I came across videos of a trip Rick and I took 14 years ago this month. He knew going to Cornwall to explore the land of my ancestors had been a life-long dream and we spent five glorious days in ...
It isn’t black veils over gray hair. It isn’t wrinkly hands clasped in front of them standing at the cemetery. It isn’t (always) a 90 year old staring out the window at gloomy clouds day after day. There is no ...
“Year two is harder than the first.” In the early days after losing my husband, Joe, I’d read how the second year of widowhood and grief is often harder than the first. 'Uhh, yea right,' I’d say to myself, usually ...
Oh how those Facebook memories love to pop up when my life is moving along almost as if things are normal and nothing has changed. Haven’t I always lived alone here in my ranch home? Wasn’t my daily routine always ...
The fuchsia-pink pool noodle Rick bought me is starting to decompose around the edges. The memories of that last vacation we shared are starting to fade around the edges, too. How can a pool noodle come to mean so much ...
I attended a writers’ conference two weeks ago. I’m still working (reworking) my plans for life without Rick after retirement. We had big plans for our golden years, well laid-out plans. We started our web design business in 2001 with ...
Author Joan Didion died in December. I’ve always enjoyed her writing, but I owe her a special debt of gratitude for her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. In it, she described the grief and pain following the death of ...
Do you ever wonder if…instead of him…it had been you? Instead…I was the one with the out-of-nowhere terminal diagnosis and the slow, painful progression toward my early death in my 40s with so much I wanted to do and see ...
I feel as though every widow who writes about this time of year writes about the gut punch that is the holiday season without their beloved, and while that’s a deep and visceral truth that I too experience, I thought ...
I went on a date last Saturday night...it was my first date with a new man I met in an online dating app. After two years of first dates, the only thing I know for sure is that you never ...