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Never Alone

Posted on: February 11, 2015 | Posted by: Alison Miller

I just finished my first Camp Widow and I’m on my way back to Arizona to see our oldest son get married.  As soon as Camp finished,  I hopped in PinkMagic and headed north to the Panhandle and turned west.  All of which is to say…I haven’t even begun to filter through the experience of meeting so many beautiful people, men and women who are traveling this widowed road.

 

There is too much to write about, too many impressions, too much emotion, too much of pretty much everything and I need to focus on driving, so I am. 

There is too much to write about, too many impressions, too much emotion, too much of pretty much everything and I need to focus on driving, so I am. 

 

No, it didn’t take away my grief and that wasn’t my expectation.  Perhaps the greatest thing I brought away from it was, quite simply, that I did it at all.  I drove from Arizona to Florida and it was so that I could be a part of it but do you know what was the biggest draw for me?  The flash-mob dance.  And not the overall dance but specifically the part in the dance where the dancers are required to open their arms to the side.  Yes, it was that specific for me when I watched the youtube video.  I saw that one particular movement and my heart clicked in recognition and I knew that I had to be in that flash-mob so that I too could open my arms out to my side.

 

 

Because, you see, (and I know you get it), as much as I write about my grief, as open as I am with it, and as open as my heart is to this new life I must create without my dearest heart next to me…I cringe at opening my arms wide.  Opening them like that required a willingness to be completely vulnerable. It meant raising my eyes to the heavens, leaving me exposed.  It meant not only opening my arms but swirling to the side and back again.  Yep, that is what that one little movement in that one short dance meant to me and I knew I had to do it.

 

 

And I did.  And you’ll be able to see all of us who did it when the video is released and I’m waiting to see what it looks like because I already know what it felt like.  It felt exactly like I thought it would and there was so much grief at the same time as there was so much comfort in dancing it surrounded by so many others who know this new world.  I know that all of us who danced last Saturday danced not only for ourselves and our loved one, but for all of you who couldn’t be there.

 

 

I cried afterwards, no surprise.  I cried and felt this surge of pride in myself that my grief and the love I had, and have, for my husband, got me in the car and helped me drive thousands of miles to join this exemplary group of men and women at Camp Widow.

 

 

That’s all I have for right now.  It’s a long road back to Arizona and I need to get there and have our kids around me and have some time to feel this all through.  So I’ll leave you with this;  all of you who were there, all of you who take the time to read what I write here, all of you who follow my personal blog and keep me company on my Odyssey of Love….you bless me every step of the way, every mile that I drive.  You are part of my story forever more.

 

Thank you~

 

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Categories: Widowed, Widowed Milestones, Widowed Community

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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