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Last Night
I felt the hair on his face brush up against my cheek. He pulled back for a minute and looked at me. I could see the lines around his eyes crinkle up into a slight smile. Then he closed his eyes and kissed me really slowly. His arms, strong and twice as big as my own, were wrapped around me. I was so happy. Blissfully happy, like that kind of happy you feel when a child is born or you have that first kiss with someone you know you’ll be with forever. But after that moment came confusion. Why was I so happy? He looked at me, and then I…
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Young Love
I was flying to the Cayman Islands to take a break from my life. It was just after Christmas, and the plane was filled with people vacationing. I located my seat, and then I saw the people sitting next to me – a really young couple who were holding hands. I took a deep breath and sat down. I’ve written before about how hard it can be at times to hang out with my happily married friends. But a newly in-love couple….well, that’s a whole other ball game. “Hi!” the girl said in the happiest voice I’d heard in a long time. She was darling, and so was the boy…
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Across the Doctor’s Office
Almost daily, someone asks me why I decided to write this blog. Here’s the response I usually give: In the beginning it was a way for me to connect with my loved ones and get my feelings out into the open. But then the blog (and my motivations behind it) changed a bit. DC Widow became a place of where I could connect with people that I didn’t know, specifically other young widows. My posts sparked conversations with my friends both online and in person. Soon, I found that I had a new reason for writing. I wanted my loss to have some sort of meaning. One of the posts…
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“I Want Daddy to Come Back”
Earlier this week, I told my kids that I was going to go to the cemetery on the anniversary of their father’s death. “Do any of you want to come?” Austin and Tommy enthusiastically agreed. “I want to come too,” Claire said softly. I was happy. A year ago, she refused to go to the cemetery. She thought it would be too sad, and though she couldn’t quite explain it, she worried about re-living the moment her father’s body was put in the ground. But when she finally went, on Shawn’s birthday last summer, she found it to be a place that was calming for her. She still doesn’t go…
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When He Was Still Mine
One year ago today, curled up next to him in the hospital bed, I began to tell him a story. It was the story of our life together. I was up almost the entire night previously. He was sick, and needed care and I couldn’t sleep and let him suffer. At 4 am I checked his breathing. At 5 am I called my friends to bring me paperwork so I could take over the medical decision-making process. At 6 am I called his family. “Hurry,” I said. At 7 am, the palliative care nurses came in, and I wept for the first time in 12 hours. “You can get in…
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In the Movie Version of My Life
A few weeks ago, I was washing dishes and talking to my friends Becky and Michelle. They had come over with their kids for dinner and we were chatting about our lives. We discussed a blog post of mine that had come out recently – the one about how I need to figure out how to make it in the world without a man. “Not forever, mind you!” I said with a wink. They knew what I meant. I’m certainly not done with men for the rest of my life. And yet the future of that part of my life seems…difficult to comprehend. “In the movie version of your life,”…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
