at Camp Widow San Diego: Keynote 2023 There is one talk that most everyone attends on Saturday morning of Camp Widow: The Keynote Speech. I’m sure there are some exceptions, but very few since all the latecomers have arrived by then and it is one of a few talks that finds all of us in […]
Widowed
Last Parent Standing
I am not a single parent. I am a solo parent. It was only a few months after Erik’s passing that I was out of town. Everything during this time was still painful. Waking up, breathing, pretending to smile, existing – it was all so painful. I was on my way to the airport to […]
Camping Without Him
This weekend the kids and I embarked on another first without Tony. Two years and three months after his passing I accepted an invitation to go on a camping float trip. Tony loved the outdoors and for him all the prep work to camp was worth the effort. I went along for the ride because […]
It’s Hard Being Widowed
Let me count the ways. Inspired by Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem, How Do I Love Thee? written for her husband Robert Browning-1850. The depth and breadth and height of my love matches the depth, breadth and height of my grief; my soul finds you missing, again and again. …I am thinking today of my […]
And the story changed forever…
Author’s Note: Thank you Emma, for the introduction and warm sentiments. I will continue to carry on the Girl Tuesday role for those that are walking this similar path. I look forward to keeping up with your journey and following you at http://www.widowingemptynests.com. Thank you for sharing your story and love with us, you will […]
Grief Thoughts of the Week
This week, I have a lot floating in my head. And I don’t feel like I have enough to really say about any of it to make a full post. Or, maybe some of it just feels too hard to write about right now. So, I thought I’d just note all of my grief/Boris thoughts […]
Revisiting a Story by the Nasturtiums
On the Eve of Camp Widow San Diego — 2023 It is a joy and a privilege to attend Camp Widow’s 15th Anniversary camp in San Diego this Thursday. A-a-a-a-n-d — I am not packed! This is a revised post from February 2022, offering a vision of hope through the lovely nasturtiums. Studying a […]
Endings, endings, endings everywhere
Main image by Ben Wicks on Unsplash One of my favourite “change” models (and I know quite a few) is that of Bill Bridges – and crucially, it’s called “Transitions”. I love this man’s work for so many reasons – not least because I trained for my first marathon, back in 1997, with his daughter […]
Widowed Customs: The Ring
Another 4th of July—another wedding anniversary for the books. Dan left on April 15, 2021, so the first anniversary without him came up just three months after his burial. At just over two years of loss, this is my third time to mark our wedding anniversary without him. On this very public holiday in the […]
Four Years – p l e a s e let him be right
Photo my own Most of my death and dying, and grief and loss reading, has been in English. While my French is “fluent for a Brit”, it’s nowhere close to perfect, and by golly does grief take a cognitive toll. I don’t often willingly pick up a book in French – much less an “academic” […]
Thoughts on Time: Night
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a strange relationship with time. I see time as a formidable adversary; time surely sees me as troublesome or unmanageable. In my mind I imagine a cartoon with a tiny me looking up at a huge clock saying, “You’re not the boss of me!” Time and […]
The trickiness of “How Are You?”
Image by Markus Spiske on Unsplash Yesterday, a fellow widbud, a woman I have never met but who someone connected with me, and who lost her husband just before Christmas 2022 after a very short illness, wrote the note below. I responded to her with both sharing some of my recent writing on this very […]