Widow's Voice

No Offense Meant~Bless Your Heart

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http://widowsvoice.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/10426900_675604462494491_348124583871564313_n.jpgFWG.  A term I made up myself and one that may or may not be offensive to people.

Words are funny, aren’t they?  My mom used to say that people are the ones who give power to words and I believe the same goes for those who hear the words.  They receive it according to how they define the word.

When people ask me what FWG means, I generally ask them if they want the PG version or the real one.  I’m not intentionally setting out to upset people, so I do that.  How great am I?

FWG means Fucking Warrior Goddess.  When I say that word I say it fiercely and I mean it fiercely.  Not angrily.  Not as a swear word.  But fiercely.  You hear it however you hear it.

Life since Chuck died is a continual decision to get up, move my body, do what needs to be done to create a life for myself, and reach out to people near and far, no matter how much I might want to just bury myself in a hole.  It’s a matter of living with an intensely high level of emotional pain that translates physically on most days.  The way I can best describe what my body feels like is this: sharp metal ridged claws dug into my chest and tore my heart out when he died, leaving trails of membrane and blood and a gaping hole, leaving me gasping for breath, with my lungs working overtime to function.  But it didn’t end there.  Those metal claws threw my heart on the ground and continued to mash and cut into it, shredding it more fully into a bloodied mess.  Non-stop.

It’s as if someone is speaking a foreign language to me when I think again that oh, yeah, he’s dead.  I attempt to grasp the concept but I don’t comprehend the language and so I’m left puzzled, wondering what they mean.  He’s dead?  How is that even possible?  It’s beyond belief.

I haven’t died so I need to find a way to live and I need to have something each day to live into.  Not to strive towards but to live into.  And it can’t be something pale and wussy.  It must be unyielding and substantial and powerful.  Defiant.  Determined.  As unrelenting as my grief.  Clad in pink. (mostly).  Not a stupid pink, as I’ve explained to some, but a strong pink that beats as fiercely as the blood pumping out of my heart on the ground in front of me.  A word and a color that has no self-pity in it, nor asks for pity.  A take-no-prisoners persona, with a heart that is wide-open to the life I must create.  A heart and a self that equally reflects the love that he left behind for me and the grief I carry with me with each breath and pulse beat.

No wimpiness.  Nothing fake.  Tears may pour from my eyes (and do).  Sobs may rattle my chest (and do).  Shudders of grief wrack my soul always, facing this life without him.  I allow it all to happen and I enfold the darkness within the light (that I honestly don’t see, but whatever…)

I drive my pink car and tow my pink-trimmed trailer on this Odyssey of Love and the front of it is crowned with a violet pink FWG in bold letters.  The same logo is stamped over the Ford logo on the front and back of my car.  I’m not fooling around with this. Ican’t.http://widowsvoice.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Cfwgollage.jpg

 

FWG rising.  Fiercely.

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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