Pieces of You Photographs and memories All the love you gave to me Somehow it just can’t be true That’s all I’ve left of you In the midst of meal prep, sorting through items while seeking the right tool in a kitchen drawer, I saw a blackened, overused kitchen fork. It immediately took me to […]
Newly Widowed
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 […]
Covid Takes and Gives
History Will Bear Witness History will bear witness to the terrible costs of the Worldwide Pandemic known as Covid-19 in the year 2020. In tallying those costs, nothing can compare to the loss of lives: 627,039 in the USA and 4.16 million worldwide to date. Over four million people–gone. The Covid Pandemic took husbands, wives, […]
Of Butterflies, Puppies, and the Dan Neff Dog
The surprising journey of widowhood. Part of the widowed journey, as I experience it, is having to face new things. Some new things contain the kind of surprises you don’t want to receive. For example, if your partner always took the dog to vet, then the first vet visit on your own might surprise you […]
90 Days
It’s been ninety days without you. When this post publishes it will be exactly 90 days since I walked you to the white van parked in our driveway to see you off. The night was cool, being after midnight, and the kind ushers walked in slow motion as they made their way step by careful […]
Til Death Do Us Part . . . or not
The irony of pledging our lives to one another on Independence Day revealed itself slowly over the years. A powerful love awakened what felt like super powers. Of course we would live a lifetime together, no matter the bets of some who thought otherwise. Dan enjoyed highlighting the benefits of choosing July 4th to marry: […]
Both / And
Both/And thinking [the opposite of either/or thinking] recognizes the folly of assuming that the new will totally supplant the old. Seeing with Both/And eyes recognizes that two opposite realities can be integrated. Adapted from Daniel Burrus at Burrus Research Today marks two months and two weeks since my beloved, Daniel Paul Neff, took his last […]
Missing our Papa on Father’s Day
What happens on Father’s Day for the family whose Papa has passed on to another dimension? Is there a way to connect from afar? When my dad passed away in 1994 I wondered, with my siblings, how we could live in a world where he was missing. Each child whose father–or special person–has passed on […]
FIRST STEPS
Author’s Note: Thank you, Alison, for your warm welcome last week. You will be greatly missed here and I will join others in following you at http://anodysseyoflove.com/ to keep up with your adventures and new endeavors. Hope we meet up somewhere in the future. Thank you for sharing your love for Chuck so beautifully. xo~Kathie […]
The Box (Part Two)
Lee kept her wedding box at the top of her closet, which I had been in the process of reclaiming from her when I found it. I say her wedding box because she was not keeping it for our mutual benefit. I did not know it existed. I opened the lid and looked inside the […]
Betwixt
With the approach of summer and a substantial number of folks now being fully vaccinated, my sense is that at long last life might be “normalizing,” even if the continued use of masks in some quarters serves as a stark reminder that normal life tomorrow could look different. Imagine awakening one fine Spring morning to […]