…that annoy me (and drive me to drink).Warning – disorganised tiredness and general whining follows….. Somedays I think being a widow has taught me patience, but there are other days when I realise my fuse is very short and I have no time for pedants and things that make my life harder.I question why, instead of helping to simplify my…
Widowed Suddenly
Four Years…
Four years since you left me.Suddenly.Violently.Bereft.Nobody could possibly begin to understand the soul connection we had. Anam Cara.We two were so closely linked….and yes, I know we are still connected.I have learnt to recognise the signs you send me.I know you are near.I know you miss nothing.I am lucky that intuition comes naturally to…
Clean or Dirty
Something I’ve begun to distinguish since Dave died is clean pain versus dirty pain. I can’t remember the original source of this idea, though I’ve read about the concept several different times. Clean pain is the pain we feel when we lose someone or something we love dearly. It’s the pain we naturally feel when we’re ripped from…
A Beginning in the End
A lot of us talk about various times during this horrible journey where a shift begins to happen. It’s nothing concrete or tangible, it may not even be something we can easily define… all we know is that something has changed in us and the way we view what has happened to us. That is the shift.Since the new year began, I’ve been feeling as…
To Be Changed
Last night just before going to bed, for some reason I felt called to go back through some really old journal entries from the years leading up to when I met Drew. I don’t always pay attention to those little cues, but last night for whatever reason I did. I smiled to read some of the entries about our first days together… about how safe and…
Grieving for Two
After two and a half years of feeling this soul-changing, earth-shattering loss, I just realized something sort of huge. Well, I always knew it, but I just stopped and actually thought about it, and now I am able to put it into words. It is this: I grieve on behalf of my husband more than I grieve for my husband. I hope that makes sense. I…
The Before Me vs….
…. the “Before Me”. We all know that we are changed after the death of our spouse. We are changed because of the death of our spouse and everything that follows in its wake. But how am I different now? How is the “After Janine” different from the “Before Janine”? Let me count the ways …..1. I am less naive. I know, really know, that…
Ambulance
In the hospital, suffering from myocarditis, Dave accidentally pulled the heart pump out of his vein. This meant that he’d have to have a new heart pump inserted. Instead, while waiting to get the new pump, he crashed. That heart pump had been helping his terribly damaged heart keep plugging along and without it his vitals went downhill fast. The…
Journaling through the Emotions
I’ve been going back over a lot of my old journal entries lately and picked one out to share a part of. For some years now I have been doing this inner-child dialogue technique… Basically having a conversation with that deepest, most vulnerable (and sometimes most wounded) part of myself by asking her questions and allowing her to share until I…
Letters from Home
My husband and I used to have those silly magnetic letters on our kitchen refrigerator back in our New Jersey apartment, and we would leave each other cute and often ridiculous or random messages on the fridge like: “I love you Boo”, or “Yankees won”, or “UR cute.” One of his favorite things to spell out for me in colored letters was “Don ‘N…
Things that have Changed
I am sitting here, marvelling at how far I’ve come since March 1, 2010; I am a different person with the same heart. I can now look back and remember the sharp, stabbing grief of that day. The insanity. The weeks and months directly afterward where I alternated between shrieking pain and dense fog; I rocked and cried or I floated…
Birthday
Friday was Dave’s birthday. He would’ve been 41. I met him nearly 20 years ago. These three facts feel impossible. The day I met him feels like yesterday. I will always think of him as the 23 year old I first met. And his birthday keeps showing up to remind me that I’ll soon be older than he ever got to be. He was a sweet, chubby baby. His aunt…