My siblings and I are renovating my Mom’s family home in the Philippines. Our Aunt passed away last year, and left her estate to the three of us (she and my Mom were the only siblings, and my Aunt had no children). We are in the long process of renovating the home. I was only […]
Widowed Memories
Livin’ On a Prayer
I spent a good portion of this past week at my now unoccupied home in Georgia. It’s up for sale and I continue to clean out the garages. The “downside” of a third garage is that there is more opportunity to store and thus hang on to items. It’s a museum of memories, a curated […]
Hi, My Name is Liliana…
THE MORNING I WALKED INTO A GRIEF SUPPORT GROUP I sat there, in my car, for what felt like an eternity. It was a cold, overcast Thursday morning in mid-February 2024, just like in the movies. I drove one hour to a city in Virginia to attend a Loss of Spouse Grief Share support Group, […]
Reminiscing … amongst the guilt and the quiet
2025 was a hard year. Really hard. Started that year with my own health scare while Jim’s issues began to escalate. So many doctors, scans, xrays, labs for both of us. Things changed drastically for Jim in May and then I got shingles (but I did get good news on my scare, so that was […]
Learning About Moving Forward from The Gilmore Girls
I love the Gilmore Girls, which originally aired from 2000 – 2007, then was revived by Netflix in a 4 episode series in 2016. The revived episodes follows the current lives of the 3 main characters (daughter, mother, and grandmother) 9 years after the original series ended. I loved most of the revived episodes. I […]
The Grass Still Grows
Mario absolutely hated yard work of any sort. He’s always said he hated it because he was “forced” to do it when he was younger. He was also just incredibly lazy when it came to manual labor. When we bought the house, the previous owner left what was, at the time, a practically new John […]
Shout Out To Our PETS Who Saved Us
I came across an instagram post that talked about why a PET might be the only thing that pulls you forward after a devastating loss (when nothing and nobody else can reach you). It was an amazing post (I will try to figure out how to link it…) and it ends with the statement, “Pets […]
Finding My Gold Mettle
Two years ago today, my mom passed in New York while I was enroute to see her from Florida. She’d suffered a stroke three months earlier in November, just seven months after the passing of my father. She passed peacefully in the presence of family. She also passed knowing of the “bold” move from my […]
The Fool
Mario was a very talented and highly creative artist. Out of all of the visual art he created in his lifetime, none was such an undertaking and reached as many people as his tarot deck. It started like many of his personal illustration projects, as a stand alone “character” that came straight from his imagination […]
It’s in the Numbers
Three is most definitely “my” number … or 33 … or 333. Vern, Jeremy and I were a family of three. Vern, Jeremy and I were each 33 years old when our fathers died. After Vern died, I began waking at 3:33 each morning for months. I don’t know why I started waking at […]
Time of Your Life
Lynn was born in Providence, Rhode Island, into a large Italian family, with heavy Massachusetts / New England accents, were devout Catholics and Red Sox fans, and – New England Patriots fans. I just came from my friends’ annual 2026 Super Bowl party, where the Patriots played (and lost horribly to) the Seahawks. I was […]
Trying to Reframe February
4 days from now it will make 5 full years since Mario made his grand exit from this life. It’s absolutely nuts to me how fast those 5 years went by. And about February … It’s not like every February of my life has been awful, but there have been some big, awful events that […]