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 ...
Within the first few months after my husband died, I very quickly learned that grief can be a lot of things: anguish, pain, anger, love, numbness. I mean, there are five stages after all. One word I haven’t heard when ...
When my husband was alive, he would say that my constant sacrificing and never-saying-no personality were self-inflicted wounds. If I complained about how tired I was because I took on a task I didn’t really want to do – because ...
Widowed Single I just completed my taxes this year, and I cried (again!, because I did the same thing last year) when I had to check the “Single” box. There is a reason that we always check off “Widowed” on ...
I’m babysitting my two young grandsons for a four-day weekend while their folks are out of town. These two like all sorts of music. They may ask the Amazon Alexa to play Daft Punk, Justin Bieber, rap or hard rock, ...
A part of me surely died the same day as my late husband. Most widows would probably say the same thing. When you spend so much time wrapping your life around someone else, it takes a while to unravel yourself ...
I consider August 25, 2021 the single darkest day of my life. The news from the hospital that my beloved husband of over 38 years had succumbed to the deadly virus known as Covid-19 was devastating, a crushing, visceral blow, ...
Everything falls on our shoulders when we are widowed which means spoiling ourselves a little should as well. Or at the absolute bare minimum, self-care must become a huge priority in our lives. I have always been someone who has ...
The below creative nonfiction piece was recently published in Heartspace II: Real Life Stories on Loss and Renewal, an anthology collection edited by Cathy Brooks Edwards. This is second book in the Heartspace series and states that it is “an ...
Intimacy is what I miss most when I think about my husband Frank. All the ways two people are intimate with each other doesn’t always involve sex. It’s the little things that make up a life together. It’s the little ...