. . . someone asked. a puzzle an enigma one long and unpredictable complication . . . a testament to love. grief the remnant from the flood proof that love existed love’s receipt. The poet, John O’Donohue says it best: For Grief When you lose someone you love, […]
Widowed by Illness
“These dreams go on when I close my eyes.”
It’s been a week of oddball dreams in which my departed other half has shown up frequently. These particular types of dreams are powered by my subconscious mind, not by supernatural forces. From the surrealistic to the mundane, they take me on a well-trodden path. It’s almost as if my subconscious is experiencing its own […]
Endings, endings, endings everywhere
Main image by Ben Wicks on Unsplash One of my favourite “change” models (and I know quite a few) is that of Bill Bridges – and crucially, it’s called “Transitions”. I love this man’s work for so many reasons – not least because I trained for my first marathon, back in 1997, with his daughter […]
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 […]
Selfish Thoughts
The New York Times recently published a fascinating and mainly hopeful guest essay by Kate Pickert dubbed “Is a Revolution in Cancer Treatment Within Reach?,” (See https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/16/opinion/cancer-treatment-disparities.html (June 16, 2023)). In it, Ms. Pickert describes nothing less than a paradigm shift in cancer treatment away from a long-held medical assumption “that many early-stage cancer patients […]
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 […]
Press “send” for instant panic
Main image by Melanie Wasser on Unsplash Last Sunday, after I had arrived in Milos in the early morning but still too late to join the other intrepid swimmers for all day open-water swimming, I just pootled around. It was a blissfully leisurely day. I enjoyed a second breakfast, unpacked my belongings, had two short […]
Παρακαλώ και ευχαριστώ
Main image by Sergio Garcia on Unsplash Back in the very early 1980s – or perhaps it was even the very late 1970s – I am not entirely sure… my mum started to learn Greek. I don’t know why she started, (nor why she eventually stopped), but she engaged a private teacher who showed up […]
“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 […]
The School Bus That Thumps Me In The Gut
Music, yes – of course music does it. Lyrics or no lyrics – same same. Places too. And faces – duh. All of those are triggers – triggers for a fast tumble down a Grief-soaked spiral. But the evening school bus? School buses, in fact, for there were two a day – one for kids […]