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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…
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Widowhood and Breakups
I’ve been thinking a lot about breakups lately, which I guess is super strange since I’m also wedding planning. Let me be clear – I’m not thinking about my own relationship breaking up! But I think being in love (and knowing that I have a future with someone new) has made me reflect on all the times when it didn’t work out. And there were a lot of times when it didn’t work out. I wrote very little about it at the time. I told some of my friends that I was dating, but I was shy about it with most people. I felt judged by everyone, even though the…
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2020 Vision Revisited
2020. You certainly didn’t go as planned, did you? I mean, I wrote a whole blog post at the start of last year about vision, and how important it was going to be for me to have some clarity about my life in 2020. Yes, 2018 had been the year of survival, and 2019 had been the “year of yes” but 2020 was going to be the year that I finally pulled myself together. Here’s a piece of what I wrote in the post “2020 vision“: Recently on my runs, I’ve started to pass by the National Cathedral here in Washington. Because I run so early, I’m often passing it…
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Ask a Widow: Legacy (Part 1)
I get a number of private messages on my blog, and I try and respond when I can. Usually, there is little I can offer to grieving people except to say, “It’s terrible. Hang in there.” But every once in a while, I get a letter that really makes me think. That happened to me last week, and the reader graciously allowed me to address it publicly. Here’s an excerpt of that note, edited for privacy: My husband died two years ago. He was one of those people who was well known by many. We had hundreds of people attend his funeral and to this day, he is loved and…
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A Life That Sparkles (400th Blog Post)
I don’t know what the statistics are around it, but I know a lot of widows who’ve recently decided to move. I think there’s a number of reasons for this, but certainly a house can feel heavy when so many memories remain in it. Given different circumstances (if my husband had died in the house, for example) I might have moved too. But Shawn was insistent that I stay in the house. He knew what it would take for me to stay, and he talked me through it. He instructed me on how to pay the bills and fix the clogged drains and how often to clean the gutters. “Staying…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
