Australian children have just come back from their 6-week summer holidays. So have their teachers…. The first year after Greg died, I dreaded the Christmas holidays. All those long weeks of just me and the kids. NO trips away (every holiday doubles in price during the holidays as we all know). No will to do more than walk the tracks to the…
Widowed Holidays
Hope
Hope is the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not permanent. ~Mignon McLaughlin It’s a new year and, with that, I’d like to rewind to the beginning years of Michael’s death. I dreaded a new year. One in which he hadn’t lived. He hadn’t existed. A year in which I couldn’t even refer to the year before of him being…
Hello 2014
A new year. Bringing hopes and dreams for a year brighter than the last. I remember the first new year after Greg died. I did not want it to happen. I hated the passage of time. I did not want to welcome a year in which Greg had never lived. Back in Ye Olden Days (ie – before we had children), we had a tradition of going up to a house near a…
New Year’s Resolutions….
…… whatever. I don’t have any resolutions. I wish that I could say that’s because Jim died 6 years ago. But I didn’t make resolutions before that. I tried, for years …… really. But I found that most years, I failed at whatever it was. Maybe I set the bar too high. Most likely I set the bar too high. But one year I just gave them up.For me,…
Paying it Forward
Tomorrow I move onto my second calendar year without Ian. Moving from 2012 to 2013, to a year that was no longer the year I lost him, I found difficult, but got through with a small group of friends. Tonight I move one more digit further away from the 2012 in which he left us. I realised this morning that I will no longer be able to say…
Circle
About a week or so ago, my mom found this great quote from a much older widowed lady who was featured in a photography / interview project on a website called “Humans of New York.” She saved the quote for me because she thought it sounded exactly like something that Don would have said to me, if his death wasn’t sudden, and if he had the chance. It…
I survived….
… Christmas, that is. I won’t lie to you, the week before Christmas, I was not feeling great. The weight of another Christmas without Greg weighed heavily on my mind. I missed him. I know I miss him every day, but last week I really missed him. I missed sitting on the couch and snuggling, watching the lights on the tree flicker. I…
The Ghost Writer….
…… of Christmas Past. I know that most of you out there wish this day was just an ordinary day. Just the 25th day of December, no more, no less.Actually, I know that most of you wish that you could’ve fallen asleep around December 22nd or so and stayed asleep until January 2nd. Or February 15th.I get that.All too well.In honor of all of us,…
A Little Bit of Christmas
So, eight years ago this past Sunday, December 18th, Don Shepherd got down on one knee on a freezing cold night, in front of hundreds of cheering tourists, underneath the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree, and said, among many other things: “Kelley, in the middle of the best city in the world and with all these people watching, at the biggest tree…
Surviving Christmas
I am finding it hard to find any Christmas spirit this year. I have no idea if I have bought the children presents that they will enjoy… just a couple of small gifts to keep up the pretense of Santa. I have not sent a Christmas card in years … they remind me too much of all those funeral “thank you” cards that sat on my dining room table…
Ornamental
Blessings to you, during this difficult time of year for many of us. I’ve handled Christmas pretty well since Ian died. Partly as we’d not really developed/embedded traditions before he passed, partly because I have a very young child who I want to experience and have memories of the childhood magic and joy of the season. So I bring you my…
Turning the Corner
So, it’s the day after Thanksgiving, and I write here on this blog each and every Friday. Except that I don’t. In actuality, in order for the blog to go live on Friday, midnight Pacific time, that means my writing deadline is 3 am on the East Coast, the night before Friday morning. Last night. Now you know all the ins- and -outs of the widowed…