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 […]
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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 […]
“Firsts” Moving Forward
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 […]
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 […]