Yesterday, on June 30th, we would’ve celebrated my sister’s earthly 63rd birthday. Manette loved birthdays and always made sure they were enjoyed in style. I, born in the cold dark days of January, enjoyed, but also envied her sunny pool party celebrations. Mine always seemed to be shut down by ice storms and blizzards! She […]
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Grief by Taylor Swift Albums
In the early months after Boris died, I remember a close friend telling me that her husband sometimes will have a hard time remembering if a certain song was out or a current event had occurred before or after his sister died. It had been many years since her death, but I remember thinking how […]
Just Another Birthday
This week I had another birthday – my 72nd. This year, no cargo shorts and Hawaiian shirt combo in a box. This birthday gift tradition ended when my sister passed away a few months ago. My mother and I share the identical birth date. While she was alive, she made a point to present me […]
Thoughts on Time: Night
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a strange relationship with time. I see time as a formidable adversary; time surely sees me as troublesome or unmanageable. In my mind I imagine a cartoon with a tiny me looking up at a huge clock saying, “You’re not the boss of me!” Time and […]
The trickiness of “How Are You?”
Image by Markus Spiske on Unsplash Yesterday, a fellow widbud, a woman I have never met but who someone connected with me, and who lost her husband just before Christmas 2022 after a very short illness, wrote the note below. I responded to her with both sharing some of my recent writing on this very […]
Readying for Another Sweep
I have been getting the itch to start purging again. The first time I got rid of anything it was about 5 months after Tony died. I went through his clothes because it was something I knew. Heck, I probably purchased 75% of his wardrobe! I didn’t need to question what something was worth, where […]
Spending Time
Hello Sunday Readers! I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the concept of TIME. How it goes sooo fast when you are a kid (or maybe it doesn’t if you experienced a traumatic/unpleasant childhood), yet soooo slowly when you are older. How there are times when we all wish we could either speed up time, […]
Works-in-Progress
Last Friday I flew home from New York State after bringing my mother north from Georgia and attending the Military Service and interment for my father who passed in late April. Upon my return, it occurred to me that for the first time in my adult life, I resided in a place with not a […]
Selfish Thoughts
The New York Times recently published a fascinating and mainly hopeful guest essay by Kate Pickert dubbed “Is a Revolution in Cancer Treatment Within Reach?,” (See https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/16/opinion/cancer-treatment-disparities.html (June 16, 2023)). In it, Ms. Pickert describes nothing less than a paradigm shift in cancer treatment away from a long-held medical assumption “that many early-stage cancer patients […]
Healing Support Tools: Widowed Peeps
What kind of support do widowed people need? Many people are familiar with the five stages of grief, but mourning a loved one rarely happens in a clear or predictable manner. You might cycle repeatedly through different emotions, or you may feel everything at once. Every widow or widower processes grief in their own way […]
Time After Time After Time After Time
Photos my own This is – and will continue to be – a weekend full of experiments. A lot of my life is still versions of experimentation, if not in the ways it was immediately post-loss(es) when even just venturing out of the front door and heading to the shops felt like an experiment. This […]
Another One Down
Last week I was just feeling off. I didn’t go to my workout class once. All I wanted to do was eat chocolate, french fries, and curl up to escape into the fantasy saga I’m reading. It took me until Wednesday to realize it was probably in part because I was approaching our third Father’s […]