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 […]
Widowed Emotions
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 […]
Healing Support Tools: Widowed Peeps
What kind of support do widowed people need? Many people are familiar with the five stages of grief, but mourning a loved one rarely happens in a clear or predictable manner. You might cycle repeatedly through different emotions, or you may feel everything at once. Every widow or widower processes grief in their own way […]
Time After Time After Time After Time
Photos my own This is – and will continue to be – a weekend full of experiments. A lot of my life is still versions of experimentation, if not in the ways it was immediately post-loss(es) when even just venturing out of the front door and heading to the shops felt like an experiment. This […]
Another One Down
Last week I was just feeling off. I didn’t go to my workout class once. All I wanted to do was eat chocolate, french fries, and curl up to escape into the fantasy saga I’m reading. It took me until Wednesday to realize it was probably in part because I was approaching our third Father’s […]
Press “send” for instant panic
Main image by Melanie Wasser on Unsplash Last Sunday, after I had arrived in Milos in the early morning but still too late to join the other intrepid swimmers for all day open-water swimming, I just pootled around. It was a blissfully leisurely day. I enjoyed a second breakfast, unpacked my belongings, had two short […]
Undercurrent of Fear
Fear isn’t always something we always talk about with widowhood. Losing Tony to suicide has put an undercurrent of fear beneath all of us who held him dear. This isn’t to say that we live our lives in constant fear, but it creeps out faster for us. When I call my mom at a weird […]
Urning Places in Our Hearts
Tomorrow my mother and I will travel to Upstate New York where my father’s cremains will be interred at the Gerald B. H. Solomon Saratoga National Cemetery during a private service next week. My late husband Rich’s cremains rest in Jacksonville National Cemetery (FL), a beautiful peaceful spot. It was a place initially intended […]
Texts.
Sometimes I do what I call “pressing the bruise” and look at something or do something that I know will trigger my grief or feel sad. This week, I did one of those things and I read through saved text messages with Boris. And yeah, it did hurt. Especially the messages where I was angry […]