• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
Widow's Voice

Widow's Voice

  • Soaring Spirits
  • Donate
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • YouTube
  • Home
  • Blog
  • Categories
  • Authors
    • Kelley Lynn
    • Emily Vielhauer
    • Emma Pearson
    • Kathie Neff
    • Gary Ravitz
    • Victoria Helmly
    • Lisa Begin-Kruysman

It’s Not About the Roses

Posted on: February 14, 2023 | Posted by: Emma Pearson

Image by Yoksel on Unsplash

It’s Valentine’s Day already in some parts of the world.

I know that the date fills a number of my fellow widbuds with Horror.

Or Grief.

Or Sadness.

Or Resentment.

There’s such “noise” around Valentine’s day in (at least Anglophone) parts of the world – it’s one of those many “Hallmark reminders” that your life doesn’t fit the conventional norm. (Even if it never did, it did just a bit more “before”). And so the gaping hole is felt all the more keenly post loss.

There are gently beautiful, truly amazing stories that I have read, where people actively seek to acknowledge how hard this date can be – particularly around the whole “flowers” side – with some florists catering explicitly for widow.er.s.  Here are two such stories.

https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Living/mom-surprises-400-widows-flowers-valentines-day/story?id=82829079

https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/washington-man-delivers-free-roses-to-widows-and-military-spouses/

They make for heartfelt reading. I am impressed at this level of organisation, initiative and generosity. Truly.

 

And… it’s not about the roses.

Or (in my case), tulips (because, heck, tulips are more in season, last longer, m u c h cheaper than roses, and don’t need to be flown in. By golly do I love to receive tulips at this time of year).

It is – as always – about the lost relationship.

The absence of the comfy companionship.

The gaping hole where love once suffused your day.

The silencing of the echo that reverberated all the time, saying, “I see you! You exist! You make me who I am!” (or whatever good love does to you).

And it applies every day – not just on 14th February.

Mike and I always remembered, always honoured, 14th February. We always prepared and wrote a card for one another. Oddly, Mike knew that the card he received was from me, and I always knew that the card I received was from him. The whole “mystery” side of Valentine’s day that was so important in my teens and early 20s so long forgotten.

What was important was that we took the time to buy and write a card. Always sentences. A proper text. Some reflections on what we loved about the other, what we loved about our love, what we loved about our us-ness. I have decades’ worth of those cards. Still.

And yet, soppy and romantic it was not. Not really. It was a gift. A marker in time. A slowing down to re-remember and re-state just how important each of us was to the other. A reminder that “we were there first” – before the kids.

We honoured that. That love. That precious gift.

Mike’s last Valentine’s day, 2017, he forgot to get me a card.

He had other things going on. Like chemo. His hair falling out.

He burst into tears when I gave him his. (Because gone were the days/years when I hid the card for him to find, or sent it “anonymously” in the post).

It remains one of the absolutely hardest, viscerally painful, desperately sad, moments in my life.

And there have been many.

He knew it was our last Valentine’s day, even if I was still in denial.

Perhaps.

Perhaps not.

I think, each and every year, there was a recognition that we knew that what we had was special. Something we didn’t take for granted. Yes – we wanted more time, and might have said, “ten more years of this, please!” But we didn’t assume we might get it.

And here, I think we both knew our time together was running out.

As it can any time, any day, any moment.

I take nothing for granted.

And so I continue to buy/make Valentine’s cards, even if I am now in a relationship with a man who wonders what all the fuss is about.

He receives his cards with bemusement (I think). And also appreciation. Perhaps francophone cultures don’t do Valentine’s day so well. Perhaps it’s all too Hallmarky and Americano-British-Anglo-Saxonish. Perhaps francophone cultures are better at suffusing their daily lives with appreciation and love and gratitude and don’t need a calendar prompt mid-way between the New Year and Easter.

Whatever.

It still matters to me, because it’s always mattered.

Because it mattered to Mike.

Because it mattered to us.

To mark and to honour Love.

I hope that I will always have someone in my life to write a Valentine’s card to.

I hope that I will always be someone’s Valentine.

Whether they still breathe or have died.

Not because I am a soppy romantic.

I am not.

But because Love really is all that ever matters.

Down through time and the ages, and through lifetimes and breath, generations past, present and future – it really is the only thing.

Categories: Child Loss, Widowed, Widowed Memories, Widowed and New Love, Widowed Holidays, Widowed by Illness, Multiple Losses

About Emma Pearson

My life is a whirling mix of swishy strands, dark and glowing brightly, rough and silky smooth – all attempting to be seen, felt and integrated at once. Here are some of my themes.

I am British and now recently also French (because of Brexit), and I have lived in France for the past 21 years. I am 55 and sometimes feel to be an “older widow”, and yet I feel so young. I lost my best male friend Don to bowel cancer in September 2015, my brother Edward to glioblastoma in January 2016, my husband Mike to pancreatic cancer in April 2017, and my sweet youngest child, Julia, to grief-related suicide, in July 2019. And I met a new love (let’s call him Medjool, after my favourite kind of date), off one single meeting on a dating website. Our relationship has exploded into blossom as of June 2019.

I am widowed and I am in a new relationship. I have lost a best friend, a sweet brother, a beloved husband and a precious child, and I still have both parents who are alive and well. I live my days with my grief wrapped in love and my love wrapped in grief. I no longer even try to make sense of anything. I just hope to keep on loving and living for as long as I can, while grieving the losses of loves that are no longer breathing by my side.

I suspect my writing here will be a complex mish-mash of love and sorrow. I also write on http://www.widowingemptynests.com/.

TO LEAVE A COMMENT ON A BLOG, sign in to the comments section using your Facebook or Gmail accounts, or sign up for Disqus.

Primary Sidebar

Footer

Quick Links

  • Home
  • Blog
  • Categories
  • Authors

SSI Network

  • Soaring Spirits International
  • Camp Widow
  • Resilience Center
  • Soaring Spirits Gala
  • Widowed Village
  • Widowed Pen Pal Program
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • YouTube

Contact Info

Soaring Spirits International
2828 Cochran St. #194
Simi Valley, CA 93065

Email: [email protected]

Phone: 877-671-4071

Soaring Spirits International is a 501(c)3 Corporation EIN#: 38-3787893. Soaring Spirits International provides resources with no endorsement implied.

Copyright © 2023 Widow's Voice. All Rights Reserved.