I’ve mentioned a few times in the past couple of months that my best friend and her husband were having a baby. Well, this morning, at 4:30am, their beautiful baby girl entered the world and I was privileged to be there to help. It was a long, sleepless, emotional and exhausting night and I’m struggling to find the words to explain both what an…
young widow
Myrtle
I sit on my porch a lot…in Hawaii we call it our lanai. The same table and chairs have been there for years and years since we bought the place in 2001…scratch that, one of our dogs broke our original glass table; the cheap, wooden one there now is one I got at Ikea when I lived in LA in the 90s….ok I’m going off on a tangent… Suffice…
One of Many
Before I lost my husband to depression, I was so unaffected by the word ‘suicide’. The word itself and casual references are everywhere in our society. In the lyrics of popular songs and common terms of phrase; it pops up unexpectedly in movies and tv shows and it features in art work, like Banksy’s ‘suicidal butterflies’. I’m ashamed to…
Not Alone and Lonely
Even when I’m not alone at the end of the day, I’m still lonely for Mike. His space can just never be filled. I wrote that line weeks ago but couldn’t finish anything with it. I think because it seemed like a complete thought; that one sentence summed it up for me in so many ways. But since I’ve been back from my holiday travels and looking…
Setting my Goal for 2016
I’m not really one for New Years resolutions however at the start of every year, I do like to put a lot of thought into setting myself a goal for the coming twelve months. When Dan died from depression in July 2013, leaving me as a young, newly-wedded widow, my focus turned to just surviving. That first five or six months was a blur and when…
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…
A Fear I Can’t Ignore
I’m going to let you in on a little secret… one that I’m not even sure I’ve fully admitted to myself. I’m scared. My best friend is due to have her first baby in less than five weeks and I’m starting to feel absolutely petrified about it. Amidst all the excitement and happiness over the past few months that has surrounded her pregnancy,…
Far From Ideal
“Far from ideal”…just one phrase uttered by my friend Margaret during a recent conversation about the state of our lives well into year three of losing our husbands. It caught my ear because indeed…so much of our world now is far from ideal. We realized too during that conversation that our lives with our husbands were probably not…
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…
Missing Pieces
I will never get used to death. Even my faith does not really help in that regard. Sure I might believe in a hereafter which brings some measure of comfort that the person we love is ok somehow and somewhere, and even that we might be reunited one day, but what we go through in our here and now after loved ones die is just downright disturbing…