Last week, the blooming heather in the hills called to me, and I set my feet upon the path to get to it. Around me there was the nutty smell of new mown hay, waiting to be bundled, the sun’s rays filtered through soft layers of cloud, and the vibrant oranges, purples, and reds of autumn’s last flowers in bloom. I watched silently as a rabbit…
Widowed Suddenly
Embracing the Silence
As I write this blog post, I am preparing for a 10 day, silent retreat at a women’s Buddhist retreat centre a few hours south of my home. I will be offline and encouraged to set aside all reading and writing devices for the entire retreat. The thought of this, I must admit, is a bit terrifying. I am well acquainted with being on my own and not…
What A Man Is
I am a strong and fiercely independent woman. I always have been. When I was 18 years old, in 1990, I left my comfy small town of Groton, Massachusetts, to attend college and live in NYC. I wanted to be a performer, actor, comedian, writer, or anything that got me out of that boring and predictable suburban life. I wanted more. So I went out on my…
Back When My Heart Was Pure
In the beginning, in the first edges of my grief, my heart felt like an open wound, and in the midst of the pain and shock of those first few days and months after the death of my husband, there was little I could do to close it. My heart was open to the world. I didn’t have the energy or the wherewithal to shut it down, to protect it, to…
Walking the Path Where the Ghost Cows Live
It is the middle of August, and it feels as if the warmth of summer has left us, though we never really had a summer, here in England, this year. Already the air is ripe with the smell of harvest: the spiky, purple thistle flowers have morphed into white milk pods, their silky seeds floating into the sky with the slightest hint of wind, the sloping…
Words Like Cries
It is a Saturday, mid-morning, and I am driving the Snake Pass, a beautiful, winding road from Glossop to Sheffield, overlooking vistas of patchwork fields and hills painted with purple heather in early bloom. It is one of the few sunny summer days we have had, in Northern England, this year, and part of me wonders why I am going to spend it…
Widows Walk
I am fortunate to have many beautiful family and friends in my life. Today, though, I feel moved to express just how important all my widowed friends are to me. I know I would not be able to walk through my own life now without them. The day Mike died, as we were making all those terrible phone calls, and just after that word “widow” had…
Rootless
This week, I have found myself questioning what I am doing here, in England, several thousand miles from the country of my birth. I came to the UK in 2009, on my own, to work in Social Work, and I met Stan a year and a half after I moved to London. I was working in a difficult, stressful job in south London, when we met, and had considered…
Triggered
The other day I went into Sports Authority looking for something – it’s not a store I need to go to very often but it was one of Mike’s favorites. He was so excited when we heard a big sports store was coming to our little island town all those years ago. As I was walking around I was hit with a flood of memories of being in there with him. I…
Stripped
Last week, I was unable to write for this blog. I had developed a migraine on Sunday, and I was feeling tired and spent. These past few weeks, I have found it difficult to write. It seems I am pouring over the same old themes: sadness, longing, attempts to make myself anew. How many ways can I express it? So I decided to try something…
She is…
She stands alone on her porch gazing up at the night sky remembering all the countless nights in years past she stood there together with her lost love. She remembers how they gaped at the star-filled sky, the Milky Way, the shining moon, here in this remote outback of the world, so far from any big city lights…the excitement they shared over a…
Gone Dancing
I can’t believe Mike is really gone forever. I just can’t wrap my head around that fact. He feels so alive to me in my heart; in my mind’s eye I see him going about his days as he did, his enthusiastic energy always pulsing within my purview. Mike was just one of those people who was…just so full of life. I’ve run into two friends this…