Author’s Note: Thank you Emma, for the introduction and warm sentiments. I will continue to carry on the Girl Tuesday role for those that are walking this similar path. I look forward to keeping up with your journey and following you at http://www.widowingemptynests.com. Thank you for sharing your story and love with us, you will […]
Widowed Emotions
Camp Widow Squad
Today I traveled home from my third trip to Camp Widow, San Diego. It is so hard to put into words how special this weekend is for me. For me, there is immense comfort in finding other widow(er)s who also lost their husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend/fiancé/person to suicide. Our loss is traumatic in a way that can be […]
Revisiting a Story by the Nasturtiums
On the Eve of Camp Widow San Diego — 2023 It is a joy and a privilege to attend Camp Widow’s 15th Anniversary camp in San Diego this Thursday. A-a-a-a-n-d — I am not packed! This is a revised post from February 2022, offering a vision of hope through the lovely nasturtiums. Studying a […]
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 […]
Prepping For Camp Widow
In two days and 18 hours I will board a plane headed for Camp Widow San Diego! This will be my third camp. I’m so excited to go back and reconnect with my mighty squad of widows. I’m also looking forward to sleeping alone in a hotel room with no small humans demanding snacks. But […]
Widowed Customs: The Ring
Another 4th of July—another wedding anniversary for the books. Dan left on April 15, 2021, so the first anniversary without him came up just three months after his burial. At just over two years of loss, this is my third time to mark our wedding anniversary without him. On this very public holiday in the […]
New Circles
A few weeks ago, my younger boys tried out with a competitive club soccer organization. Even though it’s a club, every kid that wants to join makes a team. Both kids happened to land on teams that have the same coach. Then, because I’m a sucker, I got roped into being the team manager for […]
Grief by Taylor Swift Albums
In the early months after Boris died, I remember a close friend telling me that her husband sometimes will have a hard time remembering if a certain song was out or a current event had occurred before or after his sister died. It had been many years since her death, but I remember thinking how […]
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 […]
Readying for Another Sweep
I have been getting the itch to start purging again. The first time I got rid of anything it was about 5 months after Tony died. I went through his clothes because it was something I knew. Heck, I probably purchased 75% of his wardrobe! I didn’t need to question what something was worth, where […]
Works-in-Progress
Last Friday I flew home from New York State after bringing my mother north from Georgia and attending the Military Service and interment for my father who passed in late April. Upon my return, it occurred to me that for the first time in my adult life, I resided in a place with not a […]
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 […]