Happy birthday, you gregarious, wonderful, beautiful, frustrating, hilarious, fantastic, fascinating, unique and incredibly absent man. Your birth touched many, many lives. Your life was so full, you lived several lifetimes in your short life, more than most people live. Today, I want to celebrate that life but all I can do is think about your death. All I can think is that you’re gone and that full, lively, wonderful, topsy-turvy life of yours is history. There is no more life for you. It’s still hard to process. It still feels weird, like it’s not real. Death is so weird, it’s just so weird. Birthdays are a lovely thing, though. They…
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All is not lost. All is never lost.
Hi. How are you? No. I mean, how are you? Tell me honestly. Tell me, truthfully. What is eating you up inside? What do you feel like you have to hide from the world? I actually want to hear it. I want to hear what makes this world painful for you because I also want you to know that you are not alone. Emotions are scary. Depression is scary. Fear, anger, frustration, feeling isolated, alone, abandoned; it’s all scary. It’s scary as hell just writing this post. Man, it can all suck so much, can’t it? You are not alone. Does it feel like the world would be better without…
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Two Years Ago, Everything Changed
The obituary above is from the book, Obituaries in the Performing Arts, 2016. I found it today while I was googling my late husband. My late husband. My husband who died. He’s dead. I still can’t believe it. I wonder if it will ever feel real. Losing somebody as close as a spouse or a child or a sibling—anybody who changes your day-to-day—feels like there was a nuclear attack, annihilating everything and nobody seemed to notice. They see that you notice it, but they walk around like everything is still the same. It’s weird. I remember wondering how it was that the world could still go on after Steven died.…
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Grief and Friends – Oh, That Second Year of Grief
This is a post I don’t particularly want to write but I feel like I have to. I am working through coming to terms with the stark reality of the second year of grief and how it affects everything. Simply everything. I want to share this because I think it’s important. I know it’s important. It has been very hard to find positivity in the second year. Oh, I’ve been able to do it and I’ve had some great people in my life help me with it but it’s been hard and it gets harder as the two year anniversary approaches in almost exactly a week. I’ve dealt with more…
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Deadlines and Grief
So, I made a deadline for myself to have a book finished about my grief in the first year of losing my husband. What was I thinking? I forgot how much of that initial raw grief this whole thing dusts up when I work on it. I forgot how much it brings back my widow brain. So, obviously, I am not making my deadline. However, I did learn something from this! Never set a deadline on a project dealing with my grief! Never. Oh you guys, never ever. The last thing I should have done was compound the grief flashbacks with a feeling of pressure to meet a deadline. Not…
