Widow's Voice

Staci Sulin

Self Love (take2)

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Learning to fiercely love ourselves might be the greatest and most important love affair of our lives.

(Go on, read that again.  Take a moment.  Let it sink in.)

 

Yep.  As widowed people, it is up to us to master love in a new way.  We have lost the physical touch, and the voice of our beloved; but we still have the blueprints of their love imprinted on our skin and in our Souls.  We know how to give and receive love because of them.  So, now we must craft a way to love on ourselves when our lovers are no longer here to do this for themselves. 

Everything but the Kitchen Sink – take 2

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I originally posted this blog April 2019.  But, it merits a repost.  The topic is sexual bereavement and it is very real and it need to be discussed more candidly and more often.

As widowed people we do not often discuss how our sex lives die with them.  But, the truth is that this is an enormous secondary loss.  

Sexual bereavement is a thing.  It is very real and it profoundly affects us as we live on without the one we love.  Daily, we miss the intimacy of being a couple.  And, nothing, not one thing can replace this.  The daily nuances that exist between two lovers.  Your unspoken language.  The secret words you whispered to one another.  The tone he reserved for just you. The dialect of love.   

As surviving spouses we miss the stolen glances.  The way his adoring eyes watched me prepare a meal.  The winks he sent me across the room during a dinner party.  Tenderly placing my hand on his leg as he drove us some place.  Walking side by side and casually reaching for his familiar hand; and, then interlocking my fingers with the man I love. Their hands.  Their kiss.  That place on the small of my back that only he knew.  The way he gently brushed the hair out of my eyes before his lips met mine.  The way I fell into his chest as he pulled me to him.  All of this.  Every last thing.  This is the stuff we ache for.  This is the stuff that I quietly grieve.

Strong on Your Love (Repost)

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Staci is out of town this week, so we’re reposting her blog from February 19, 2018. Enjoy! I am tired of trying to be – ‘not sad’.   I am exhausted from the aching in my heart. I am weary from recognizing Joy everywhere, All around me, And, still feeling hollow inside, I am aware […]

Fly the Coop

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There remains a lot going on in my life as I transition from my house of fourteen years to my new home.  I have been between homes since the end of April; and though I am unsettled, I feel fairly calm.  My new life is starting to take shape and this is exciting.  It has been 4.7 years since I have really felt any type of warm anticipation about anything substantial.  The feeling of hopeful anticipation about my future has been foreign to me in grief.  Hope feels like the feels from another life I used to live.  But, recently, hope reigns supreme for me.  I guess this is what thawing from grief feels like.  Slowly, I have worked to come back to life and I am more than ready to reap the benefits of my hard work.

The Evolution of Grief (part 3 of many)

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After 4.7 years, I can write to you and say that I actually like my life again.  And, I am almost sort of “happy” once again too.  I have come to accept my life without him; and, I am also excited about my future.  These are all things that I could not imagine when Mike first died.  But, alas, I am a very different widow than the one who began writing to you in 2018.  Early on, I created mantras for myself so that I could somehow survive in a world where he is not.  Once upon a time I used to say, “love got me here, and love will get me through”.  And… it has.  I was right.  Love (in all its forms) for the win.

Your Touch (edited 2021)

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Touch has helped bring me further present.  It has helped reawaken me to the moment I am living in.  Touch has resuscitated me in ways that nothing else can.  Touch has given me the air I need when I was struggling to breath life back into myself.  For me, touch has been healing in a new a different ways.

Touch has brought me back in touch with my humanness.  I have allowed myself to acknowledged that I am still alive.  And, because I draw breathe, my skin still hungers for the touch of another human being.  Touch in and of itself is just that.  It is not love, but it is something.  And, sometimes a nebulous thing is really a big deal.

Strongish (again)

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As the days rolled into weeks, and then became months,  strong continued to mean different things.  Things that I never previously associated with being strong.  

I learned that strong means laying on the cold, hard kitchen floor crying for three months straight. 

I discovered that strong means sobbing silently while I cook my sons dinner every night for a year.

 

Strong is a lot of things.

Strong is learning to hide my tears behind sunglasses at the grocery store.

Strong is getting up everyday to repeat a life that is nothing like the one I imagined.

Strong is making homespun, amateur attempts at creating a new life, when all I want is my old life back.

 

Marry Me (2021 edition)

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On May 25, 2016,  he asked me to marry him. Then, he died before our wedding day. In 2018 when I originally wrote this, I sat re-reading those two sentences again and again and again.  I just couldn’t seem to process the words the letters were forming.  Now, nearly five years from the date, my […]