There are literally 45 minutes remaining in Christmas Day 2025 as I begin to write this post. Having just spent time on a variety of sites for the widowed on Social Media, many commenters were counting down the minutes and hours for the day to be over. Many more relayed how they’d dreaded the days […]
Widowed Milestones
Approaching Year’s End
Closing Down 2025 Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. My feeling? Pretty chill, actually. I’m saving my present wrapping for tomorrow after church. We draw names, so only one special person’s presents require wrap. No party happening here, so no busy prep. I plan to sit by my brightly lit tree to wrap my gifts and then […]
On the Scent of Home
Four years ago December 9th, I adopted an adorable Maltese-mix puppy out in San Diego. I’ve written before about Quint’s arrival in my life just seven weeks after Rich’s passing. Quint, named for Robert Shaw’s character in JAWS, began his life on the very same day Rich entered the ICU beginning what would become the […]
Bringing Our Person Into the Holidays
Traditions, Rituals, and Memory Making Where do we begin? How does one start a new tradition or ritual for one’s self or for a family? How does making memories help? As holidays appear and then move on, how do we fill the empty place where our person is missing? GRIEF I had my own […]
Moving Parts
As we are just about through the first week of December, I realize that this is the third Christmas spent here in Old Florida. For those who may not know, I moved here two years after the passing of my husband, Rich. I was content in the home in Southeast Georgia that Rich and I […]
The Widowed
Wedding rings on or off. Belief in an after-life, or not. Belief that our person is near, or fiercely shouting “No! They are gone!” Some of us move quickly toward another relationship to fill the void. Some of us believe they are present in a new way and hang with them daily through […]
Passing Holiday Milestones to Better Days Ahead
Just a few days ago, an archived Facebook photo from 2021 that I’d posted the Thanksgiving weekend four weeks after Rich’s passing, appeared in my Feed. At that time, my elderly mother had come to stay with me and although I truly wasn’t into holiday decorating, for her sake, I did. That memory made […]
The Immeasurable Power of Gratitude
“Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.” –Melody Beattie Gratitude snuck up on me today. Gratitude is a wily beast! It captured me in a google search and surrounded me in its giant warm hug. It came to me through a poem from Melody […]
The Best Dog I Never Needed
When I “ran off” to my new life in rural Northeast Central Florida in September 2023, the last thing I needed in my life was a new dog. As I’ve written before in previous Widow’s Voice posts, however, i think that dogs seem to enter our lives often when we don’t even know how […]
Getting into The Write Spirit
Last week I wrote about being inspired by my trip up North to New England for a visit with family. I relayed about how thrilling it was to tour the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts and my visit to a gallery in town with some beautiful landscapes by local artists and how I wanted […]
Season of Fall
Season of Dying “In Asian mysticism and Chinese medicine, Autumn is considered the season of Grief. While summer is associated with the emotion of joy, autumn is associated with both courage and sadness. If you are grieving, you can probably feel the truth of that association for yourself, because, in Autumn, things are dying.” — […]
Timelines
While watching tv I saw an ad for a sitcom about marriage. They were making a joke about how long after death they had to wait to find a new partner. He told her she had to wait half the time they were married, then she quipped that he wouldn’t wait. […]