Tomorrow is Father’s Day and for the first time in my life I won’t be celebrating the occasion with my dad. On Tuesday of last week, my father’s cremains were interred at the Gerald B. H. Solomon Saratoga National Cemetery in Schuylerville, NY. It was a beautiful and solemn occasion with about dozen family members […]
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Another Trauma Reminder
CW/TW: This post contains a discussion of suicide. I am currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Georgia State University, where I also received my undergraduate and master’s degrees. It is where Boris and I attended college together, and where he was attending for his master’s when he died. GSU holds a special place in […]
Dos Urban Cantinos
Paul texted me Tuesday morning. He said that he wanted to see me and would come by my place. He suggested that we should have dinner together. I strongly suspected Paul’s message had not arrived entirely out of the blue. After all, this past Monday marked what would have been another wedding anniversary for me […]
Lost and Found
Do you ever feel lost, but you can’t define it? This is me, of late. Without words to inform my senses. Something in me wants to define my feeling of being lost. This makes me ask, what is it about the known that is less disconcerting than the unknown? Is that actually true? […]
Press “send” for instant panic
Main image by Melanie Wasser on Unsplash Last Sunday, after I had arrived in Milos in the early morning but still too late to join the other intrepid swimmers for all day open-water swimming, I just pootled around. It was a blissfully leisurely day. I enjoyed a second breakfast, unpacked my belongings, had two short […]
Undercurrent of Fear
Fear isn’t always something we always talk about with widowhood. Losing Tony to suicide has put an undercurrent of fear beneath all of us who held him dear. This isn’t to say that we live our lives in constant fear, but it creeps out faster for us. When I call my mom at a weird […]
Return to San Diego
Happy Sunday everyone! I’m happy to report that I will be attending and presenting again at Camp Widow San Diego. The last Camp Widow that happened in March in Tampa, I was unable to go for financial and logistical reasons and I just could not make it work. Since it was literally the first Camp […]
Urning Places in Our Hearts
Tomorrow my mother and I will travel to Upstate New York where my father’s cremains will be interred at the Gerald B. H. Solomon Saratoga National Cemetery during a private service next week. My late husband Rich’s cremains rest in Jacksonville National Cemetery (FL), a beautiful peaceful spot. It was a place initially intended […]
Texts.
Sometimes I do what I call “pressing the bruise” and look at something or do something that I know will trigger my grief or feel sad. This week, I did one of those things and I read through saved text messages with Boris. And yeah, it did hurt. Especially the messages where I was angry […]
Lee to the Rescue
Ordinarily Tuesdays and Wednesdays are busy days. Not only are these the days when I craft my posts to this site, but on alternating Tuesdays, including this past one, it’s also when I clean my house for Julia, the biweekly housekeeper. (I would not want Julia to discover how I really keep my house most […]
The Best of Men
ONLY A DAD by Edward Albert Guest Only a dad, but he gives his all To smooth the way for his children small, Doing, with courage stern and grim, The deeds that his father did for him. This is the line that for him I pen, Only a dad, but the best of men. Words […]
Παρακαλώ και ευχαριστώ
Main image by Sergio Garcia on Unsplash Back in the very early 1980s – or perhaps it was even the very late 1970s – I am not entirely sure… my mum started to learn Greek. I don’t know why she started, (nor why she eventually stopped), but she engaged a private teacher who showed up […]