“Hello darkness, my old friend…” are the haunting lyrics of the beginning of the Simon and Garfunkel song, “The Sounds of Silence,” that have ebbed and flowed their way through the American musical fabric over the years. I know I ...
Own your grief, but don’t let grief own you. You’ve been through hell on Earth. You’ve endured a loss only few can comprehend. You get to cry whenever you feel like it, for whatever reason. You get to be a ...
7/7/2001. Twenty years ago today Steve and I got married on a sun-drenched veranda overlooking the hills , under a rose-embellished gazebo, witnessed by 210 of our closest friends, family, and absolute strangers (aka our parents' friends we'd never met ...
“When you die and I move to Finland**” is often heard in the house where I live. Always from the friend I live with to her husband of 10 years. It is always said rather matter-of-fact and casual; “babe take ...
It’s weird and very random (or is it?), the things we remember from childhood. I have a vivid memory of driving in the car with my mom and my sisters when she told us she had now had her married ...
"No man (or woman) steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and (s)he's not the same (wo)man."--Heraclitus I live near the Green River, drive across it a few times a day, walk next to it ...
How to be a Bad A$$ Widow (hell yes that’s all capitalized, we’ve earned it) Tricia R. Kauffman Let me start off by saying I thought I was a bad ass/independent woman prior to all of this. I learned ...
I want to start by saying that I'm a firm believer that not everything has to happen "for a reason." I think that cliché is incredibly insensitive to anyone who has gone through something as soul-crushingly awful as losing a ...
Thoughts are powerful! If I think that I can’t do something, I will usually give up pretty quickly. Heck, sometimes I will give up before I even start because my thoughts are so negative. Have any of you ever struggled ...
I was at a four-day writers’ conference this past weekend. It was supposed to be on a lake in northern Michigan, but due to COVID, it was on Zoom. That’s a lot of screen time, but it was worth it. ...