With a birthday that occurred on a Sunday this year, I’ve regarded this past week as Birth Week. And it has been a good one. For me, communicating and feeling the good vibes of friends, family members and colleagues is the greatest gift of all. I’ve spent a part of each day thanking those who […]
Widowed Milestones
Considering the Impossible
and Finding Possibility [COMMUNITY: Part 1] You Don’t Move On But you must move ‘with’ you must shake hands with Grief, welcome her in, for she lives with you now. Pull her a chair at the table and offer her comfort. She is not the monster you first thought her […]
Butterfly Fly Away
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. […]
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 […]
Hoot Owl Anthem
With the passing of another year, I strive to comprehend the incidents that have unfolded in the span of the past four years. In 2020, my late husband and I closed on our dream home in a gated community in Southeast Georgia. We enjoyed settling in to our new lives even with the challenges presented […]
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 […]
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. […]
Winter Break
After last night’s tutoring session, we are on Winter break for the next two weeks. As I wrote back in August, this is my first go-around as a tutor. I thought today might be a suitable time to update you. It turns out that I do have some things I can impart to a student […]
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 […]
Overindulgence
If I’m going to write my truth in full here, sometimes that means sharing the uglier side. Many of us have vices. They are not all healthy. I don’t want to condone it or judge it here, only share. Occasionally, I find myself in a situation where I have overindulged in alcohol. Where one drink […]