It had rained non-stop from Illinois and Indiana through Ohio and Kentucky, into parts of Tennessee, crisscrossing the Great Smokey Mountains. A challenging stretch of road for two flatlanders but we managed a steady clip. We were in North Carolina before we caught the first glimpse of blue sky and sunshine. Suddenly, on one side […]
Widowed and New Love
Will Weddings Always Be Hard
A fellow widow asked if weddings would always be hard for us to go to and I found myself looking back to the first wedding I attended after Tony died. It was an out-of-town wedding that took place 6 weeks after he passed. Six weeks felt so far away when I was on day 3. […]
Three Years’ Ago This Week
Lee died three years’ ago this week — on July 2 to be precise. This year the date fell on a Sunday. This year, when I awoke, Robyn was with me. I felt no ambivalence about this circumstance. On the contrary, I was happy she was with me. *** According to the Holmes-Rahe Stress Scale, […]
The trickiness of “How Are You?”
Image by Markus Spiske on Unsplash Yesterday, a fellow widbud, a woman I have never met but who someone connected with me, and who lost her husband just before Christmas 2022 after a very short illness, wrote the note below. I responded to her with both sharing some of my recent writing on this very […]
Time After Time After Time After Time
Photos my own This is – and will continue to be – a weekend full of experiments. A lot of my life is still versions of experimentation, if not in the ways it was immediately post-loss(es) when even just venturing out of the front door and heading to the shops felt like an experiment. This […]
“The relationship I always wanted….”
Photo of my parents in 1961 in Córdoba, Spain – from their archives Medjool and I have just had a lovely 10 day “working break”, based mostly at my parents’ house in Céret in the Pyrénées Orientales, just inside France on the Franco-Spanish border. Now into their 80s, I try to get down to spend […]
I wish I could better imagine…
Photos my own – taken at Christmas 2022, on runs with my dad Sometimes I stop short in my tracks and realise with desperate sadness that I can no longer imagine what my life would be like with Mike were he still alive. In the last years since he died, I have lived through what […]
What do Mother’s Day, Handy Men, T-shirts and Jazz have in common?
Photo my own You might well ask. Well, one answer, and the only one I have right now, is that these words, or words related to them, are on sticky notes, forming a dense, colourful and messy pile, worthy of investing in 3M. I am trying to reduce my use of sticky notes, but […]
Credits
Photo my own screenshot A long, long time ago, back in the last millennium, in the time when there were dinosaurs, and during the 7 month period between 1997 and 1998 where I had a brilliantly exciting expat assignment in Minneapolis, I met a lovely woman called Betsy. She was first a colleague then became […]
Grief Work
Over the past 6 months or so I have started to realize how much more grief work I have to do. I think I went through a period where it felt like I had done it all. Not that I was “over it” or everything was better, but that I’d sort of worked through everything […]
8th April
Photos my own, taken today It generates a sicky feeling in my tummy. A sinking of my heart. A shortening of my breath. An increase in my heart’s rate. A tensing of my belly. A weakening of my arms’ and legs’ strength. Trembly fingers. This date. 8th of April. Typing it out. Seeing […]
Taking Stock
I’ve explained that my recent travels with Lola the pup to explore Arizona and parts southwest felt like an imperative. Simply put, I had to go. To accomplish the mission I did a lot of driving over a short period of time. Today, back home, I realize it was unnecessary and possibly even a mistake. […]