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Any Day You Can Die
I was walking to my Spanish class the other day and out of the corner of my eye I saw a sticker on a post that was in English. I guess it grabbed my attention because I don’t see much in English in my daily life. Or maybe it’s because of what it said: Any Day You Can Die I stared at it for a minute, and then snapped a photo. Was it encouragement? A nihilistic viewpoint? A threat? A dose of reality for English speakers? Who knows! But I kept thinking about this sticker all day. A few nights later, we went out to dinner as a family. Out…
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Things That Remain: Fear (Part 2 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. Here’s one of my dark little secrets: Every morning, as I kiss my kids goodbye and watch them leave the house for school, one thought always enters my head: I hope they don’t die. I know – what a morbid thing to think! I don’t know if I ever worried about this before Shawn died, but I know it was a bit of an obsession of mine after he died. I knew I would be broken without my children and even though I tried not to think…
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What If He Dies? (Part 2)
Well. There’s nothing like writing a post about my fear of Chris’s death to cause a lot of mail to arrive in my inbox. Some of these messages were public. But a lot of them were private, as sometimes happens with really intense posts I write. “I feel that way too,” said one reader after another. “I worry about my new partner dying.” “I know,” I’d write back. “It’s just something widows feel, I think. We know death is real. And even though we’ve faced it, it still scares us.” A few days after I wrote the post, I was talking to Chris in the kitchen after dinner. We picked…
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What If He Dies?
I woke up in the dark this morning, and I was alone. I could hear Chris rustling in the next room, probably putting things in his overnight bag. He was leaving on a very early flight. His job is still based in Atlanta, and thus to Atlanta he had to go. I wasn’t fully awake yet, and so I simply laid there, listening to his quiet movements. He stepped softly, not wanting to wake me up. He loves me so much, I thought. I’m so lucky to have him, I thought. And then, in an instant, my thoughts turned. What if he dies? I thought. My heart started to race.…
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Someday, I’ll Watch Him Die (500th Blog Post)
“I’m so sorry,” the clerk said, handing the papers back to me, “but this won’t work. It’s a copy, and we need the original death certificate in order to issue you a marriage license.” She nodded sympathetically as I sighed. My heart sank. I knew it wasn’t a big deal, really, because we still had time to get all the paperwork together. I knew that part of marriage is just getting the contract in order, and that had nothing to do with love. I knew we could eventually get everything sorted. I was still totally overwhelmed in that moment. We’d come to the town hall in Chris’s hometown in Maine,…
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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…