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Warning: Bad Things Happen to Me
The other day, I was emailing with a widow friend of mine who had something terrible happen to her – another issue that occurred after the already traumatic death of her partner. I was sympathetic, or at least that’s how I felt and I tried to show her that. “Geez, universe!” I wrote, “Isn’t widowhood enough?” We laughed a bit about that, but she was still really down. Why did bad things keep happening to her? I really felt for her. I’ve thought that a lot in my life – that bad things just happen to me. It is, of course, completely true and not true at all. It’s completely…
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Failures (Part 1 of 2)
Today’s blog post is about failure and all the ways that I’ve failed in widowhood and wow, it’s been a humbling one to write! As I began to write this post, I thought, “I bet the internet has something to say about widow failures” and boy I was right. Seems that there’s a lot our there about how we can fail. But, really, I didn’t need to read anything online. I’ve already lived plenty of failure over the past three-and-a-half years. Yes, if you’ve just started reading my blog, you may read some of my stories about my kids’ positive life experiences or my new partner Chris and think, “she…
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To Update the Account, Part 2
The first few months of widowhood are awful, full of deep pain, heavy anxiety and….a shit ton of paperwork. It’s actually amazing. I mean, I knew there would be some paperwork, but I had no idea that for many weeks after Shawn’s death, I’d need to devote at least 4-5 hours a day to figuring out finances and bills and forms and everything else. Did your late husband have a car he owned, one that didn’t have you on the title? Well, you’ll have to go to court for that! Yes, even if there was a will. Welcome to probate. I am grateful that I had resources to go to…
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The Anxiety is Real
My sister recently had a baby. A little girl, her second, perfect and tiny and the best possible thing to happen in this year of horror. My dad was finally vaccinated, and he was traveling to see my sister and help with her children. I jumped at the chance to see them both. But that is all the subject of a different blog post. This blog post is about what it’s been like to be on a very full airplane, next to perfectly nice people who are nonetheless scaring the shit out of me. No, they are not reckless, and they have mostly been wearing their masks. But my greeting…
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Death by Pork Butt
I told myself I couldn’t freak out until 10 pm. I had been worried for the past hour, but I tried to rationalize it. Everything was fine. It wasn’t really that late. But then 10 pm arrived, and I let myself get really worried. Where was Chris? He’d been over at his sister’s house that evening, sitting around the fire and chatting with his brother-in-law, Josh. A few friends and neighbors dropped by to say congratulations on our engagement, and Josh was smoking a pork butt in his new smoker. Chris had let me know that things were behind schedule, as the pork butt was taking much longer to cook…
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Three Years
It took Shawn an entire day to die. I laid next to him as he came in and out of this world, holding my hand and squeezing it when he could. Of course, it took him longer than a single day to die. He had been dying for weeks, and we knew for days that the end was very near. But he was always cognitively aware until the very last day of his life. That day, he was more out of this life than he was in it. I knew that he was going to die that day, or sometime very soon. The doctors told me. The nurses told me.…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
