Tomorrow, the day after this posting, marks the first anniversary of my beloved husband’s death. I can hardly believe it is true. One year. It feels like yesterday. It feels like a lifetime ago. So much has changed since he died. I have done many things, in spite of my crushing grief. I have visited my home neighbourhood in Indiana, and sat with…
Widowed Suddenly
What About Don?
It is now 3 years and almost 11 months (next week)since my beautiful husband left for work and never came home. In that time, I have (and still do) been to grief counseling weekly, tried many different widowed support groups, become a member of several online and in-person groups for widowed people, found support through Soaring Spirits and have…
The Musician: Part I
I’m going to tell you a story. It is an intensely personal one; one I haven’t felt open to sharing until now. But it has persisted at knocking at my brain, and I finally feel ready to let it out. So here goes. And since it is so long for a blog, I will be dividing it into several parts. The Musician: Part I Life after death is a…
As Memories Fade
Today is the first day of June, and eight days from the first anniversary of my beloved husband’s sudden death. While last year, at this time, England was sweltering under a heat wave, the temperature has barely climbed above 55F (13C) this spring. I check the weather forecast obsessively, grasping for some sign of a sliver of warmth. I want to…
The Knowing
When you lose your beautiful husband to sudden and shocking death at age 39, just four years into your happy and flourishing marriage, one of the biggest things you are left with is something that I call “the knowing.” What is the knowing? It is having the knowledge about a whole host of things regarding life and death, that your previous self had…
Where are you?
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, because it never changes: Mike is ALWAYS on my mind. He doesn’t go away when I’m working, when I’m busy, when I’m cleaning or shopping, when I’m hanging out with friends old or new, when I’m listening to music or watching a movie…he doesn’t go away even when I’m thinking of my…
He knew. This too, shall pass.
When my husband and I were ‘new’, and so full of love for each other, he would caution me that this aspect of our relationship, the euphoria and the intensity, would change. “It won’t always feel like this,” he would say. Extremist that I am, my heart opened and softened by his attentiveness, I did not believe it for a moment. I had found,…
Life Piles Up
It is the middle of May, now, and we are moving toward the anniversary of your death. Sunday, May 24th, is the day the police came to tell us they had found your son, dead, in his flat. I remember that moment as if it happened yesterday. It was a Saturday afternoon, and we had not long returned from our weekly shop. We were relaxing on the sofa,…
Things in Common
This might sound kind of silly or stupid or not at all important in the grand scheme of things related to losing one’s life partner to death – but just bear with me, if you don’t mind. It’s how I’ve been feeling lately, and I feel the need to get these thoughts out. There are a lot of things that my husband and I had in common. A lot of things.
Time Spent
Seriously there are just not enough hours in the day. And then when I think about it, there aren’t enough days in the year, or years in a life. There’s always so much to do…so much stuff to deal with, bills to be paid, shopping and work to do…I can’t remember being this busy when Mike was still alive, at least after we closed our…
Nero’s Cry
This week, on an animal sanctuary in Southern Spain, I am surrounded by rock, and the nude, bare earth echoes the inner emptiness I feel. In England, all that green and growing doesn’t match my insides. Here, this rock, this heat, this rugged blend of pine and desert wildflower, poking up from parched earth, speaks to my spirit. Here, amongst this…
My Two Mother’s Day
I have struggled with Mother’s Day all my life. I lost my own mother when I was nine, many of you know. I don’t really remember my father knowing what to do with that day anymore afterwards. We had no other family around to celebrate, and so it just kind of became a non-holiday in our house. I sometimes wish we had continued to make it about her -…