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Why I Write
It’s 5 am and the house is dark. The only light in the kitchen comes from the button on the dishwasher, telling me that it is now clean. The birds aren’t even up yet, but I am. I’ve been here often, in this place and at this time. It has been my writing spot for many years, especially before the sun was up. I didn’t make a conscious effort to wake up in the wee hours of the morning after Shawn died, but it often happened. I’d lay in bed for a while, tossing and turning, my mind often filled with anxiety. Were the kids okay? What was that rattle…
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Things That Remain: Risk (Part 4 of 4)
In this four-part series, I discuss the things that remain for me (and for some of my readers) in the years after widowhood. For many years, I convinced myself that if I just did all the right things, nothing bad would happen. I knew it was a stupid way to think. I’d lost my mom young, so I knew random horror was out there in the world. But I figured I’d had my share of bad luck already, so as long as I didn’t invite any more, life would be okay. After Shawn died, I obsessed about the unfairness of his death. Furthermore, I was irate that all the hard…
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When Auto-Fill Won’t Cut It
I’ve filled out so many forms in my life. That’s part of being an adult, I suppose. But the form-filling-out got way more intense when I became a widow. When Shawn died, I seemed to need a new form for every single account I had everywhere. Sure, that made sense at the bank, but it seemed crazy to me that I needed a needed to fill out a new form (declaring my newly widowed status) for the internet company, among many others. But the worst kinds of forms were the ones I didn’t have to totally re-do. The worst kinds of forms were the drop-down menus that I had to…
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I Don’t Want Anyone to Know, But I Also Want Them to Be Happy for Me
The title of this blog post comes from a public comment I got from a young widow who was starting to date again. She wrote me about finding someone new after losing her husband in her 20s. She told me that being with someone new felt “complicated and weird” and that she really wasn’t sure whether she’d be with this new guy for a long time or not because there were so many difficult emotional issues she was still working through. Still, she was really excited about her new boyfriend. And she wasn’t telling anyone. At the end of the note, she wrote this: “I don’t want anyone to know,…
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Widow Time: Chronos and Kairos
I was talking to Chris the other day, recounting what it was like to be without a partner and have three young kids. “It was so hard,” I said, in the understatement of the year. “It was endless, too. I mean, I was just always alone, always a single parent and a single person.” Chris paused, and seemed to be thinking. He does this when he wants to disagree with me, just a little, but hopes to do it in a thoughtful way. He noted that, actually, I’d only been totally alone for less than three years. He’d moved in about 2 1/2 years after Shawn died. Sure, some of…
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What If My Grief Is Over?
I love running in the pre-dawn hours. Yes, it’s dark. And yes, it’s often cold. But it’s the time when I’ve done some of my best thinking. For a long time, I thought through my blog posts on those solitary runs. Once Chris started joining me, we would sometimes talk about my blog and I would think out loud about what was coming up next. Last week, as I set out on a run with Chris, I told him I was struggling with what to write. This happens sometimes. I mean, it didn’t happen at all for the first 18 months of widowhood because things were so chaotic and hard.…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
