Life as a Young Widow
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This is the title Claire Bidwell Smith gave to her book, and honestly it rings very true –though of course with the caveat that there really are no linear stages of grief, it is a squiggly messy route through it. As I look back, anxiety was a big theme of year two of my grief.…
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The holidays can hit hard. It’s a bit like the love bombing of Valentine’s day, but this is a long season that seems to almost pressure cook our grief. I’ve been reflecting on how far I’ve come on my grief journey to find a sort of balance, holding both the joy and sadness that this…
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I sat at a table with three people I barely knew, just chatting. We’d been talking about pets when one of them shared, “I’d choose my dog over my husband any day – that’s really all you need in your life”. I had a moment in my head of ohh she assumes I’m divorced like…
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I went to turn on the air purifier in our room, expecting to hear the humming of the machine as I turned the dial. But I didn’t. Oh it was unplugged. That brief space between expecting something and it not being there? I was thinking this is totally life after a huge loss. It’s part…
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As time goes on the finality of this settles in a bit more and I’ve needed to navigate moving forward. That opens up the question, how do I exist in this new reality? There is a process of “trying on” if or how everything fits in my new life, as I challenge myself to…
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Anxiety is a pretty natural response after losing your spouse, but oh what a beast! It’s a kind of anxiety where you can’t really talk yourself down from it. If you try to convince your brain that the worst case scenario won’t happen… well it did, like worse than I ever could have imagined. So…
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I haven’t posted for a bit, despite having pages upon pages of half-written posts. Sometimes I wonder if my writing should just be for myself, not wanting to share anything too depressing or offend anyone. A little while ago I listened to a webinar with David Kessler and Andrea Cagan on writing through loss and…
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I wrote about taking hustle culture out of grief here. This is me reflecting more on the challenge of slowing down to lean into the grieving process, and what might shake our ability to do that. I’ve learnt a helpful new term – “grief thief” (I first learnt the expression from reading Grief is a…
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I want to be over this. I’ve put in the work. Now can’t I just be healed up and back to normal? One of the hardest parts of my second year of grief has been crashing into this idea over and over again. This is not short-term. Tom is still dead and he’s going to…
A Smiling Young Widow 