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 ...
It can be very hard to navigate the waters of the family when grief is involved. It is hard enough when the person missing from your family functions is a cousin, aunt, parent, or any other loved one. The reality ...
When my husband passed suddenly at the age of 32, I was quite pregnant with our second child and was a stay at home mother to our then 18 month old. Despite being an intelligent and capable 31 year old ...
Every morning I read a list of fifty things I have to be thankful for. I started doing this a few months ago; it was something my grief therapist suggested to help me get through the uncertainty and loneliness of ...