grief-life-widowhood

Becoming a Chill Widow – New Post on Hope for Widows website

… So here I am, with all the usual stress inducers (and more) and no Rick to balance it all out for me. No backrubs. No one to say, “Don’t worry, honey, none of that matters. Let’s take a drive through the park.” I am graced with the support of wonderful friends and family, so I’m not alone. But the most supportive partner in the world is gone, my world has shattered, and I’m still here picking up the pieces without him.

So the weird thing, the thing that just occurred to me the other day, is that I’m not stressed out by all this. I rarely wake up with that cloud of worry that’s been following me around my whole life. When stressful things come along, I just handle them, or shrug it off, figuring, meh, it’ll work out somehow. What’s the worst that could happen?

It wasn’t like this at first. In the first few months after Rick’s death, I definitely was a bundle of nerves, always at a high level of anxiety. My whole life was off balance. My equilibrium was shot. But, as time has gone on, I have become more serene about life than I have ever been in my entire existence. Things just don’t bother me like they used to.

And I honestly think it’s because I know that nothing is as bad as losing Rick. Nothing is worse than losing the man I loved and the entire future we had planned together. As we tried to live life to the fullest in his last months on earth, I was slapped in the head by what really matters in life, and it’s not any of these paltry day-to-day issues that used to matter so much.

I just don’t care anymore.

Read the rest of the blog here.

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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