Widow's Voice

Raise Your Hand~

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I thought about reposting my WV blog from 2015 for this week.

Because I pretty much feel the same way, regarding the holidays.

Except worse.

As a 6 1/2 year veteran of this wid life, I kind of hate owning up to how difficult this all is for me still.

I don’t want to scare those of you who are just stepping out onto the road.

But I also feel the need to be honest.

I’ve never yet, in all these years, not spoken/written the truth of how this is for me, and I’m not going to start now.

Yes, what it feels like, generally speaking, has changed.

It’s no longer the soul ripping, heart shredding, ungodly pain that it was for the first few years.

Now it’s just numb and empty, and I don’t know that I count that as progress.

Also, overwhelmingly lonely.

Not in a way that if I start dating and find a guy I’d be fine lonely but in a I’m lonely for a dead man way and there’s no way out of it because he ain’t coming back.

So.

What I think is also true is that I’m feeling a fine rage bubbling inside of me and I haven’t felt this level of rage since we were in hospice, because of family issues that arose, and directly after, also because of family issues.

The fact of the matter is, I left the little condo that Chuck and I had rented (we lived on the road for our last 4 years together) just 3 weeks after he died. And I’ve lived full time on the road ever since. 

Like most of us, I didn’t have time to sit and let it all sink in. I had to get to living and for me that meant driving and workamping and figuring out how to survive on the road.

I’ve been real about all the emotions, and haven’t hidden them from myself or others, but we have to make a living, right?

Now that I’m off the road for a bit while I film my Loveumentary, I’ve got that down time. Moments to breathe. 

What I’m feeling isn’t that hard core grief, per se. 

It’s more the feeling that I’m missing Chuck so fucking much that I don’t know how I’m still breathing or how I can stay in my body.  It’s the feeling that shit, what if I live another 20 or 30 years without him? Even another 10? How can I bear that?

The holidays don’t help, of course, though he and I were never big on them when together. 

Knowing that I’ve lived almost 7 years without him, and the new year will bring me to E.I.G.H.T.? 

I don’t know that I can contain that in this body and mind of mine without losing it and going over the edge.

Raise your hand if you’re feeling like a lunatic along with me….

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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