Widow's Voice

Love Onscreen~

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It’s habit with many in the widowed community to talk to their dead people. To write to them on the regular.

I admire this. I really do. I’m envious, honestly.

In these 7 years since Chuck’s death I haven’t been able to write to him, or talk to him.

There’s just a block of some sort in me. My brain won’t process words to him in conversation.

The only words I’ve spoken to him usually come as I’m walking through a campground and I stop and gaze up at the stars…at the spectacular Universe glittering over me and whisper I love you I miss you come find me.

My inability to speak to Chuck or write to him is particularly puzzling because I love words. Writing and speaking them.

But there you have it.

In the last month I’ve been busily working on my documentary An Odyssey of Love...in pink with my film team. We’re readying it for an online premiere on April 24, which entails lots of editing from our film shoots, and watching rough drafts many times over, taking notes and making changes here and there. Creating story and poetry and grit and determination and vulnerability into a flowing expanse of what I hope the world will see as really, just simply, Love.

As I watch all that we’ve got on film, and my camera guy employs his genius creativity to bring it to life, and I watch the beauty of it on the screen…well, I realize that this documentary is my Love letter to Chuck. What shows on the screen is everything I’ve ever wanted to say to him. The color and sweeping panoramic views in it carry the vastness of the Love he left behind for me and the Love I feel for him, still, now and forever. Emily and Blake, my producer and my camera guy/editing genius have taken the story of my Odyssey of Love and translated it for me in a manner I never imagined could happen. They’ve taken the pain and the grief and the incredible power of the Love Chuck left behind for me…the love that I took and used to create a community for myself around the country…and they gave it life on the screen. I’ve only seen the rough draft-it took my breath away. There it is, I said to myself when I watched it. There’s everything I’ve wanted to say to Chuck and couldn’t verbalize.

Love is a massive container. In it I pour all the grief. All the missing-ness. All the loneliness for him. The confusion. The uncertainty. All the emotions that come with the death of a loved one and that we learn to carry as we create our lives in the after.

I hope you’ll all join me for the premiere of my documentary on April 24.

You’ll see pure Love up there on the screen.

I promise.

 

 

 

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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