My husband and I used to have those silly magnetic letters on our kitchen refrigerator back in our New Jersey apartment, and we would leave each other cute and often ridiculous or random messages on the fridge like: “I love you Boo”, or “Yankees won”, or “UR cute.” One of his favorite things to spell out for me in colored letters was “Don ‘N…
Widowed Emotions
Things that have Changed
I am sitting here, marvelling at how far I’ve come since March 1, 2010; I am a different person with the same heart. I can now look back and remember the sharp, stabbing grief of that day. The insanity. The weeks and months directly afterward where I alternated between shrieking pain and dense fog; I rocked and cried or I floated…
Talking to the Echo
There is a space where my husband’s voice once lived, a big empty hole that sits in the center of my hours, my days, my years. It mocks me by following me wherever I go, And it feeds off of it’s own nothingness, Sipping on the hollow void, A cruel silence where there used to be sound.It follows me everywhere, But it is most cruel whenever I try…
Day by Day
I’m often still taken by surprise when being able to do some tasks are often a day by day proposition. Mostly these are tasks to do with Ian, but not always. Often this freeze is not so much in the sense of having a ‘bad’ day, but just a day of not wanting to go there. Just prior to Christmas I was working on swapping which rooms are used for…
The Blindside
I’ve been in a clay workshop for the past few days, and its mostly been a heck of a lotta fun. Each say we have worked with a different teacher, making sculptures, dinnerware, decorated tiles, and learning alternative techniques for firing clay (examples in the picture above!) It’s been a whirlwind of new and exciting creative ideas for me,…
Suicide Widow
I am filling in for Amanda today. The current heat wave has knocked out her power! Amanda stay cool (get it?!) and I will try to stay warm! Recently I have had a lot of suicide widows reach out to me on Widow’s Voice and facebook. “I have no one to talk to, I have no one that gets it. I can’t talk about the suicide to my friends or…
Turning Pain into Love
In 2012, when his death was so fresh, I needed to talk. About the pain, the fear, the agony, the anger, the loss, the accident, the future we will not have, the children we won’t raise, the wedding we won’t share… all of it. I wanted to crawl out of my skin with all the pain. I talked and cried almost every single day to someone about my pain. I…
It’s Gone
The following was written in my personal blog just a few days ago, so those of you who may follow my writing over there, may have already read this. Really wanted to post a shorter version here too, though – because I know that so many of you can relate to the devastation and feelings that this brings up. Nothing has changed. Nothing has been…
Happy
It’s been a long time since I could say without hesitation “I feel happy”. In the time since Dave died, I’ve laughed and enjoyed myself, but always I felt that underlying layer of sadness and shock that dampened everything. It made even laughter a bittersweet act. How could I laugh when he was gone? Lately, though, I’ve felt happy. Not tinged with…
Taking Chances on Life
I’ve had a particularly hard couple of weeks lately. Not only has there been Christmas and the 18 month mark since he died, but throw in a trip to Dallas where we lived together, his younger brother graduating from college, my idiotic attempt to start a pretty strict new diet and workout regimen (beginning a week before Thanksgiving, really…
Wistful…..
…… is probably the best way to describe how I am feeling today, the day that marks the sixth year since Jim died. It also happens to be the birthday of my sister, my brother and my step-dad. Which totally sucked for them 6 years ago. I hope it sucks less now. I’m at a good point in my life, and yet …… …… I miss him. So very much.I’m…
Sick
So, I was feeling really really strong after feeling not so strong. And then I got a stomach bug. And after a week of being stuck at home, semi-helpless, I felt my anxiety creep back in. I don’t get a little bug and just think “Oh, I’ll be fine. It’s just a bug,” I think “I might be just a little sick, or…I might be very sick and will have to go…