Father’s day around our house was never a big production. I was usually the first to wake up in the house on any given day, creep downstairs, make myself some coffee, and watch or read the news until everyone else started stirring. I preferred it to be that way. I didn’t relish any extra attention placed upon me. I appreciated every…
Widowed Holidays
A Recipe for Life after Loss
So here we are again, at yet another holiday in the “after” life… only this one for me is very different. Firstly, I’m in Ohio, not Texas. Mike, Shelby and I are up early. The two of them are in the kitchen starting to cook up a feast for Easter while I write this. In about 5 hours, Mike’s family will be over and we will be doing a whole…
Valentine’s for all Kinds
So this is my first Valentine’s Day since Drew died that I am celebrating with a man. That’s big. It’s been 3 years now. In those years since he died, I have celebrated with my best friend. Each year, I drove up to Dallas and we would go out somewhere nice, me and her, and sometimes her Mom and another girlfriend or two. Together we would…
Not Alone and Lonely
Even when I’m not alone at the end of the day, I’m still lonely for Mike. His space can just never be filled. I wrote that line weeks ago but couldn’t finish anything with it. I think because it seemed like a complete thought; that one sentence summed it up for me in so many ways. But since I’ve been back from my holiday travels and looking…
Happy New Year
I generally try to write my posts in advance, which gives me a bit of time to pore over them and change things up here and there before it goes public. This week, I did just that, writing a post about the five year anniversary of Megan’s lung transplant, which is Wednesday, the 6th, and what it meant to me. Then, at the eleventh hour, I…
The Last Straggler
It was still dark when I stepped outside the Holiday Inn near the Los Angeles airport where the airline had been forced to put me up after a snarl of delays and cancellations across the country left me unable to make my connection back to Hawaii. It was the final leg in a long day and a half of travel and I felt bleary and grungy, having spent the…
Hopefully, in Time
So another Christmas has passed us by, my third without my husband. Initially, I felt like this one was going to be a bit easier than my past two, and I guess in some ways it was. However despite enjoying the festive build-up, the Christmas parties, house-decorating and gift-buying, the heaviness in my heart on Christmas day was unavoidable. A…
Sadness and Sugarplums
Here’s the sucky thing about being widowed. Well, one of the many sucky things about it anyway. Holidays will always be hard. They will always be tarnished with lost love and that empty chair at the table. There is just no getting around it, and it doesn’t matter how long it’s been. I’ve been thinking about it a lot this year – my third since Mike…
You Find What Works
So, today, December 18th, is the 10 year anniversary of my husband Don asking me to marry him, on a 23 degree windy Sunday evening, exactly one week before Christmas. Knowing my obsession with the Christmas holiday and the the entire season, he took me to the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree, got down on one knee in front of hundreds of total…
An Empty Ritual
My Christmas tree is up. It nearly didn’t happen. Again. I had that moment where I didn’t see the point, with the same questions I’ve asked myself for the preview two years since he passed. I thought ‘I live alone, I won’t even be here on Christmas day – I’ll be at my sister’s house. It’s so depressing to decorate a tree on your own, why…
Holiday Spirits
In Zoar, Ohio, there is a tree farm that allows you to cut your own Christmas trees. Shelby, Megan, and I had been here a few times to shuffle through the snow, walking around so many firs, pines, and spruces, to pick the perfect specimen for our living room. Once located, I would proceed to lie on the ground and begin sawing. A few seconds…
No Pie for Me, Thanks
Somehow, my computer erased the post I’d been working on this week. I am NOT grateful for that. Grrrrr. But what I’d planned to say will probably not come as a surprise. It’s Thanksgiving again and it’s just not an easy time for us widowed folk. No matter what else lovely we find in our lives in the strange after-world, it is painful to…