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‘Till Death Do Us Part
In just a few days, under the bright Maine sky, Chris and I will be married. We’ve thought a lot about our wedding, about how we want to share our love with our family and friends, and what it means to formally recognize our commitment to each other. We think we’ve got a lot of unique moments planned for the ceremony. But one thing that won’t be unique? Our vows. We decided early on that we wanted to say traditional Episcopal wedding vows. We liked the simplicity and we liked that we’d be saying the same words that so many people have said before us. This is what I will…
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If My Wedding is Cancelled, Then I Can Make Jury Duty
I came home a few days ago to a letter in the mail with the dreaded “official jury summons” stamp across the front. I sighed and picked it up. I guess it was time to me to have jury duty again. The last time I’d gone, in fact, was just a few weeks after Shawn died. Here’s part of what I wrote that day, from one of my oldest blog posts, Chuck E. Cheese and Jury Duty: It’s 8:30 am and I’m sitting with 200 of my fellow DC residents, waiting to be called for jury duty. My friends all thought I should defer, that coming to jury duty would…
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Successes (Part 2 of 2)
My life as a young widow has included a lot of failure, especially in (though not limited to!) the first year. There were so many things I did wrong, so many choices I regretted and so many ways in which I made my already difficult circumstances worse. And yet, my years of widowhood have not all been about failure. In fact – even that first year – I’ve had some successes. So, here they are! Ways I’ve succeeded as a widow: Logistics: One of the very first failures I experienced was my broken washing machine, which happened less than a week after Shawn died. It was just the start of…
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A Happy Ending
One of my favorite authors (who I profiled for the Post a few years ago) is Nora McInerny, a young widow who is a writer and a podcaster. She wrote a book that came out a few years ago called “No Happy Endings” which, as you can imagine, was about how there is always going to be grief that remains after losing someone, even if we find a new love. (It’s about a lot of other things, too, so check out this link if you’d like to read what I wrote.) In any case, lately I’ve been thinking about the idea that grief never really goes away. I think it’s…
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Ask a Widow: Am I Moving Forward if I’m Still Angry?
Answer: Yes. That’s my answer to the question “am I moving forward if I’m still angry?” It’s a question I get frequently from readers in one form or another. So many widows I know – both my friends and people I’ve met online – want desperately to move forward with their lives. (On the whole, most widows say they want to “move forward” rather than “move on,” since the latter seems to imply leaving behind all memory of the person who was lost.) Regardless of how a widow wants to define it, there often comes a point in a widow’s life when you begin to move beyond the initial loss.…
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Easter Joy
For the past four years, Easter has been an important marker in my life. Maybe it’s because in my faith and in my family, Easter is a time of joy – and joy is something that hasn’t always been so easy to grasp since Shawn died. Even as the trees turned pink with flowers and the purple-red buds of the peonies peeked above the ground, even as there was hope and life everywhere and even as I heard the church sermons that proclaimed joy for this time of year – well, even then, I couldn’t always embrace the idea that joy was all around me. The first Easter I celebrated…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
