Widow's Voice

A Huge Moment in Northwest Texas~

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It was completely unexpected. 

My first road trip since the pandemic began. I wasn’t towing my pink trailer, but I did add a bunch of decals to my pink car, deciding that my car needs to represent my Odyssey of Love just as much as my trailer does, covered as it is with the hundreds of names of loved ones sent to me to write on it…#traveleingtributetoLove.

I was on my way to CT, from AZ, and my son’s family, visiting them for the first time in a year. Traveling a direct route because of #covid, masking up, keeping away from people. Not at all my usual way of traveling, but I wanted to follow protocols for my sake and everyone else’s.

The roads I was on were all too familiar from my Happily Homeless travels with Chuck many years ago. Familiar because of my own Odyssey of Love travels these 7 years since his death.

I’ve been off the road for a year. Which I only mention because it may have played a part in what happened. Prior to this last year, I’d been a full timer since the 3rd week after Chuck’s death.

Emotions always run high in me as I drive all the roads around the USA; Chuck and I navigated most every highway and byway and back road we could find, so I run into memory everywhere, and sadness and missing fill my heart each time.

As memories started filling my mind the other day, on that 2 lane road in northwest Texas, with the sun bright overhead and the skies a deep blue, instead of melancholy, I suddenly found my entire body immersed in a bright light of sheer Love. I recognized it immediately as the Love that Chuck left behind for me. Now, of course I’ve always known, intellectually, that if Chuck could leave his Love for me behind…if it was at all possible for him to do such a thing…then he would. And did. But the knowledge of that Love has never quite gotten to my heart and soul and, as a result, familiar roads evoke sadness and pain rather than Love.

BAM.

It was as if a light clicked on inside of my heart. I truly felt so suffused with Love, by Love, that I felt as if I became Love. If an energy wand had scanned me at that moment…one that measures auras, so to speak…I believe it would have lit up from the Love radiating from me. It was Chuck’s Love radiating towards me, into me, around me, where it then radiated outwards from me.

Memories of the two of us through the years poured through me. Not just in my mind, but my heart. Memories of what it felt like when he touched me. When he smiled at me from across a room. How his kisses felt. How I felt being with him. How I responded to him and how he responded to me. Our beginning. The years of loving and being loved by him. All of it flooded through me and zinged through my blood in a manner that hasn’t happened since his death.

It was the most beautiful feeling. I clicked on my playlist of music he and I listened to as we danced. As we drove together for our last 4 years. I turned it up loud and opened the sun roof and absorbed this new feeling.

This, for me, is nothing short of frickin’ miraculous.

I don’t miss Chuck any less. It still pains me that he’s dead and gone.

AND.

I feel so loved by him. It’s no longer one sided, me to him. His Love for me is suddenly a real and living thing, as it was when he breathed on this earth. It’s made me feel more powerful than ever as I contemplate the next phase of my Odyssey of Love. It’s long been a thing with me to default to Love since Chuck’s death, but this is something even more.

The Love that I carry in my heart, coming from Chuck, carries strength in it that is unequaled by anything else. It is the force that enables me now, more than ever before, to go out into the world and do my part to show Love to everyone I meet. To be Love in this world with nothing holding me back.

The details of this happening don’t matter to me. I’m not curious about it. Not questioning it. I know what it was that happened. I know where it came from. And that’s enough for me.

Since that day, just one week ago, I’ve had lovely dreams for the first time since Chuck died.

I’ve slept comfortably.

I feel lighter.

I feel more certain of myself in all ways now.

And there truly is no holding me back from the mission that Chuck laid out for me before he died.

I almost feel…ordained, if that makes any sense. As if he said to me…you know what you need to do with whatever time you have left. Take all the Love I had for you…that I have for you still…and scatter it into the winds and out into the world. It’s your responsibility. Take my Love for you and shine it on every damn person you meet. Don’t stop doing that. It’s what made us who we were. Now it’s yours to carry. Carry it for me and with me. Get out there and shine brighter than you’ve ever shined.

This…this is what’s real.

Chuck’s Love.

Our Love.

Just…Love~

 

Alison Miller

About Alison Miller

My beloved husband Chuck died while we were full timing on the road. We’d rented a condo for our stay in southern CA, and I had to leave 3 weeks after his death. All I knew at that time was that I had to find a way to continue traveling on my own, because settling down without him made me break into a cold sweat. I knew that the only place I’d find any connection to Chuck again was out on the roads we’d been traveling for our last 4 years together. I knew nobody out on the road, I knew grief was a great isolator, and I knew I had to change the way I traveled without him, to make it more emotionally bearable for me. So I bought a new car, had a shade of pink customized for it, bought a tiny trailer and painted the trim in pink, learned how to tow and camp, and set out alone. My anxiety was through the roof, and all I knew to trust was the Love that Chuck left behind for me. I found Soaring Spirits early on, thank god, and the connections I made through SS helped ground me to some extent. I needed to know that other widow/ers were out there in my world, because I felt so disoriented and dislocated. Through Soaring Spirits, as the miles added up, my rig taking me north, south, east and west, I found community. I found sanity…or at least I learned that if I was bat shit crazy, I was in good company, and realizing that ultimately saved my sanity. PinkMagic, my rig, is covered with hundreds of names of loved ones sent to me by my widowed community, and I know it isn’t visible to the naked eye, but I’ll let you in on a secret…she actually illuminates Love as I drive down the many roads in our country, and I can see it through my side view mirror. Love does, indeed, live on~

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