Something I’ve begun to distinguish since Dave died is clean pain versus dirty pain. I can’t remember the original source of this idea, though I’ve read about the concept several different times. Clean pain is the pain we feel when we lose someone or something we love dearly. It’s the pain we naturally feel when we’re ripped from…
Widowed Emotions
Questions?
Where is…?Who put that there…?When…?Why is……the bottle of brown sauce in the crockery cupboard?Did I put it there… or did John? I don’t remember doing that… but I don’t remember seeing John in the kitchen while I was cooking dinner, either. It must have been me that put the sauce in there, but have no recollection what so ever…
Year Three Fear
I’m heading into the run of second anniversaries that begin in February and run for about 4 months – his surgery; the complications hitting and the roller-coaster of his illness; him dying. Something I’m acutely aware of. In my journey, the big anniversary for me is the March “complications hitting” anniversary. That’s the day from which…
Ambulance
In the hospital, suffering from myocarditis, Dave accidentally pulled the heart pump out of his vein. This meant that he’d have to have a new heart pump inserted. Instead, while waiting to get the new pump, he crashed. That heart pump had been helping his terribly damaged heart keep plugging along and without it his vitals went downhill fast. The…
Journaling through the Emotions
I’ve been going back over a lot of my old journal entries lately and picked one out to share a part of. For some years now I have been doing this inner-child dialogue technique… Basically having a conversation with that deepest, most vulnerable (and sometimes most wounded) part of myself by asking her questions and allowing her to share until I…
Letters from Home
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…
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…