I generally try to write my posts in advance, which gives me a bit of time to pore over them and change things up here and there before it goes public. This week, I did just that, writing a post about the five year anniversary of Megan’s lung transplant, which is Wednesday, the 6th, and what it meant to me. Then, at the eleventh hour, I…
Holidays
The Last Straggler
It was still dark when I stepped outside the Holiday Inn near the Los Angeles airport where the airline had been forced to put me up after a snarl of delays and cancellations across the country left me unable to make my connection back to Hawaii. It was the final leg in a long day and a half of travel and I felt bleary and grungy, having spent the…
Hopefully, in Time
So another Christmas has passed us by, my third without my husband. Initially, I felt like this one was going to be a bit easier than my past two, and I guess in some ways it was. However despite enjoying the festive build-up, the Christmas parties, house-decorating and gift-buying, the heaviness in my heart on Christmas day was unavoidable. A…
Sadness and Sugarplums
Here’s the sucky thing about being widowed. Well, one of the many sucky things about it anyway. Holidays will always be hard. They will always be tarnished with lost love and that empty chair at the table. There is just no getting around it, and it doesn’t matter how long it’s been. I’ve been thinking about it a lot this year – my third since Mike…
An Empty Ritual
My Christmas tree is up. It nearly didn’t happen. Again. I had that moment where I didn’t see the point, with the same questions I’ve asked myself for the preview two years since he passed. I thought ‘I live alone, I won’t even be here on Christmas day – I’ll be at my sister’s house. It’s so depressing to decorate a tree on your own, why…
Holiday Spirits
In Zoar, Ohio, there is a tree farm that allows you to cut your own Christmas trees. Shelby, Megan, and I had been here a few times to shuffle through the snow, walking around so many firs, pines, and spruces, to pick the perfect specimen for our living room. Once located, I would proceed to lie on the ground and begin sawing. A few seconds…
No Pie for Me, Thanks
Somehow, my computer erased the post I’d been working on this week. I am NOT grateful for that. Grrrrr. But what I’d planned to say will probably not come as a surprise. It’s Thanksgiving again and it’s just not an easy time for us widowed folk. No matter what else lovely we find in our lives in the strange after-world, it is painful to…
Home for the Holidays
I can no longer say “one year ago, Megan did this”. She’s been gone 369 days. Today isn’t anything special or significant in the grand scheme of things, but it is interesting to me how the one year mark mentally appears to be a weight off of my shoulders in a sense. I have experience now. I’ve been through Thanksgiving,…