Widow's Voice

What Was. What Is~

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Your death

stripped me down to bone and marrow.

It dug my heart out of my body with sharp talons

And flung it, bloodied, onto the ground

A sharp bladed axe,

Such as was used for beheadings in the days of Henry VIII 

Hacked away at that bloodied heart of mine on the ground.

Slicing and dicing it into miniscule pieces.

It took effort and determination and grit

And all the Love he left behind for me,

To string those pieces of you and me together.

My heart doesn’t look the same now, as it did when it was full in my chest.

I don’t look the same as I did all the years of our together lives.

I am stripped raw.

Exposed.

Vulnerable.

That isn’t a bad thing.

Or a good thing.

It’s just what I am now.

I’m still dislocated. Dispossessed. Disoriented. Displaced. In dissaray. 

I’m okay with all this, too.

In a world where nothing is okay because you are no longer in it…

I’m weirdly okay.

Living and missing you. Living while missing you with each breath. Living. And missing.

Empty and filled with Love for you.

I don’t try to reason any of it out any longer.

Perhaps that is the true freedom that comes with grief.

In the truest, most loving, strongest way of letting go…

It is letting go of people’s expectations of me. 

People’s opinions of me.

People’s anything of me.

Or judgement of myself.

I’m just me. 

Still, and always, in Love with a dead man.

With a heart open to Love every day.

No matter what.

Aching with Love.

Aching for you.

Loving you~

About Alison Miller

My beloved husband Chuck died while we were full timing on the road. We’d rented a condo for our stay in southern CA, and I had to leave 3 weeks after his death. All I knew at that time was that I had to find a way to continue traveling on my own, because settling down without him made me break into a cold sweat. I knew that the only place I’d find any connection to Chuck again was out on the roads we’d been traveling for our last 4 years together. I knew nobody out on the road, I knew grief was a great isolator, and I knew I had to change the way I traveled without him, to make it more emotionally bearable for me. So I bought a new car, had a shade of pink customized for it, bought a tiny trailer and painted the trim in pink, learned how to tow and camp, and set out alone. My anxiety was through the roof, and all I knew to trust was the Love that Chuck left behind for me. I found Soaring Spirits early on, thank god, and the connections I made through SS helped ground me to some extent. I needed to know that other widow/ers were out there in my world, because I felt so disoriented and dislocated. Through Soaring Spirits, as the miles added up, my rig taking me north, south, east and west, I found community. I found sanity…or at least I learned that if I was bat shit crazy, I was in good company, and realizing that ultimately saved my sanity. PinkMagic, my rig, is covered with hundreds of names of loved ones sent to me by my widowed community, and I know it isn’t visible to the naked eye, but I’ll let you in on a secret…she actually illuminates Love as I drive down the many roads in our country, and I can see it through my side view mirror. Love does, indeed, live on~

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