Widow's Voice

It’s in the Eyes~

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Sometimes I torture myself by looking at pictures of myself when I was younger.

Not because getting older bothers me, but because it intrigues me to study them for how I looked before life disintegrated into a cloud of dust around me.

I study the eyes of the young woman who’d just met this super handsome guy wearing BDUs, with a moustache to die for, and I wonder at the power of Love that lit up her features.

I study pictures of Chuck and I on our first weekend away together, still newly involved, and feel the lightness of being.

Look into the eyes of a woman supremely happy-more than happy, really-living life with a man who was the leading man in a true romance…

I love, too, looking at pictures that I took of Chuck, because I know that the smile on his face is for me, the woman he loved, as he looks directly at me holding the camera.

It’s been a struggle since his death, remembering our time together, and I know that this is normal, but Jesus it was horrifying when amnesia about our life together blew into my mind almost the second he took his last breath. It was as if we’d never existed together. As if he’d been a mirage in my life.

He’s so unreal to me now. Our life together is so unreal to me now. Did I once know a man named Chuck Dearing? Was I once the most loved of women? And, if he did exist, and we had a life together, was it just yesterday or was it in another lifetime?

Did Chuck die over 6 years ago, or was it yesterday?

I know that I haven’t lost my mind, but it feels like I have most definitely lost my mind and I’ve been alone forever and that this heaviness in my heart has been there as long as I’ve been alive.

Jesus.

Widowhood is most definitely, most assuredly…not for sissies.

I miss you, D.

 

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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