This past Tuesday was our 25th wedding anniversary and I celebrated alone, sitting under the windchimes in my gazebo. A small portion of Rick’s ashes are in the chimes, so I always feel like he’s with me when I sit there. It was his favorite place to sit in the evenings, so I thought it was the perfect location to … Read the blog
The impact of Rick’s death has lessened as the years go by. That’s only natural. I’ve always been a firm believer that time really does heal all wounds, although not as quickly as we would like (and I definitely formed that opinion before experiencing widowhood). But certainly the enormous and raw pain I felt daily in the first months and … Read the blog
I was watching a Brene Brown video and she talked about how everyone wants to have extraordinary experiences, but how the little things in life really matter more. She said that after stunning life events, like near-death experiences, the death of a loved one, or other traumas, in the aftershock, what we miss are the ordinary moments before the event … Read the blog
I attended a writers’ conference two weeks ago. I’m still working (reworking) my plans for life without Rick after retirement. We had big plans. We started our web design business in 2001 with the goal of having plenty of work that we could enjoy doing together remotely from our favorite spot in Florida half the year, and back near our … Read the blog
Last week was the anniversary of our first date. I remembered writing about that date a year after his death, so I looked up the blog. There it was, and as I read it, I remembered that stage of grief again, the rawness of another “first” without him. But something else happened while I read it…I started to smile. There … Read the blog
Author Joan Didion died in December. I’ve always enjoyed her writing, but I owe her a special debt of gratitude for her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. In it, she described the grief and pain following the death of her husband, and the lost sense of reality that resulted from her grief. (She also refers to this state … Read the blog
The first year or two after losing Rick, every memory that popped into my mind was an emotional trigger that sometimes made me sob, and other times just brought on some quiet tears. The trick was learning to handle these moments because you never knew where or when they were going to hit. It wasn’t just seeing a picture of … Read the blog
I don’t often write much here about my dating experiences or my new relationships. For one reason, this is a blog about widowhood and grief, and not about virtual dating or how to navigate the dating world. For another reason, no one would believe some of the stories I could tell. It’s been interesting, to say the least.
But the … Read the blog
This past week, I was up at our cottage in northern Michigan, and I joined the family at nearby Ocqueoc Falls. Rick used to make fun of the falls. When I first took him there, he kept laughing as he watched the water cascading across the large stones, and finally he asked, “Well, where are the falls?” Two weeks later, … Read the blog