loss
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The week after Tom’s funeral I listened to my mom try to access her credit card account over the phone and fail every one of her own security questions. I laughed, like really laughed. I think I remember this moment so vividly because it was such a foreign thing to experience the deep darkness and…
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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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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 where I realized ohh she assumes I’m…
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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…
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I’m going to share a bit about my favourite grief theory (kind of crazy that I have a favourite grief theory, hey?) – it’s called the continuing bonds theory. Here is a quick overview I’m taking word-for-word from this website: When your loved one dies, grief isn’t about working through a linear process that ends…
A Smiling Young Widow 