It’s been 7 shorts weeks since I lost my Partner of 4 yrs. – Clayton, or as my family calls him “Tin”. Right now I am sitting, ironically, at the Atlanta airport on a layover to go home to Boston for my cousin’s wedding. Tin and I met in Atlanta and left the city to move to the beach, get married and make a life. Everyone has been…
Newly Widowed
Today I am Ok But Not Everyday
Usually I would write a blog post separate from my personal blog for Widows Voice. However this week has been a rough one, we all have them. Rather than write a totally new post I want to share a post I wrote earlier in the week that shows the dark side of grief. The side that most feel they need to hide. I want to tell you, it’s ok to not be ok!…
Home Is Where The Heart Is
I sat in the car alone, across the street from the vacant house we once called home. The house was the only one in the street without lights on. I hoped none of the neighbours would notice me parked and no one did. I sat in silence reminiscing on sweet memories of us taking evening walks under the stars. I imagined we were teenagers again, lying on…
The Wave
You know the one. That wave of emotion that overcomes us, drowns us, in that rush of remembering all at once, what our reality is now… I still remember (how could I ever forget?) in the first days and weeks after Mike died, waking up before the sun and lying there trying to grasp that he wasn’t here anymore…dragging myself out of bed,…
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…
Changes and Things
We all arrive at that time after our loved one dies where we look around and see what remains. What remains of a person who filled our lives in one way or another or so completely that we look at their physical belongings and are struck with disbelief that this is it. The sum of their existence. My husband and I specialized in not being…
What grief is
Most people have heard about the so-called five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – modeled by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book On Death and Dying. Even then, she clarified that these are not the only emotions felt during the grieving process, nor do they always appear in this order. It is now…
Back to Basics
It still shocks me how totally ignorant I was about the grieving process before having to go through it myself. I’ve been at this for ten months, as of today, and I still don’t really understand it. All I know is one minute I can be laughing at a joke; or smiling at strangers as I walk down the street; or excitedly making plans for a holiday; or…
A Widowed Status
Today I changed my relationship status on Facebook from “married” to “widowed”. I have been staring at that line on the page for many long months now. For whatever strange reason, it has given me great comfort to see it posted this way. Facebook may be a silly, meaningless network in many respects, but that status was still not something I could…
Seeing Strength
Chuck’s first anniversary just passed. We had a remembrance for him and danced for the love he left behind for all of us. But I also needed, somehow, to mark this past year in a very personal way that was about me and who I am now and who I’m becoming. Who I want to be for the rest of my life. Thinking about it became a spiritual mediation…
Thankful ……
…… is not something I have felt a lot these past almost-6 years. I mean, I’ve felt it for a few things, like my children, my family and friends who were there for me when I really needed them. But it was beyond difficult to feel thankful, while at the same time not believing that Jim was dead. But this year …… this year is different. These…
I’ve Met The Most Amazing People ……
This is a post I wrote on my blog ten months after Jim died. I thought that I’d share it with you today. I don’t go back and read most of my posts. I don’t like re-visiting that “cave”. Especially those days where that cold, inky blackness totally engulfed me, filled every pore of my body and threatened to completely suffocate me. But once…