This weekend has been amazing. Challenging, scary, exhausting, sweet, beautiful, silly, and bursting at the seams with love. Mike and Shelby have been here now for 3 days and this afternoon they head home back to Ohio. I can scarcely even put into words how amazing and terrifying all this has been. After countless hours of Skype calls – to meet her…
Widowed
The Anger isn’t as Important as the Love
Last weekend I attended the wedding of one of my husband’s closest friends. This happened to fall on the second anniversary of his funeral, and a week after his anniversary. I always knew it was going to be a difficult time. I knew it would hurt and bring up all kinds of triggers, sad thoughts and memories. But somehow, despite knowing…
Widows Walk
I am fortunate to have many beautiful family and friends in my life. Today, though, I feel moved to express just how important all my widowed friends are to me. I know I would not be able to walk through my own life now without them. The day Mike died, as we were making all those terrible phone calls, and just after that word “widow” had…
Decade
Thursday, August 6th, would have been Megan and I’s 10th wedding anniversary. A full decade. When I sit quietly to reflect on this, I suppose it would be a fitting end to the gauntlet I’ve been running the past few weeks. After a few months of relatively no significant milestones; her birthday, a trip to Myrtle Beach to spread her ashes,…
Rootless
This week, I have found myself questioning what I am doing here, in England, several thousand miles from the country of my birth. I came to the UK in 2009, on my own, to work in Social Work, and I met Stan a year and a half after I moved to London. I was working in a difficult, stressful job in south London, when we met, and had considered…
Grieving the Grief Years
I had an all-out breakdown a few days ago. The kind I haven’t had in at least a year. I am chocking it up partly to hormones and the damned full moon, but also to everything else going on. Nothing is settled in my life. Most of the time I am used to this, and I ride the waves well. But sometimes it piles up. My career as an artist is sort of like…
Widow Bingo
Yesterday I had one of those encounters with people who REALLY don’t know what to say to a widow. You know the type, they rattle off every cliche in the book with very little understanding of what they’re actually talking about. Furthermore, they usually have zero ability to pick up on the fact that the words of sympathy and wisdom they are…
Triggered
The other day I went into Sports Authority looking for something – it’s not a store I need to go to very often but it was one of Mike’s favorites. He was so excited when we heard a big sports store was coming to our little island town all those years ago. As I was walking around I was hit with a flood of memories of being in there with him. I…
Compromise and Guilt
Photo: Circus skills class As this pregnancy draws closer to the end, I’ve found myself thinking about how different John’s early childhood’s been from what Ian and I had wanted – particularly what I’ve done and how I’ve engaged with John as a mother. We all have grand plans of the childhood we hope to give our kids. Play…
Stripped
Last week, I was unable to write for this blog. I had developed a migraine on Sunday, and I was feeling tired and spent. These past few weeks, I have found it difficult to write. It seems I am pouring over the same old themes: sadness, longing, attempts to make myself anew. How many ways can I express it? So I decided to try something…
Start Where You Are
I’m feeling a bit worn down today. I’ve been trying hard the past few weeks to keep a new schedule and really buckle down on getting work done. Working for myself has been the hardest possible thing I could have added to my life these past few years since he died. It never seems to get any easier… unlike the grief, I don’t know that it’ll ever…
An Unexpected Reason to Smile
Yesterday marked the two year anniversary of the day I lost my husband to depression. It’s the hardest day of the year for me. I miss him always and there are obviously times that are harder than others, like our wedding anniversary, Christmas and birthdays. However while those days bring sadness, it’s his death anniversary that has me…