Happiness has pervaded my life, before, during and after my time with liz. and since she died, it’s been my friends and family and stranger friends and music and books and travel and writing and memories and photography and baseball and cheeseburgers and beer and this blog and countless other things that have all been huge sources of happiness…
Widowed and Healing
You Get What You Get ….
I’ve come to realize something over the past several years. It’s about a variation of a sentence I’ve heard over and over again. And I would bet that most of you have heard it in the not-so-distant past. I have come to hate ….. no, abhor, this sentence ….. “I could never do that.” Or better yet, “God knew that I couldn’t handle something like…
The Little Guy
Summer has started here in Texas and the heat is on. Grayson has started his series of summer camps, and we’re looking forward to our birthday trip over the 4th of July weekend. Ten years old. It’s hard to believe that my little guy will be 10. He was 5 when he lost his dad, and I was so afraid that he’d be permanently damaged by the whole…
Facing My Fears
It has been a long time since I have really shared my life with a man. Four years, ten months, and seven days to be exact. In that time I have learned to juggle life as a single parent, a single person, a sole provider, the sole tenant on my mortgage…I have become accustomed to the fact that the buck stops with me. For the last two weeks I have…
It Should Have Been ……
…. our 27th anniversary. Friday. The 28th. It should have been. Instead, it was the day our oldest child/daughter graduated from graduate school. And I was with her. Just me. It should have been us. But it wasn’t. It was just me. Again.I get tired of it being just me. For everything. Every big day. Every “first day of ….” Every “last day…
Resting In the Riddle
Musical Tuesday for me. I went to the Indigo Girls concert this weekend. I loved them in college and it was such fun to see them so many years later. My sister-in-law Leslie and I went and were not disappointed. It was a fantastic show. They closed it out with one of my favorite songs “Closer to Fine”.I’m trying to tell you something about my life…
The Meaning of Sacrifice
There was a time that I could not imagine being a widow. There was a time when I didn’t know that widowed people come in all shapes and sizes. There was a time that I knew the dictionary definition of the word sacrifice, but I had no idea how that word fit into the widowhood experience.Since I began leading an organization that creates a network of…
In Every Cloud ….
…. there’s a silver lining. Or so they say. Who are “they” anyway? I’m guessing not anyone who lost their spouse. So …. is there a silver lining in all of this? Hmmmmm …. not really. Not yet?Although I guess maybe the changes in me could be considered a silver lining. I know that time is short and that I can’t take anything for granted.
When It’s Quiet
I took a drive last night with the top down. Driving 70 I couldn’t hear anything but the wind and engine. The effect was therapeutic in a white noise way. I emptied my mind and just drifted for a few minutes. What I found there in the roar of the wind was a little piece of myself. I had some “deep thoughts” for a few miles and found that I need…
Separate Worlds
A friend of mine told me that his 99 year old Grandfather had just died, and that his wife who is also 99 years old is still living. She wondered how long the wife was going to live now that the husband is gone. “I’m sure it’s not the same for you, but you hear all the time with the elderly how quickly other one dies after the death of their…
Parenthesis
As noted last weekend, the 21st marked 3 years since my hero’s death, but tradition continues of being around amazing widows leading up to or after the date. This past week we were in Fayetteville, NC for our annual golf tournament for the organization, followed by our annual AWP Skydive!Like all of our events, we have a definite melting pot of…
come again
I have gone out of my way to avoid the parking lot of our doctor’s office for two years and two months. I’d park on the other side of the building and walk the long way to get to my appointment. As I approached the glass doors to the dreaded parking from the opposite entrance I’d avoid looking at one specific tree. This tree marked the spot where…