Widow's Voice

Another Valentine’s Day

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This particular blog will be short and sweet, and I know that all of you understand.  It’s night on Valentine’s Day and I’ve spent the past two days determinedly making Love bigger than grief, delivering joy in colorful bouquets of flowers.

I took on a job with a local florist, appropriately named Fairytale Florals, just for this day. I knew I couldn’t let myself languish with my thoughts for the day, so I found a way to bring Love to others. I drove up and down highways and roads in my pink car, waving to people who passed me by, talking to those accepting the delivery.

I wore pink clothes and my warrior goddess boots and dusted my face with shimmer and fairy dust and wore Love amulets and hugged people and gave it everything I had.

And now it’s almost the end of the day on Valentine’s Day and I’m exhausted through and through, having nothing to do with the physical activity and everything to do with my heart hurting from missing Chuck so much, from not being able to just collapse into his embrace and not feel so damned alone.

Our anniversary is Friday.  Much of life is what I like to describe as a clusterfuck, to coin a military term.  It’s always something even though it really isn’t anything other than me being here on this earth alone and it’s a feeling that goes down to my bones.

I will always, always, always, do my best to live the legacy of Love that Chuck left behind for me.  I will breathe for him and share our Love story and push my comfort zones and put myself out there and do whatever I can, as crazy as it might seem to others, just to keep his name and his Love alive.

And I’ll never lie about how hard it is to continue doing so in the face of living this fucking widowhood day after day.

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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