To be honest, nothing much rattles me these days. I think I used to get more wound up about things before Mike died. I was younger, and lacked perspective. And there is something to the idea that I have gone through such a difficult experience, losing him, that nothing much compares, so I take things more in stride. Losing my house, planning a…
stephanie vendrell
The Meaning of Teeth
Sometimes I feel like I’m just going through the motions. I’ve had that recurring thought/feeling quite often recently. It will hit me when I’m doing routine tasks like brushing my teeth or vacuuming. Like a big internal sigh. It all seems meaningless sometimes. I just couldn’t quite put my finger on that feeling. How to describe it without…
Say Goodbye to the Fridge
I got a new fridge this week. Well, new to me. My old one just stopped defrosting itself and a repairman told me it wasn’t worth the cost of repair. So once a week we were standing there with a hairdryer. A friend of mine was redoing her condo and needed to get rid of a fridge, so I hired a handyman to move it to my house and take the old one to…
Just Another Week
What’s going on in the life of this widow this week? It’s been four years, four months, and 11 days. Some things are changed very much, and some not so much. I still look out over the same view, from the same lanai, in the same house we shared together for 12 years. I still drive through the little town in Hawaii we both fell in love with…
His Heart and Mine
For anyone new to this blog, my husband Mike died in 2013 of a heart attack in his sleep. Finding him the next morning is a horrific memory I will carry with me always. He had heart problems, to be sure, but I didn’t really know the extent of it. I’m not sure whether he did either. He hated doctors and hospitals, and I often wonder if he had…
Post-traumatic Growth
Did you know “post-traumatic growth” is actually a thing? A friend mentioned the concept to me recently and I made note of it, thinking it was a clever concept invented by us grief sufferers, but when I typed it in a search online, a bunch of very real psychological studies came up. Mike used to say, repeating an oft-used phrase, that what…
Soul Searching
I saw my therapist today, for the first time in about two years, we figured. She was the one who first helped begin to lift me out of the fog in those early weeks and months after Mike’s death. She knows my story, knows me. I had been thinking of her a lot this year, with all the issues and decisions I am facing, and low and behold, I literally ran…
Killer Lonliness
Last week in my nutrition course we heard some amazing lectures about Blue Zones. If you don’t know what Blue Zones are, they are communities in various places around the globe that share common lifestyle and environmental factors that contribute to their populations being among the longest-lived and healthiest on the planet. These areas were first…
Ripped Open
I had another series of thoughts planned for this week, but it will have to wait. The tragedy in Manchester just has me reeling. So many young girls lost, so many families in the horror of that grief right now. So many girls that will never grow up, never get married, never have families, never experience all that their lives had promised. So…
Smiling Through the Tears
I don’t really have anything particular to write about this week. No news on the house, work is going, school is going. In the middle of it all, I am feeling that ring of sadness around it all. Sad that my life has changed so much as a result of losing Mike, sad that he isn’t here to share it with anymore, sad that my future will not include…
The Public Face
I have a dear friend here in Kona who recently lost her mother. She was a new friend when Mike died, but had met him, and after discovering we were both writers we decided to get together every so often to write and support each other. She has since become a good friend who saw the rawness of my grief right there in the beginning, but since I’ve…
Clickety-Clack
Remember as a kid when you would hold your hand out the car window and float it up and down in the wind? As a kung fu guy, Mike would play with the wind the same way, with the same joy as that child riding in the car. I have a hard time describing how that large man would seem to float effortlessly in the air, twirling, kicking, jumping, his arms…