Today, Tuesday, is an anniversary of sorts for me. It isn’t an anniversary connected to Chuck, since it happened after he died. And yet, it is entirely connected to him. Because today is the day, 5 years ago, that I picked up my new Ford Escape from the garage, and the man, I’d taken it to after buying it from the dealer. I took it directly…
widowed courage
A Waste of Worry
Last week I was anxious and annoyed (raging, actually) over the seemingly endless list of things I thought I could not do without Ben. At the time, the top of my list of stressors was the fact that I was headed off to Camp Widow where I would be attending a Saturday night Masquerade Ball, and I realized there was no one to zip up my dress. It…
The Missing Dress Meltdown
I’m completely devastated this week. There was a horrible mixup while I was out of town last week and I discovered that a dress was accidentally thrown out. Not just a dress – but THE dress which I have been wearing in every weekly self portrait I have taken for the past 7 months (shown above). It was the main prop in this year-long series about…
This~
I’ve been on the road for two weeks now with my daughter in this continuing Odyssey of Love. Not necessarily by plan but happening nonetheless, we’re traveling the same roads my husband and I drove in our first year out on the road. Not by plan only because all we know is that we’re headed north to Washington state, where we’ll turn East and…
Things that have Changed
I am sitting here, marvelling at how far I’ve come since March 1, 2010; I am a different person with the same heart. I can now look back and remember the sharp, stabbing grief of that day. The insanity. The weeks and months directly afterward where I alternated between shrieking pain and dense fog; I rocked and cried or I floated…
The Blindside
I’ve been in a clay workshop for the past few days, and its mostly been a heck of a lotta fun. Each say we have worked with a different teacher, making sculptures, dinnerware, decorated tiles, and learning alternative techniques for firing clay (examples in the picture above!) It’s been a whirlwind of new and exciting creative ideas for me,…
Suicide Widow
I am filling in for Amanda today. The current heat wave has knocked out her power! Amanda stay cool (get it?!) and I will try to stay warm! Recently I have had a lot of suicide widows reach out to me on Widow’s Voice and facebook. “I have no one to talk to, I have no one that gets it. I can’t talk about the suicide to my friends or…
Turning Pain into Love
In 2012, when his death was so fresh, I needed to talk. About the pain, the fear, the agony, the anger, the loss, the accident, the future we will not have, the children we won’t raise, the wedding we won’t share… all of it. I wanted to crawl out of my skin with all the pain. I talked and cried almost every single day to someone about my pain. I…