Widow's Voice

Questions. For Myself. For Others~

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What does one do, 6 years after being widowed?

Where do we stand?

What does life mean in the here and now?

Does the future finally carry meaning for us?

Or is life simply one filled with questions?

About ourselves, our lives, the life we lived, the life we have to live in the without…

I always feel a vague sense of unease when I tell someone newly widowed how long it’s been for me, when it’s followed up by the question, sometimes unspoken…

How are you doing now?

Because I hate to tell them that, in spite of all that I’m doing, how colorful it all looks, how much Love there is in the world for me…that the loneliness for Chuck and the life we shared leaves me feeling empty, because it’s further and further away from me.

That it pains me to look at pictures of us together now because there are no new pictures added. It’s the same pictures. 

24 years frozen in time. 

I still love looking at them, and I’ll admit it’s with hungry eyes, but they’re a reminder that that was it. 

I wish I could tell them that I’ve enthusiastically embraced this new life of mine and I see a future shining brightly ahead of me.

But how to explain that yes, I do embrace this life I’ve created for myself while still firmly living in the past, because there is nothing in this life that is as good as the life I had?

I don’t want to scare them. Or intimidate them about their own futures.

We all do this in our own way. We put our fingerprints on what we create. 

My fingerprints are all over this pink life I’ve created, living on the road.

I feel it fully. I’m living it fully.

And missing the ever loving fuck out of the life I had with the man I adored~

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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