A repost! Last week I attended what I thought was my first funeral since Erik’s funeral. As I was driving up this cemetery hill something looked all too familiar. Then the flashback came. My cousin and I had driven up a similar hill for another funeral just a little over a month after Erik’s passing. […]
Widowed Memories
One Thousand Days
Today marks 1,000 days since Tony died. 999 days I’ve woken up as a widow. I have a countdown app on my phone. The kind most people use to enter fun things, like upcoming vacations or special events. I do use it for those things, but awhile back I also discovered that it would count […]
Tripping Around the Sun
I’m posting this on what I call Birth Eve, the day before my birthday. It’s been a busy time on many fronts leading up to the “Big Day”. Last week I saw my first snow while visiting family in Upstate New York. I think it had been five years since I’d last experienced that cold […]
Midnight Kisses
Last week the kids and I were on our annual holiday vacation. Since Tony’s death, I have taken the kids to Disney World, Beaches Jamaica, and now Xcaret Mexico over the holiday break. There are a variety of reasons vacationing this time of year works for us. The kids are out of school, I am […]
Marking Time
Through Numbers This is my 85th blog post as a widow. By 71 years + 230 days, time marked 32 years since Dan’s first heart attack at age 39. When he died, we had been married for 18,913 days (50 years + 9 months) when no one thought these two crazy kids would make it […]
‘Tis the Tangled Lights
And there goes the second December without Erik. This past week has been a whirlwind of emotions. December is always such a hard time. The holiday season starts with our wedding anniversary on the eve of Christmas Eve. This second year of celebrating the holidays without Erik hit me harder than I had expected. It […]
Christmas Past
There are certain days of the year we use to mark the passage of time. After losing someone that time either falls into the before or after loss category. I don’t know if it was always that way for me, but Christmas is now one of those days. Today marks our third Christmas without Tony. […]
The Natural Order of Things
Here we are a day before Christmas eve, and up until now, I hadn’t been inspired to write a new post. Recently I’d written about the passing of Lonnie DuPont (aka Callie Smith Grant) in August of this year. Lonnie was a Senior Acquisitions Editor at the Revell-Baker Publishing Group and I was honored to […]
The Holidays
Holiday time is often a real bummer when you’ve lost your spouse. Holidays seem to shine a brighter light on the fact that there is a missing person. When I first met Mario, he had grown to hate Christmas. I think he felt like after his parents divorced, there was just a lot of tension […]
When Things Go Wrong
in Grief and Life I love this image. One folder looks like tax receipts; another could be love letters. Bookends of life. When things go wrong in grief it forms a layer on top of the grief itself. We are carrying one thing and then, suddenly, there is another layer on top (and often another […]
Christmas Cheer “Condensed”
Awaiting stormy East Coast weather and settling in to write my weekly Post. I continue to coordinate with family at a distance as my mom faces post stroke challenges up in New York State which has been my recent primary focus. I often remind those who are assisting us that my mom lost her husband […]
The St. Louis Blues
My mother and my sister died in December. Meanwhile, my dad was born in December. He also nearly died during December, and easily could have, except, being strong and stubborn to the end, he held onto life for two days in January. My dead family tugs at my memory, though never more so than in […]