While writing this blog, I was forced to revisit and relive more than just my widowed walk. I dove back in time through many memories I had forgotten or hidden. In reflecting back, how ironic was it that I rushed through the four years of high school and the four years of college only now […]
Widowed Therapy
You Say It’s Your Birthday
In my first posting to this site back in the early winter of 2021 (February 4, 2021), entitled “Please allow me to introduce myself,” I described two of the existential issues I had to confront during the early days following Lee’s death: “So I was left to ponder the BIG QUESTIONS: Am I destined to […]
No more life lessons, please.
I saw this TikTok the other day that made me go: “YES” (it was one of those that I repost on Instagram because I do not fully understand TikTok). In case you don’t want to watch it, the soundbite says, “I don’t want to learn any more life lessons! My character is developed! Go away!” […]
Strategies for life
and hope . . . Looking out my window before dawn I witness evidence of surviving grief. Abstract but authentic proof of something deep inside that insists upon living fully alive. Twinkle lights. Twinkle lights bordering the walls of a secret garden. In the Year of our Lord, two thousand twenty one […]
Return to Therapy
Tomorrow I will be returning to therapy after several months “off”. It feels like good timing, but I wonder how it will be different this time around. I started going to therapy shortly after Boris was hospitalized for suicidal ideation for the first time, in June 2017. We also saw a couples therapist for several […]
Grief’s Gaslighting Guilt
“Why was I the one to live and not him?” “Did I do enough when he was sick?” “But if only I had done more then maybe, just maybe, he’d still be alive.” These are all statement I have said to myself about Clayton’s death. These are all statements that I have heard other widowed […]
The Grief Guard
Terrible things happen to people every single day but not everyone experiences terrible things. Some get to float through life without fear, loss or a bigger view of the world. Lucky maybe? However, true gratitude often comes from true grief. There’s a mindset now that any inconvenience is a huge struggle and so many are […]
Sometimes…
Sometimes when I come to reflect on what to write about each week, I just know. I know – yes – THIS is the incident, the thought, the feeling, the reflection, the conversation, the insight, the piece of wisdom that LANDED in my marrow. THIS is the poem, the quote, the text. THIS is the […]
Reflecting on Early Days of Grief
I am realizing that I am now far enough out from my loss to have some perspective on my behaviors and reactions when I was only hours, days, weeks, and months out from it. Isn’t it weird how much we forget and the parts we remember? And I wonder how much of it I remember […]
In Conversation with Madiba
Main image by Ashim d’Silva on Unsplash Some of the more woo-woo stuff I get up to is “Journey work” (The Journey®). I first came across Brandon Bays, and her book, “The Journey”, in Autumn 2009, and fell in love with it. Over the next few years, I attended about 30 days – possibly more – […]
Reel Therapy = Good Medicine
What is Reel Therapy? Gary Solomon’s popular book of the same name, published originally in 2001 and again in 2015, suggests that movies can be a therapeutic tool for our lives. A friend of mine gave me this book a long time ago and I pulled it out recently with an instinct that it might be […]
Crying Feels Different Now
Lately I’ve Been Thinking About Tears . . . . . . feeling them stream down my face and having the sensation that my tears are somehow different now. Rather than tears, they feel like mountain streams with inadequate dams to hold them in place. The tears come without warning and they flow in a […]