen in life from time to time. I have uni deadlines and assessments this week, I got sick Friday so I lost a study day, then a nasty nasty so and so of a virus attacked my computer rendering it to the status of a boat anchor (and not a very good one…
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Much to lose
In less than 3 weeks, it will have been 3 years since Dave died on a heart-breakingly beautiful June day. It has been the most terrifying, wrenching, altering event of my life so far and I will spend the rest of my life dealing with it to some extent. I’m beginning to understand just how much we learn to carry our grief rather than get over it.
Living Adventurously In Loss
Even though our adventure together did not last a lifetime as we expected – my fiancé and I certainly lived our days adventurously. He convinced me to go skydiving a week before we began dating to my surprise. I am not an adrenaline junky, but somehow he had a way of making me surprise myself by the things he was able to bring out in me. I always…
Grief Rising. But Love, Too
Tomorrow my daughter Rachael-Grace and I leave on our 6 month Nothin’ But Love tour. It will be quite an experience for both of us, filled with every emotion of the alphabet as we honor and remember my husband/her dad, meet people along the way and hear their stories, offer workshops to women around the country and, well, who knows what else. …
Energy Force
Do you ever have those moments, where you can’t really explain why or how, but you just know that the person you lost whom you loved most, is nearby, or in the room with you? It is more of a feeling really – rather than something that can be analyzed or broken down. Sometimes it is inside the gust of wind that whispers by on a cold, crisp autumn…
Dissed
Dislocated. Discombobulated. Disconnected. Disengaged. Disjointed. Disrupted. Disarranged. Disoriented. My career for 10 years or so was in hospice bereavement support. I facilitated groups of all sorts and one of my handouts contained many words used to describe the emotional/physical/spiritual elements of grief. In the year since…
Something’s Coming
This week has been… interesting. After last weeks post, I head on into my week including attending a combined meeting of two chapters of a lobby/advocacy group that I’ve belonged to for nearly 20 years. Over this period, there have been the various internal issues that arise from time to time in such organisations, and those currently around…
Worth It
Life marches on so relentlessly. Dave’s memory fades as time passes. The way to make his memory stay clearer would be to pull out his pictures regularly and talk about him constantly. Doing these things can be comforting, but for me, they’ve also been incredibly painful. I talk to him still. I think about our life and our love. I look at pictures…
The Accidental Mother
“Happy Mother’s Day!” the waiter says to me, followed by saying that he isn’t sure who is or isn’t a mom so he just says it to all the women coming in to eat lunch at the restaurant today. I laugh at his over-kindness, and say thank you. But then, as he walks away… the feeling sinks in. Now, normally I’m very good at keeping the whole children…
An Anchor in a Rough Sea
Widow’s Voice is a unique blog. Our writers write about widowed life as it is being lived. Which means that whenever each of our courageous authors sit down to write a post they don’t have the answers to the questions they pose; they don’t know how what the next twist in their own story will be, and after baring their souls with each post, they…
A Widowed Status
Today I changed my relationship status on Facebook from “married” to “widowed”. I have been staring at that line on the page for many long months now. For whatever strange reason, it has given me great comfort to see it posted this way. Facebook may be a silly, meaningless network in many respects, but that status was still not something I could…
Seeing Strength
Chuck’s first anniversary just passed. We had a remembrance for him and danced for the love he left behind for all of us. But I also needed, somehow, to mark this past year in a very personal way that was about me and who I am now and who I’m becoming. Who I want to be for the rest of my life. Thinking about it became a spiritual mediation…