Widow's Voice

Heart and Soul

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When your heart and soul are just so tired, 5 years in.

Not for any particular reason, really.

Everything is pretty much the same as it’s always been.

Even when life is routine, my spirit is tired. And, yes, life on the road can be routine.

Tired from doing and being and all the stuff that comes from living a life that is so achingly and shockingly different from the life that was going to be.

Widowing.

How many of us just get out there and do what life requires? How many of us go beyond that requirement and strive to truly create a life for ourselves, alongside all the grief and devastation?

And we do, by god. But, Jesus, it’s exhausting.

To me, anyways.

Underlying all the doing and creating and self-care and just…everything….is the overriding knowing that I’ll never see him again, and I ache all over with that knowing.

Sort of like a continual flu.

And you just learn to live with it.

And live above it and around it and with it.

And some days are pretty good, even with it.

It’s just always fucking there.

I haven’t figured out the process for feeling joy again. Or, never mind joy…how about just feeling a sense of peace again? Feeling that all is right with the world again?

My world tilted on April 21, 2013, and it’s just never righted itself.

It’s a constant balancing act now….this life.

About Alison Miller

My beloved husband Chuck died while we were full timing on the road. We’d rented a condo for our stay in southern CA, and I had to leave 3 weeks after his death. All I knew at that time was that I had to find a way to continue traveling on my own, because settling down without him made me break into a cold sweat. I knew that the only place I’d find any connection to Chuck again was out on the roads we’d been traveling for our last 4 years together. I knew nobody out on the road, I knew grief was a great isolator, and I knew I had to change the way I traveled without him, to make it more emotionally bearable for me. So I bought a new car, had a shade of pink customized for it, bought a tiny trailer and painted the trim in pink, learned how to tow and camp, and set out alone. My anxiety was through the roof, and all I knew to trust was the Love that Chuck left behind for me. I found Soaring Spirits early on, thank god, and the connections I made through SS helped ground me to some extent. I needed to know that other widow/ers were out there in my world, because I felt so disoriented and dislocated. Through Soaring Spirits, as the miles added up, my rig taking me north, south, east and west, I found community. I found sanity…or at least I learned that if I was bat shit crazy, I was in good company, and realizing that ultimately saved my sanity. PinkMagic, my rig, is covered with hundreds of names of loved ones sent to me by my widowed community, and I know it isn’t visible to the naked eye, but I’ll let you in on a secret…she actually illuminates Love as I drive down the many roads in our country, and I can see it through my side view mirror. Love does, indeed, live on~

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