It seems like every day, week, and month there’s an official Awareness Observance for just about every thing under the sun. For instance, as I write we’re in the midst of Spiritual Literacy Month established in 1996 to encourage us to read books with spiritual themes, we are also currently in the middle of “It’s […]
Widowed Therapy
Regrouping After Trauma
Step By Step Professionals who write about trauma these days say that when a person experiences a trauma (small or large) it is important to allow the trauma to “keep moving through” our psyche. Last week I experienced a trauma that bumped into a bigger trauma that looms in my life—Death. Death was present in […]
Ruff Times and Holidays
“The presence and companionship of dogs, the observation of their playful tactics has helped patients on their way back to normal thinking and living.” Captain Wm. Lewis Judy,Founder of National Dog Week (1928) and long time publisher of Dog World Magazine. I realized the other day that as the Saturday Widow’s Voice poster I’d be […]
Dancing with the Scars
In early December of last year, a little peaches and cream ball of fluff entered my lonely life at just the “write time”. The following appeared in Ruff Drafts, the official newsletter of the Dog Writers Association of America (DWAA) an organization on which I serve as a Board Member. It’s a longer read than […]
Waters of Significance
In last Saturday’s post, I shared the continuing process of spreading my late husband’s cremains throughout multiple watery locations. Choosing these meaningful places for this journey has been an important step for me, and others, in the mourning progress and honoring Rich as he’d wished to be. As a watery theme had run […]
Art as a Tool for Healing
An Invitation Making art—giving form to the images that arise in our mind’s eye, our dreams, and our everyday lives—is a form of spiritual practice through which knowledge of ourselves can ripen into wisdom. Pat B. Allen, PhD Art is a Way of Knowing. There is a hidden secret about art that may benefit those […]
The Unconclusive Conclusion
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 […]
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 […]