This week brought with it a major milestone – my first wedding anniversary. A special day that I should have been celebrating with my darling but, instead, had to spend alone, as his widow. I’ve had a pretty busy few weeks so even though I knew it was looming, the reality of the day really snuck up on me. One year ago I married the man of my…
Widowed Emotions
Help
Here’s what I’m noticing as I begin to build a life with someone since Dave died. I’m struggling to let myself be helped. I fight against the idea of my boyfriend doing things for me. I’m torn between the desire to let myself be a part of a couple again and split the work up – You do the finances because you love it and I’m terrible at it. I do…
One of Those Days
My car broke down. Again. It’s been acting up quite a bit lately. I took it in and they said it needed new struts. That wasn’t cheap. But it was still making weird noises and behaving strangely. A few weeks ago it didn’t want to start…then it finally did, so I immediately drove down and had a new battery put in. Then a few days later…
Fear
I was leaving the house yesterday when I realized, with amazement, that I wasn’t filled with dread at leaving my cats and house unattended. After Dave died, I would leave the house and immediately my mind would fill with images of the house burning down in my absence, the cats unable to escape the fiery death trap. I would think “I should just…
Empty Fury
I’m sure we’ve all been told that ‘anger’ is one of the phases of grief (coincidently, Stephanie wrote about these on Thursday). I say ‘phases’ instead of ‘stages’ because, in my experience, it’s not a linear process where you graduate from one emotion to the next. Instead, it’s been a messy, complicated jumble that throws us back and…
It’s Only Love. Or Grief. Or Love.
I’m near the end of the first month in the second year since my husband Chuck died. The nights and the days blend one into the other. When people ask me how I’m doing, I ask them in return if they want to hear the polite answer or the real answer. That’s pretty polite of me to ask that of them, isn’t it? I’ve run out of words to describe how…
Routnine. Junior Edition
I’ve written before about how my personal routines went out the window after Ian died. John was only 13 months when Ian got sick, and 16 months when he died. Getting him into a bedtime routine, let alone to going down at a regular time just never got re-established after the initial “everything gone haywire” period. We both developed bad…
Nobody Remembers
If you are widowed, and you are reading this, then you know that missing your person and the life you had together is as constant as breathing – it is a new fact in your new life that you didn’t ask for, and it’s just there, always and forever. The missing of what was never goes away. But then, above and beyond that missing, is a whole other kind…
About an Abode
I could lose my house. In fact, I probably will. For the first few months after Mike died that thought kept me awake at night. It was the single biggest fear I had in that terrible, dark time. I felt like I was choking on grief, and drowning in panic. I could barely breathe when the waves of fear came over me. I went through every channel I…
Raining, pouring
It’s been a crazy week. I guess I am just in one of those general bad periods that just happen in life from time to time. I have uni deadlines and assessments this week, I got sick Friday so I lost a study day, then a nasty nasty so and so of a virus attacked my computer rendering it to the status of a boat anchor (and not a very good one…
Much to lose
In less than 3 weeks, it will have been 3 years since Dave died on a heart-breakingly beautiful June day. It has been the most terrifying, wrenching, altering event of my life so far and I will spend the rest of my life dealing with it to some extent. I’m beginning to understand just how much we learn to carry our grief rather than get over it.
Energy Force
Do you ever have those moments, where you can’t really explain why or how, but you just know that the person you lost whom you loved most, is nearby, or in the room with you? It is more of a feeling really – rather than something that can be analyzed or broken down. Sometimes it is inside the gust of wind that whispers by on a cold, crisp autumn…