I am filling in for Amanda today. The current heat wave has knocked out her power! Amanda stay cool (get it?!) and I will try to stay warm! Recently I have had a lot of suicide widows reach out to me on Widow’s Voice and facebook. “I have no one to talk to, I have no one that gets it. I can’t talk about the suicide to my friends or…
Widowed
Another birthday…
…… remembered, but not celebrated. Jim would’ve been 54 today (as I write this it’s Tuesday night). Instead, he’s forever 47. And that sucks. In more ways than one. I hate that his birthday is so close to Christmas …… which is so close to the day he died. This time of the year can be one onslaught after another. And yes, it still brings…
Bridget Jones
I’m on my annual extended-family vacation this week and the Australian summer vacation period is a big time for relaxing with a book (or ten). So I’ve opted to publish a review of the third Bridget Jones instalment that I wrote on my personal blog in October. It was written for a non-widow audience, so is preaching to the converted…
Terrible Relief
Kelley’s post got me thinking. My knee jerk reaction was: what’s wrong with me that I parted with my wedding ring months after Dave died? What’s wrong with me that I don’t long to wear it? How did I let go of that ring? I measured the devotion I had by the way I dealt with my grief. Never helpful. Everyone grieves differently. For a moment I…
Turning Pain into Love
In 2012, when his death was so fresh, I needed to talk. About the pain, the fear, the agony, the anger, the loss, the accident, the future we will not have, the children we won’t raise, the wedding we won’t share… all of it. I wanted to crawl out of my skin with all the pain. I talked and cried almost every single day to someone about my pain. I…
Hope
Hope is the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not permanent. ~Mignon McLaughlin It’s a new year and, with that, I’d like to rewind to the beginning years of Michael’s death. I dreaded a new year. One in which he hadn’t lived. He hadn’t existed. A year in which I couldn’t even refer to the year before of him being…
It’s Gone
The following was written in my personal blog just a few days ago, so those of you who may follow my writing over there, may have already read this. Really wanted to post a shorter version here too, though – because I know that so many of you can relate to the devastation and feelings that this brings up. Nothing has changed. Nothing has been…
Hello 2014
A new year. Bringing hopes and dreams for a year brighter than the last. I remember the first new year after Greg died. I did not want it to happen. I hated the passage of time. I did not want to welcome a year in which Greg had never lived. Back in Ye Olden Days (ie – before we had children), we had a tradition of going up to a house near a…
New Year’s Resolutions….
…… whatever. I don’t have any resolutions. I wish that I could say that’s because Jim died 6 years ago. But I didn’t make resolutions before that. I tried, for years …… really. But I found that most years, I failed at whatever it was. Maybe I set the bar too high. Most likely I set the bar too high. But one year I just gave them up.For me,…
Paying it Forward
Tomorrow I move onto my second calendar year without Ian. Moving from 2012 to 2013, to a year that was no longer the year I lost him, I found difficult, but got through with a small group of friends. Tonight I move one more digit further away from the 2012 in which he left us. I realised this morning that I will no longer be able to say…
Happy
It’s been a long time since I could say without hesitation “I feel happy”. In the time since Dave died, I’ve laughed and enjoyed myself, but always I felt that underlying layer of sadness and shock that dampened everything. It made even laughter a bittersweet act. How could I laugh when he was gone? Lately, though, I’ve felt happy. Not tinged with…
Taking Chances on Life
I’ve had a particularly hard couple of weeks lately. Not only has there been Christmas and the 18 month mark since he died, but throw in a trip to Dallas where we lived together, his younger brother graduating from college, my idiotic attempt to start a pretty strict new diet and workout regimen (beginning a week before Thanksgiving, really…