Not much to report from Widow Neff this week. Last week’s post published on Wednesday followed by a positive PCR test arriving to me the day after. By then, I mostly felt better, but the official “symptoms” continue into today, yet another Wednesday, and just five days after the confirmed Covid test. PATIENCE is required […]
Widowed Emotions
“Go Get Yourself A Bigger Problem”
Photos by my friend Jane del Pozo Back in the early 1990s, I worked for a couple of years post-Masters, in a small consulting firm of organisational psychologists in Cambridge. One of my colleagues – let’s call her Terri – was a bullish, no-nonsense Aussie, who has stayed in my mind all these decades, despite […]
Filtering Out the Fiction
Moving from the apartment where I became widowed has had a lot of competing emotions. Taking down the photos that Clayton hung up and seeing just my dog Roan standing in our empty apartment hit me hard. Real life becomes more real in some pretty harsh, unexpected waves and ways. Worn out carpet where Clayton […]
The More Things Change…
My first email of 2022 contained the subject line, “Greetings from Lee.” In her email, Lee apologized for not previously sending along certain linked photographs. Of course, I highly doubted this message was sent to me by Lee, since it’s now going on two years that she died. Additionally, looking at the URL coupled with […]
One of the Best Things
Photos my own these past days So Christmas and New Year have been okay. Better than okay. Moments that were really hard, of course; but more moments that have been really enjoyable. Ben and Megan came back from the Netherlands where they study, and stayed largely at home while they were here. Medjool went back […]
A Flight of Stairs
Almost six years ago and three flights of stairs up, we thought our new apartment in this little beach down was part of Heaven. For 8 months I helped you walk up and down these stairs until up was to hard for the both of us. Four years after you, I stayed in our apartment. […]
“Happy” New Year?
Well, somehow tomorrow marks a new year. If I am being honest, I do not feel cheery or happy with the ring of the new year. I feel like 2021 was just a year of surviving and getting by. My dad’s health took a turn in late December 2020 and since then he has needed 24/7 […]
A STRONG PRESENCE
. . . and a Christmas Story The longer I live the more I realize how different we are as humans. What matters to one is barely a blip on the radar screen to another. What one treasures can be opposite of what another would give their life to protect. My entire life, as long […]
The Magic of the Season
I remember the magic of the holidays when I was younger. Time went by at a much slower pace waiting for that one special night followed by a day of jolly and cheer. Christmas Eve we would spend with my mom’s side of the family surrounded by aunts, uncle, cousins and grandparents. Each year my […]
NEARING YEAR’S END
Noticing the Passing of Time Frost is something that we take notice of when it arrives to our Southern California neighborhood. Many winters come and go without so much as an icy car windshield at year’s end when many places in our hemisphere are covered in snow. It was a balmy April night when he […]
Flowering Unapologetically
Image on Unsplash by Roksolana Zasiadko I am a subscriber to Megan Devine’s weekly and monthly writing prompts. I always read them, even if I don’t often write into them. But this week I want to write into one of the prompts she sent out recently. Even if it made more sense to me last […]
A Change of Address
I’ve lived at my apartment for almost 6 years and alone in it without Clayton for almost 4 years. I am 100% full accepting that I’ve stayed in “our” apartment to press pause on parts of my life. I couldn’t have Clayton back but I could wrap myself up in him through the photos he […]