Lately, I’ve been getting this urge to try to find balance in my life. What is the balance? Some people would say, it is to have a job, a family, stability, and security. All those things sound great, but life throws at us unexpected unimaginable things, and somehow someway we can still manage them. So by managing the unimaginable, does that mean…
widowed growth
This Terrible Club
Do you want to know the best thing that happened to me since my husband died? Meeting other widows. When I realized I was a widow…the day he died…it floored me. It felt unreal. Surreal. It occurred to me, sitting at our dining room table, with that female police officer asking me about other kin, the firefighters in the bedroom with…
Hugging Through the Fear
I am honestly not even certain what this has to do with being widowed, but it sure as hell has to do with death and loss and trauma and fear. Often times, I begin writing not knowing what will come and find that what needed to be cleansed comes to the surface on its own. I suppose, as someone who is learning to mother the child of a widowed person,…
Nero’s Cry
This week, on an animal sanctuary in Southern Spain, I am surrounded by rock, and the nude, bare earth echoes the inner emptiness I feel. In England, all that green and growing doesn’t match my insides. Here, this rock, this heat, this rugged blend of pine and desert wildflower, poking up from parched earth, speaks to my spirit. Here, amongst this…
In the Ring with Grief
I’m filling in for Kelley Lynn today, she will be back next week! This post was written about four years after Phil died. It’s amazing how the written words mean the same thing literally, but six years later their figurative meaning has shifted yet again.Over the past four years grief and I have reluctantly become friends. Grief is not the kind of…
Living with “After” Shock
Something I feel many people don’t understand about losing your partner is that there are many, many subsequent losses. It’s something all of you understand, or will come to. Like aftershock from an earthquake, they continue to shake our foundation for YEARS after the initial tragedy. It can be the smallest things, like the first time you…
Will the Stars and Moon Answer Me?
Even while I’m engaged in various activities, my mind’s eye, my heart’s eye, is searching for something that will ring a bell of recognition within me. Something that will make my heart say oh, that’s what I’ve known all along and didn’t remember I knew! That something that will ease some of the devastating ache of my soul and heart and body.
Another Year Over
Another number away from the “2012” in which Ian died. One thing I read late last year was people doing a ‘word’ for the year, not New Years Resolutions, which seemed a far more sensible way to go than dragging out the perennial resolution that never gets stuck to. The word that stuck out to me at the beginning of the year was Faith. Not religious…
Neighbors of the Heart
It’s been a few weeks since I shared about going on my first date with someone since my fiancé died. I have been through every wave of emotion imaginable since then. I have cried buckets of tears for how much this experience has made me miss my fiancé. For how much all of this is bringing up old familiar memories and joys I shared with him…
A Leaf Adrift
Somehow it ended up that Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day all fell on Thursdays this year, my day to write. It is the season so I know it doesn’t really matter what day we write or what, if any, religion we practice – holiday time in general is hard for us widowed folk, but it certainly rings very clearly that I’m posting on days that…
A Heart’s Reflections
I went to a Christmas party the other night. A year ago, there is no way I could, or would have been able to socialize like that. And I was going alone, as my guy works evenings. So I know I have made vast strides this past year. This time around I found myself really looking forward to it. I felt happy to have been invited; it felt nice that…
Third Thanksgiving Lessons
Thanksgiving was easier this year. I think. It was certainly less terrifying than the first year. I still remember that first year, when we changed the tradition from being at my in-laws’ house to Drew’s aunt & uncle’s house near Houston. His aunt did assigned seats… and I was sat next to the ONLY empty chair in the whole room. Which also…