I wake up every morning with some depressing thought. Sometimes it’s picturing you the day you died. Sometimes it’s remembering how your mind was starting to go in those last months. Of course, I never know what it will be. I only know it will cause pain, and then I’ll put it away and go…
Author: Katherine
Katherine Billings Palmer is a technical writer, poet, and essayist from Garden City, Michigan. She’s won several academic writing awards, including first place in the University of Michigan Dearborn Critical Essay Contest for her work about poet John Donne: “‘The Sun Rising’: A Lover’s Boast.”
In 2017, Katherine’s husband, Rick, died of complications from small cell lung cancer. She wrote a series of poems and essays about her struggles to cope with her grief. I Wanted to Grow Old With You is available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle editions.
Her latest book, A Widow’s Words: Grief, Reflection, Prose, and Poetry – The First Year was published in January 2019 and is also available on Amazon.com.
Katherine is a guest blogger for the Hope for Widows Foundation and writes about her grief journey at www.TheWritingWidow.com.
New York Times 2017 “The Lives They Loved”
In 2012, after my father died, I submitted his story to the NYT’s The Lives They Loved section. For some reason, it made me feel better – my father was a simple man, no movie star or world leader, yet he was bigger than life in my world. Publishing his story in the Times seemed…
Christmas
They talk of Christmas, but to me it’s just another day without you. It’s just another day that you’re gone.
You died when I left the room
This morning I woke up, and foolishly went to the widows’ support group on FB. A woman mentioned the theory that our loved ones wait until we leave to die. They hold on until that time, then you may go to get a drink of water, take a bathroom break, and that’s the time that…
I went to Costco today
December 20, 2017 18 weeks Dear Rick, I went to Costco today. I doubt I’ve ever gone without you. Maybe once, but maybe not. Costco was us, just as Home Depot, Lowe’s, Ikea, and all those other stores were places we went together. Roaming the aisles of Costco with you was one of life’s simple…
A visit from you
December 11, 2017 The printer just made the cycling noise that lets me know you are here. So I started blabbing to you. I think you may be around at other times, but when I hear this, I jump at the chance that you’re trying to tell me you’re here. I love you. You know…
Sometimes I wail
Sometimes I wail. I don’t just weep, or cry, or even sob. I wail. It’s been a little more than four months since I became a widow. This is new territory for me. I met Rick when I was nearly 40, a never-married mother of one son. Marriage had eluded me. I’d obviously met men,…
The little losses
Now that I’ve been in mourning for more than 4 months, I think this grief thing is pretty predictable: I’ll wake up each morning and immediately notice your absence. I’ll either bury the thought and jump out of bed, or – on the weekends – I’ll bury myself deeper under the covers and begin remembering…
Time Hop
Every morning I get a reminder from Time Hop…”see what happened on this date…” I open the app with trepidation. Will it make me laugh or cry? Will the photos from the past affect me like a dagger through the heart? Four years ago…Rick sitting by the fire in the backyard. He’s wearing his favorite…
It’s times like these
I was driving to my grief counseling session, foolish enough to listen to the radio. I can’t listen to music anymore, and music is something I’ve loved my whole life. Music is passion and feelings and emotion and more. A passionate love of music is also something Rick and I shared. We had different tastes…