If there is one thing I have learned in the 4 years of being widowed, it is this: Pain and joy can and do exist in the same breath. Excruciating sadness and ecstatic happiness can be felt in the same exact moment. Inhale joy, exhale pain. That’s just how it works when you’ve lost your whole world in 2 seconds flat. Nothing is simple anymore.
Maybe
Last night, I had tickets for “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.” They took a long time to get, like months and months and months, and it finally happened. I was finally there in the audience. I have lived in NYC for two decades now, so I have been to tapings of quite a few shows over the years. David Letterman, Saturday Night Live, and others.
Dying
So this past Monday, July 13th, was the 4 year “anniversary” of my husband’s sudden death. (I’m putting that word in quotes because I don’t like that word to describe the day someone died. It makes it sound like a great big party or something to celebrate.) My once a month session with my grief counselor happened to fall on that day, so I decided…
Pinata
I am a word-nerd. I love words and poetry, and similes and metaphors and illiteration, and sometimes the way that somebody words something or the way they write something, can change everything for me. It can make me see things in a whole new way, or bring to me to a deeper level of understanding about something that I never would have had…
New Life, Old Life
If I’m being 100% honest, which I always am in my writing about loss, there are actually two of me. Version One of me was born on September 26, 1971, and she died on July 13, 2011. Version Two of me was born on the same day, within seconds even, of version one’s tragic death. Version One never saw it coming. A massive heart-attack took her husband…
Anchor
I went to the doctor today. I know. That doesn’t sound like a big deal, but believe me, in my world, it is. When my husband died suddenly just under 4 years ago, we were living paycheck to paycheck. We shared his beat up old car to get to our jobs, and we had nothing in savings. We lived in a crappy and small apartment in New Jersey, and we were…
Everywhere
There was a time, early on in my loss, where I felt like I was constantly on the search for my husband. Every second of every day was spent , in my mind and heart, trying to locate him somehow. People kept telling me over and over and over that he is always with me, that he is in my heart, and all those other cliche’, blah-blah-blah things that…
Around the Corner
On July 12th, 2011, during another ordinary day in my previous life, I could have never in a zillion years predicted or seen coming that only hours later, my husband would leave for work and never return again. I could NOT have foreseen that he would be sitting at the computer desk in our bedroom one minute, and the next morning,I would be jarred…
What About Don?
It is now 3 years and almost 11 months (next week)since my beautiful husband left for work and never came home. In that time, I have (and still do) been to grief counseling weekly, tried many different widowed support groups, become a member of several online and in-person groups for widowed people, found support through Soaring Spirits and have…
The Knowing
When you lose your beautiful husband to sudden and shocking death at age 39, just four years into your happy and flourishing marriage, one of the biggest things you are left with is something that I call “the knowing.” What is the knowing? It is having the knowledge about a whole host of things regarding life and death, that your previous self had…
Bellissimo
After my appointment, I was supposed to meet a friend for a light dinner in the city before heading home. I got to the restaurant and she texted that she had to cancel last minute due to an emergency. I was already seated there with an iced tea, so I figured Id stay and get a light dinner and wait out the rush hour subway traffic going home. The…
Things in Common
This might sound kind of silly or stupid or not at all important in the grand scheme of things related to losing one’s life partner to death – but just bear with me, if you don’t mind. It’s how I’ve been feeling lately, and I feel the need to get these thoughts out. There are a lot of things that my husband and I had in common. A lot of things.