grief journey

Videos and Memories – May 2023 Blog on Hope for Widows Website

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 England. We then met up with my son and his wife to explore several other countries in Europe. It was a trip of a lifetime.

I was going through the trip photos in my Dropbox folder and discovered the short videos I took using one of those little Flip video cameras available at the time. I forgot the videos existed! As I opened them one by one, I watched my husband being silly and playful, saw videos of him driving us down the narrow treacherous paths through the countryside, and even found one of us dining together in a restaurant in Germany with my son and his wife, where my daughter-in-law turned the camera on the two of us, providing me with a rare video of us together.

When I finished watching all the videos, I felt almost paralyzed. I was so overcome seeing these unexpected memories of that time we shared, that I didn’t know HOW I felt. And, of course, I started to cry and did so for probably two hours. As my grief therapist once told me, as time goes on, there will come a stage where there are very few new memories, so uncovering one I haven’t explored will be a shock to the system.

Read the rest of the blog on the Hope for Widows website. 

About the author

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.

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