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.

I used to think a lot of things about grief that I don’t think any longer.I used to think that you couldn’t hold two thoughts in your head at one time. Wrong. In the 2 years and 3 months since Chuck died, I’ve realized that I can carry on a conversation and be engaged with others while simultaneously flash-backing in my head to times and…

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…

What’s weird about this is that I haven’t even entered into the world of dating. And yet I hear from a man I met along the road in my travels, a man who is a widower, a man who is a veteran, who took it upon himself to read something huge into 2 brief meetings over a 2 year period, and, upon realizing that I don’t return his affections, also…

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…

Sex and widowhood.  I don’t hear much about it but I wonder about it. I wonder about it because I think about it.  You probably do too.  So I read an article this week about widowers and sex. It was kind of a sexist article, in that it spoke to the belief that widowers seek sex as a panacea to grief, that men tend more to emotions such as anger,…

After my mom and brother died within 6 months of each other, back in 1996,I took a year to grieve and then began volunteering with hospice. Over time I studied and took courses on end-of-life issues, bereavement support, spent time with those who were dying, and became formally employed with various hospices. I volunteered at Liberty State Park…

f you missed it, catch part I here before reading on.   As I said last week: once he moved in, I didn’t give my new tenant much more thought for quite some time. He paid his rent and was really very quiet, considering, and that’s all that mattered. But sometimes, as the weeks and months wore on, I found myself waiting until I heard his car…