SO. After two and a half years… it finally happened. I had my first date this week. I can’t even tell you how this happened. I had no idea this person would be interested and I’ve never much been interested in him either. It sort of came out of the blue… no real warning, no time for planning how I want to feel about this step. Just… bam,…
Widowed Emotions
Facing my Second Christmas Without Him
A friend called me yesterday to talk about plans for New Years Eve. She had previously mentioned the idea of renting a house at the beach and getting a few people together for a fun night in. While I had been quite keen to join them when we first spoke about it, I found myself feeling more and more reluctant as the conversation went on. For…
The Ache of Lonely
You know that thing, where, for days and weeks and maybe even longer, you are strolling along in life, thinking and maybe even knowing that Hey, I think I might be doing more than okay right now – and having this odd sort of confidence in knowing that you are emotionally pretty happy for the most part – and then all of a sudden you are lying in…
A Step Up from Suffication
I reached a crisis point in my grief late last week. It was as if all the agony and devastation that lingers right under my skin suddenly became the surface of my skin and I felt like a wild animal that howls its’ pain to the night skies. It didn’t help that I’d been ill for almost a week, a vicious flu that tore up my body in every way possible.
500 Days of Missing
As of today, my husband has been dead for 500 days. That just sounds so utterly ridiculous to me. 500 days. It might as well be an eternity. During those first few weeks, each day felt like a marathon. It was the greatest challenge to make it through every. single. day. I’d lay in bed at night with a heart heavy and a broken spirit,…
Silence and Noise
Have you ever taken a few minutes or hours or days, to look completely outside your own life and how your loss affects it, and instead look into the world at large? If you have, like I have, you might find yourself staring into a great, big, never-ending, cavernous hole. Being where I currently am inside this grief tsunami, (3 years and 4…
This Dark Night of the Soul
This particular blog is one I don’t plan on editing or changing in any way. It’s completely raw writing from the darkness of this night that I’m in. I came in off the road not quite a week ago, right before Thanksgiving. My PinkMagic trailer is parked outside my son’s house here in Arizona. He recently moved in with his girlfriend, soon to be…
A Thankful, Angry Heart
It is the week of Thanksgiving, and all around me there is the message to be grateful, to be thankful for what I have, and to count my blessings. I am thankful for many things—my brothers and their families, who made sure I got to visit them, my cousins and aunts and uncle, who made special efforts to see me while I am here, my son and his…
The Grief Critic
In the 3 years and 4 months so far of this death tsunami I’m living since losing my husband, there is something I have learned about other people. Sometimes they suck. A lot. When it comes to living with the death of your partner or spouse, I have found that there are two kinds of people I deal with: the supporter, and the critic. Technically,…
Surviving Thanksgiving
The first Thanksgiving Mike and I spent together in 1999, we went out for Indian food. We thought it would be a lark to be totally untraditional, and we did that together for a few years until we moved to Hawaii. Once we got here we started hosting the holiday ourselves with various groups of family and friends over the years. I have a lot of fond…
Read Patiently. There is an Actual Point
It’s turned out, for me, to be all about the hair. I didn’t intend it to play out like this; it just has. Shortly after Chuck died, I cut my hair off to the scalp. Short, short, short. First scissors then a razor. It was done in a violent manner, in a way that I hoped would allow me to release some of the devastating pain of his forever…
Still, Life
week has been a whirlwind for me. I met a fellow artist who, upon seeing my photographic series on grief, asked to write this feature about it for a creative blog he writes for. That one blog post at this point has led to around 6 other blogs contacting me to share my story and the project… which has resulted in hundreds of people sharing the…