When you lose your spouse, whether you are a parent or not, there are phrases that you will hear from family, friends and acquaintances. These phrases are spoken out of care and, I believe, an unspoken discomfort in not knowing ...
Sharing The Loss So how do you explain to someone new you meet that you are a widow? When do you say it? Do you wait for someone to ask an awkward question that they don’t even realize they ...
It seems that in life a young widow so very often feels like an oddly shaped piece that doesn’t fit into the puzzle of life going on around them. Many families around you are established and complete. They have their ...
Father's Day has passed for another year. This one and Mother's Day can be tough dates for the widow/er community. In my mere six-plus years in this sad little club, I have noticed the sentiments for Father's Day in particular ...
It's been well over six years since I became a widow and if I'm being honest, I still have not settled everything that needs to be settled following the death of a spouse. Most everything that needed tending to was ...
Assumptions NOT to make about a widow (even if you are one yourself). 1) Don’t assume you know exactly how she feels. 2) Don’t assume that because you lost a parent or another loved one, that you understand ...
Living without my husband feels so much like a cruel sentence. It feels like I have lost so much at a such a young age, and continuing here the remaining years of my life, separated from him at times ...
When we are in the throes of deep grief, it's tough to imagine how anything else, ever, could be worse than what we are feeling. Pain and grief feel incredibly isolating. They are deceptive as well - even when others ...
I was recently staring at a painting created by my three year old. I looked intently at the colors behind the blackish brown and wondered what it was supposed to have looked like. What was the original beauty behind ...
Navigating Mother's Day Mother’s Day is coming. In the view of those whose lives have not been acquainted with a loss of this magnitude and the stabbing pain of grief that follows, perhaps to them mother’s day is a ...