Posts Tagged ‘grief’
Twenty-Four Years Ago Today…
It’s Christmas Eve in the United States. And about twenty-four years ago, it was around this time that my late husband Michael and I had the most amazing thirty-six-hour conversation in my entire life. Long distance, much via AOL Instant Messenger (still a thing in 2001), complete with raw honesty, what I’d call true bravery on both of our parts as we weren’t afraid to be vulnerable (and neither of us was drunk, or had taken any mind-altering substances as far as I know).
See, at the time, I was waiting for my second ex-husband (yes, I’ve been married three times, if I haven’t said that before or in a while) to come back to his home state and sign the divorce papers.
Mind you, I don’t want to discuss my ex here because there are reasons he’s my ex. What I want to discuss instead is the most amazing person I have ever known, my late husband Michael.
I had contemplated annulling my second marriage, but it cost too much time and too much money. That’s why I was going for a straight divorce instead, in the hopes that I’d be able to get out of the marriage faster. But it still took well over a year before my ex decided to sign the papers, mostly because by that time his then-girlfriend and soon-to-be-wife was heavily pregnant.
I truly hope he’s been a better husband to her than he ever was to me. But I digress.
Michael understood two things from the moment he met me (via a mutual friend). One, he knew right off that he was going to marry me. Two, he also knew that if he tried too hard, I’d run like Hell the other way. I’d had bad luck with men, to say the least, and I was divorcing for the second time at the age of thirty-five. I felt like a complete failure, really…I wasn’t one, but I still felt that way.
So, how did we end up having this thirty-six-hour conversation considering he knew I was gun-shy (for good reasons)? Mostly, the first couple of hours were stuff we usually talked about. Books, movies, current events, ethics, morality, you name it. We could talk for hours. He was possibly the one man I’ve ever known who types as fast as I do (as I type around 100 words per minute when I’m all warmed up). He also read as fast as I do, and so we could have these long conversations, intercut with a point from three minutes ago, intercut with another point from a half-hour ago, etc. And it didn’t bore him!
Nope. Instead, I think it enthralled him.
He was lonely, I was lonely, and there’s no doubt that was part of why we started talking that night. But what took us from a developing close friendship to a romance was how vulnerable and open we were that evening. Neither of us wanted to let the other one go. When I went to the bathroom, I’d tell him, and wait for him when he had to go. Neither of us had webcams, which might’ve been just as well (I’m sure he probably had one somewhere, but he wasn’t about to use it), as I was terrified.
Why? I mean, he already knew what I looked like. He knew I was a big, beautiful woman, what they now call a “curvy” woman. He was attracted to me. Partly for my body, I guess, but mostly for the mind and heart and spirit inside that body.
I liked his looks, too, but he could’ve looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame and I’d have still wanted to be with him. (He didn’t. He was quite handsome, actually, but didn’t think so at all.) He had the most beautiful spirit, was kind-hearted, wanted to help people, would do whatever he could to make someone’s life a little better, and yet he also was witty, made me laugh on a continual basis, and him being willing to talk openly about what he wanted in a woman, and what he hadn’t found yet (as he was also divorced; he and his ex stayed friends, and I am still in contact with her, but they weren’t right for each other romantically).
Then, somewhere in those thirty-six hours, he said he thought he’d found it in me. And could we please consider ourselves courting now?
He used that old-fashioned term because it tickled him (he loved British and BBC period dramas), and partly because that’s exactly what he was doing.
Me on the verge of a second divorce did not scare him. It did not make him run away. And he was savvy enough, intelligent enough, and empathetic enough to know how to support me as I got to know him better.
There’s a reason I called him the most wonderful person ever. There actually are many.
So, twenty-four years ago today, my life changed for the better. I took a chance; he took a chance. It was the right thing to do. We were right for one another. Our marriage was a huge success by every metric he and I used: did we care about each other? Could we support one another? Did we have things we loved to do on our own as well as each other? Would we ever run out of stuff to talk about with each other? (Um, no. We never did.) Did we match in every possible way, mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually?
Yes, we did.
We had no money, of course. Neither of us was in good health, and he was in worse health than he knew considering his four sudden heart attacks in one day, culminating in death, in September of 2004. But we wrote together, and it was glorious. (I have to get the two Elfy books out again. I’m sorry it’s taking extra time. Too much going on here, I guess. And my novel Changing Faces was partly the reason he felt he could talk to me in the first place, as he figured anyone who could write that was worthy of the best things in life. He didn’t think he was that, but he wasn’t going to pass on me, either. And he thought my exes were the most foolish, ignorant men on the face of this Earth, too. If I didn’t put that in, he’d not be pleased if he could come back and read this now.) The Elfy duology would not exist without Michael. My other stories, including some set in his own far-future SF Atlantean Union universe, would not exist without Michael. Changing Faces in any form would not exist without Michael either.
Bluntly, I am the person I am today in large part because Michael loved me and he wanted what was best for me. He loved that I played music, he could read music (in all clefs, too, which is hard; yes, I can do it, but I had years of practice and he picked it up seemingly overnight), he loved it that I composed music, he insisted on doing as many household chores as he could to spare me the back and knee pain, he cooked more often than I did even though we were both good cooks, and he made my life so much easier despite all of the obstacles that were in our way.
Once upon a time, I knew that the Deity must love me, or I never would’ve found Michael at all.
If I ever find someone kind enough, good enough, willing to try enough, to be in my life again, it’s because of Michael. His love made it possible for me to see that men can be good, kind, decent, honorable, steady as a rock, encouraging, creative in his own right, quick-witted, and worthy of love in all particulars, in all spheres (mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical), and his love ultimately helped me go on as best I could, even though it did take me at least eleven years to process and even now, still, it often feels like I’m walking on broken glass, trying to pretend my feet aren’t bleeding from the pain of his loss.
So, I don’t know the answers. As I have often said here, I don’t even know the questions sometimes. But I do know that love matters. Creativity matters. Honesty and ethics and fair dealing all matter, too. Honoring the love I had with my husband, that I will have until the day I die and assuredly after as well when we are finally reunited in joy on the other side (hopefully with all the dogs and cats we loved in this life at our sides along with my father and grandmother and all the people Michael had wished I could’ve known better, including his father, who died before I ever knew Michael’s name, much less how wonderful he was).
That’s what matters to me. That’s what’s always going to matter.
May your Christmas and New Years be filled with love, happiness, peace, joy, and whatever else you need to help you have a glorious 2026 despite everything else in your life that gets in the way.
Not having money, not having health, not having a constant place to live, have all gotten in the way of my life for sure. But so long as I have one breath left in my body, I have hope. So long as I remember that a truly good, kind, loving, funny, intelligent, creative person with so many multitudinous talents as Michael loved me, I know I am worthy of that love. And that helps me, at least in part, to get in touch with the Deity in some way, even though I still do not understand why I am here and he is not.
At any rate, it was twenty-four years ago today that my life changed for the better. I think that’s worthy of celebration, even though it’s really hard to celebrate considering Michael’s been dead for twenty-one years, three months, and three days.
Why I’ve Not Blogged Lately…
Folks, the past several months have hit me hard. There have been several “sadiversaries” (AKA sad anniversaries), in a row, and it’s been almost unbearable sometimes to deal with all the grief, mourning, and frustration.
That’s just a fact.
In addition, one of the sadiversaries was the first anniversary of my father’s passing last year. My entire family had trouble with this; it was not just me, not in any way, shape, or form. When the day of observance came, in some ways I didn’t know what to do with myself.
See, going back into June, there was my wedding anniversary, which was possibly the happiest day of my life. Still, when you have had far more years without your husband’s physical presence than you did with, it can be hard to see any of the remaining happiness.
Then there was my husband’s birthday, which he never observed. (As previously stated here at my blog and elsewhere, Michael believed far more in every other day of the year. He’d rather celebrate 364 days than just one.) Yet I observed it…while I never got along with his mother, and never got a chance to meet his father (as Michael’s father died before I met him), the fact is that if they hadn’t met and married, Michael would never have been here at all. I felt that day was worthy of commemoration, and while Michael was alive I would treat it much the same as any other day, you have to understand something: I was so ecstatic to be with Michael, the man I loved, the man I married, the man who understood me…every day was like Christmas, New Year’s, July 4th, or any other holiday that you might wish to observe.
Getting past those two things wasn’t easy. But then there was my birthday, which went surprisingly well this year, followed by the anniversary of Michael’s passing in September. As it’s been a rough couple of years, I couldn’t help but wish I still could feel Michael’s arms around me, and hear his voice tell me it would be all right so long as we had each other. (Anything else could be surmounted, you see. We’d proven that.)
Then came the anniversary of Dad’s passing a few weeks ago. And it’s like something inside me just refused to keep going for a bit.
I think that’s part of the reason why I’ve been sick, physically ill, far more often than I’ve been well in the past few years. While my health was never as robust as it could’ve been, there’s been a marked downturn in some ways of energy, maybe because I’ve had a lot of responsibilities and not too much in the way of fun or entertainment.
See, we don’t live by bread alone. We need other things to season that bread with, or to put on the bread so it tastes better. Salt, pepper, olive oil, butter…you name it, any of those things will make bread taste better, especially if you combine a few. (Such as peppered butter. Yes, that’s a thing.) Yet in my case, I’ve been on subsistence rations for many years now.
I refuse to put on a false face for anyone, because I feel it detracts from my energy, my strength, and my sense of purpose. The way I do my best is to present myself as a hard-working, put-together woman who is trying her damnedest to overcome a difficult series of obstacles. I do that because that is my truth.
I worry, though, because we have AI now, and they aren’t paying writers what they should — or even anything at all — for scooping up their work and training the AIs in the vagaries of human behavior. (At least, this is what it seems from the outside.)
Another problem I’ve been dealing with over the past several months is the physical pain brought on by osteoarthritis throughout my body, along with fibromyalgia flare ups. This saps my strength further, because pain does that. (Then again, as one of Lois McMaster Bujold’s characters says, what golden moments can you wring from life despite the pain? Still working on that one.)
I also worry because I had a very weird experience with someone recently. I thought we were getting to know each other, as friends, and I enjoyed having someone to talk with at the odd hours I have to discuss anything…someone new helped for a while, because I worry that I put too much on my long-term friends as it is. (Sometimes it’s harder to stand and watch as your friend flails than it is to actually do the flailing. Or at least I’m willing to postulate that as possible, maybe even probable.) I looked forward to discussing things with this person, until the day came where I was asked for money — and not just, “Can I borrow $20?”
See, this individual may or may not have been telling me the truth. But one thing I did know was that what was being proposed — me paying bills for them that I’d supposedly get reimbursed for later, all because the account he had was frozen — was a well-known scam. Maybe there’s someone out there who has this real problem, but if he or she does, they need to realize only their long-term friends with a very, very long baseline of knowledge about said person and their life experiences is going to be able to do any good.
What I ended up doing was, I said if the finances were so terrible, it was time to go to the state and ask for help. (Supposedly this person’s son was very ill. The details I’d heard were correct, too. Some con games are far more successful when there’s something true about them, though.) Or go to the hospital and/or clinics the son was being treated at and ask to have bills reduced through community/charity care. (This is a real thing, so if you ever get in a financial bind in the US, ask for help.) Further, I pointed out St. Jude’s Hospital for Children in Indiana, as this person said he was from downstate Illinois — not very far away from Indiana! — and said they were a possibility to bring their sick child to in order to get care. St. Jude’s takes no money from parents; they raise money via donation, in the belief that sick children need care regardless of how much, or even if, their parents can pay at all — and they’re right.
Then I blocked the individual.
I tell you all this for one reason: it’s been a huge stressor on top of other huge stressors. Something that started out as fun chit-chat ended up as that (someone who wanted something from me that I could not provide), and it made me feel like I was just a piece of meat or something. (Shades of Lady Gaga’s “meat dress” from years ago.)
So, that’s why I haven’t blogged in a while. I’ve been trying to get through what seems like a minefield that, while not necessarily filled with active mines, definitely was filled with quicksand (to pull me under), molasses (to keep me stuck), and a whole lot of trepidation.
I don’t know how I’m going to get through this stretch of time. But I figured I’d at least come here and let you know — whoever is still reading, or will read this whenever they see it and are bored (or whatnot) — that I am alive.
Frustrated, but alive.
Angry, but alive.
Tired out of my mind, wishing for a good thing to happen somewhere, somehow…but alive.
My only thought now is this: I hope you all are being good to yourself and your loved ones, and are treating each other the way you, yourselves, want to be treated.
Despite everything, I still believe that is the best strategy to go through life. Treat each other with respect, dignity, and try to find the good in people…or at least try not to spread vitriol, as I’ve said so many times before.
I hope I’m not just shouting into the void, now, with this blog. But if I am, at least I tried…picture me ruefully chuckling at that, because I’d rather try and fail than just refuse to do anything at all.
Let me know how you all are doing, OK? And if you have had something good happen that made you smile, tell me about it in the comments. (Please?)
What Do You Deserve from Your Employer, Or, Meditations on Mike Budenholzer’s Firing from the Milwaukee Bucks
This past week, the Milwaukee Bucks parted ways with their head coach, Mike Budenholzer. The Bucks had the best record in the NBA this past season at 58-24, and had the #1 seed throughout the playoffs. However, this only lasted for one series, as the Bucks were eliminated by the #8 seed, the Miami Heat. It’s because of this disastrous (for pro sports) outcome that Budenholzer was fired.
“Ah, but Barb,” you say. “Your blog’s title is ‘What do you deserve from your employer.’ What does that have to do with the Bucks/Budenholzer situation?'”
My answer: Plenty.
You see, for the second year in a row, the Bucks went out early in the playoffs, though last year the Bucks at least got through the first round and past the #8 seed. (Early, in this context is, “Did not ascend to the NBA Finals.”) The Bucks feature possibly the best player in the NBA, Giannis Antetokounmpo. He’s in his prime right now at age 28, and the Bucks have been built around him for five-plus years now.
I say “five-plus” because Budenholzer was the coach for the past five years. Budenholzer’s record in the regular season was stellar at 271-120, which means the Bucks won almost seventy percent of their games.
Yep. No misprint. That’s how many wins Budenholzer had as the head coach of the Bucks: 271.
Not only that, Budenholzer coached the Bucks to the 2021 NBA Championship. The Bucks hadn’t won a championship in the NBA in fifty years, but they won with “Coach Bud.”
“Barb, you still haven’t gotten to the bit about what the coach deserves from his employer. I assume that’s where you’re going with this?”
Why, yes, dear reader. That is exactly — exactly — what I’m going for, and I’ll tell you why, too.
First, though, I want to explain something else to y’all, some of you who probably don’t know much about professional basketball. When you have the best team in the league, you are expected to win all the time, no matter what.
Including when one of your brothers dies in a car accident, which no one knew about until after the Bucks had lost in five games to the Heat.
See, Coach Bud didn’t want to make the playoffs about him, so he said nothing. But he was grieving. He found out just before game four that his brother had died. And it was in games four and five that some of the coach’s decisions seemed rather odd. But he is the youngest of seven kids. One of his elder brothers died, Budenholzer was being private as is his right about his brother’s passing, but I don’t think the coach understood just how strange grief can be when it comes to anything else. Most particularly the time sense, as when you grieve for someone you loved, nothing seems real for a while. And certainly time seems sometimes like it’s running away, and other times, it seems like it’s stopped.
I don’t know about you, but I think if someone who’s very good at their job, like Coach Bud, has a bad series or makes questionable decisions after his brother dies, I think you should give him a pass. He’s grieving, dammit! His brother’s life was more important than basketball, and yet because he is a professional, and because he’d been with his team all year, he stayed to do his best and coach his team.
I admire that impulse, but it may not have the right one.
That said, the Bucks did way wrong here. They should not have fired Coach Bud, not under these circumstances. Instead, they should’ve hired a top-flight assistant head coach perhaps to work on the defense (as the Bucks’ defense got torched by Heat superstar Jimmy “Buckets” Butler and were completely unable to stop him) and let the coach grieve his brother.
Why? Well, look again at the coach’s record. Think about the fact that two years ago, the Bucks won the NBA Championship for the first time in 50 years with this coach at the helm.
In most cases, employers realize if they have a great employee — and in any case, Coach Bud was just that — but the employee is a bit off due to grief or grieving, even if the employee maybe doesn’t even realize it (it’s possible the coach didn’t), you are supposed to let your employee take time off to deal with his grief.
In other words, you don’t fire the best coach in the NBA because he was off a bit for two games after his brother died. That’s dumb, to put it mildly, and more to the point, it’s an overreaction.
So, what does your employer owe you when you have something awful happen like a death in the family? They owe you time to grieve. They should give you time off from work, with pay, to go bury your sibling in a case like this.
You don’t deserve to be fired.
I don’t know Coach Budenholzer at all. But I do know this. What the Bucks did was classless, not to mention truly horrible behavior under the circumstances. They should not have done this. And as a Bucks fan, I am incensed.
Peace and Remembrance
Yesterday was my eighteenth wedding anniversary, AKA the sixteenth wedding anniversary I’ve spent alone since my husband Michael died suddenly and without warning in 2004. Usually, observing this day and remembering how wonderful Michael was in all his allness crushes me. (I’m not going to lie.)
But this year was different.
(Why? I don’t know.)
I decided that I was going to do my best to remember Michael as he was. How he loved to make me laugh. How he enjoyed doing just about anything with me. How he wanted to hear whatever I had to say on whatever subject, and about how interested he was to hear about my day even when I had been sick for three days running and hadn’t even been able to go to the computer.
In short, Michael was an outstandingly good husband as well as an outstandingly good man. And I felt better for remembering him that way.
Many anniversaries, I’ve thought more about what I’ve lost than what I’ve gained. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, either. It’s how I felt at the time, it was authentic, and it was the best I could do to process my catastrophic level of grief.
But this time, I was able to think more about what Michael and I did together. How we wrote, together and separately, and talked our stories out together. How we watched current events, sometimes bemusedly, sometimes with great insight, and could talk them through in a historical context. How we were able to talk about spiritual matters, him being a Zen Buddhist and me being a spiritual seeker who probably best aligns with NeoPaganism (but isn’t NeoPagan enough for some because I still appreciate the life and works of Jesus Christ and try to make common cause with what makes sense to me, especially “love one another”). How we were able to forge a life together despite previous divorces…
Anyway, concentrating on what we were good at together, and how good we were together, helped me a lot. I was able to get through the day with more peace than usual.
I will always wish Michael were still alive, beside me, on this plane of existence. I wish he were still here, writing his stories, writing with me, helping me with my stories, and editing for other people. I wish he were able to tell me what he thinks of the state of the world — most particularly the coronavirus concerns and the #BlackLivesMatter protests, though I’d be interested to hear his (likely trenchant) takes on the current crop of DC politicians (most especially President Trump, someone I don’t think Michael would’ve cared for at all due to that gentleman’s previous experiences as a reality TV star). I wish he were still here so I could see his smile, hear his laugh, enjoy his touch, and get to watch and listen and observe how he got through the world with such serenity and optimism.
But as he’s not alive on this plane — though I do believe the spirit is eternal, and that love never dies either, so in those senses he’ll always be with me — I can only do what I can to remember. And yesterday, I chose to remember the good.
To The Grieving…Some Thoughts
Folks, I have written about this subject before, most notably here, here, and here. And I’ve also pointed out the many difficult problems when it comes to grief in a few essays, most notably this one on Lois McMaster Bujold’s GENTLEMAN JOLE AND THE RED QUEEN and this one on Debbie Macomber’s HANNAH’S LIST. But I have even more thoughts on the subject of grief, so…here we go again.
Grief is incredibly hard to deal with. I know I’m not telling you anything new. But it’s because I want to give some sort of comfort that I’m writing again about grief, loss, and the frustrations at expressing all of it in words, in the hopes that someone out there will understand that he or she is not alone.
I have a number of friends who are grieving. Some are recent widows and widowers. Some have been widows and widowers for quite some time. But all are hurting, because their spouses and the loves of their lives are not here on this Earth anymore. Yet they are left behind, powerless to do anything except remember what was, and what never will be again. And none of them, not one, knows what to do except putting one foot in front of the other, because it hurts so badly to go on when you’ve sustained such a deep loss.
I don’t believe in platitudes or weasel-words. So I refuse to say that eventually it’ll get easier to handle the loss of your spouse to anyone. Especially as I haven’t found it to be such at all.
But I can give at least a little comfort to those of you who are suffering, because I’ve been through it. (Sometimes, still going through it. One slow step at a time.) I do understand where you are, why you hurt so badly, and why you’re angry that you’re in this place at all.
Death comes for us all, yes. But sometimes it comes so early, it’s impossible to process. As advice columnist Carolyn Hax of the Washington Post put it recently, “Here we were, thinking we were X. And now the universe says, ‘nope, now you’re going to be Y.'” (My elaboration on that theme is, “And too bad that you enjoyed being X, ’cause you’re not going to get to be X again.” So no wonder why we hate it, no? But I digress.)
What I have found is that over time, I can handle the pain a little better.
But I’m not going to lie. I still hate it. The man who understood me, loved me, and appreciated me the most in all the worlds and time is on the Other Side, and I am still here. I defy anyone to tell me why this is a good thing.
Yet I have also figured out — slowly, painfully, and painstakingly — that as long as I live, at least a part of my husband lives on in me. (In the “two shall become one” sense, if nothing else.) And that gives me great comfort.
But I want to say one more thing to those of you grieving right now. (Ready?)
Your life matters. Not just because you were the spouse of someone wonderful who’s passed on to eternity. But because you, yourself, are an incredible person with much to offer the world. And unique gifts of your own that your spouse, were they here to tell you, would want you to continue using to the best of your ability.
I know it doesn’t feel like that now. It can’t. You are hurting, you wonder what in the Hell the point is, and you wonder why on Earth you’re still here when your spouse isn’t.
But it’s still the truth.
You matter. And as long as you live, you can still affect the outcome at least a little bit, while keeping the memory of your beloved spouse alive.
So walk on, with your memories and your love intact. And never listen to the fools and idiots out there who may say “get over it” and “move on,” as those are both impossible and irrelevant to the grieving process.
“Writing After Widowhood” Essay Is Up…
Folks, author and editor Deborah J. Ross asked me, a while back, if I’d be willing to write an essay for her about the differences between writing before my husband Michael died, and after. I called this essay “Writing After Widowhood,” and it is up now at her blog. Here are a few excerpts, though I do hope you’ll go over there and read it…then let people know, far and wide, about it.
(In particular, if you can leave a comment at her blog, do. I am all thumbs today, and can’t seem to get Blogger to accept my profile for love or money, meaning I can’t even comment over there. This is very frustrating. So if you can do it instead, that would be great.)
Here’s a bit of what I remember about writing before widowhood, mind:
Anyway, when Michael was alive, we wrote some short stories together despite having very different writing styles. We could do this because we’d heard Eric Flint, in 2002, discuss how he collaborated with other authors. It was all about communication, Flint said, “Also, if you could check your ego at the door, that would help immensely.”
That wasn’t all Michael did, mind you. He edited for me, as I edited for him. He and I talked about our stories for many hours a day, every day of the week, a great gift…and he made sure to do all the things a good husband does for his wife without prompting—and without fanfare.
My quote there is my best remembrance from 2002. That comment from Eric Flint was made at a gathering of Baen Barflies (or Barfly gathering) in July of 2002 in Chicago to the best of my recollection. It was only a few, short weeks after our marriage, and it made a huge impression on me.
I discuss Michael’s passing (which you should go over there and read about), its effects on me, why I decided to keep going with his stories as best I could and get at least a few of them out there, and a bit about how frustrating it was to write for a few years after Michael died.
Then I got into the nitty gritty about what it’s like to write now:
But as I started writing again, I realized something. I am a verbal processor. I need to talk my stories out with someone who wants to hear about it. And since Michael died, I really haven’t had that. Though I do have some very good friends who will let me bend their ears on occasion, they are working writers. They are doing more in the field than I am currently, and I don’t want to be a millstone around their necks.
(And yes, I listen to them. Of course I do. But that’s not the point.)
With Michael, I knew if I made mistakes, he’d fix them. Or he’d show me where I’d made mistakes, and I’d fix them myself. I had more confidence in going to write on a day I had little energy (as I have battled lifelong health issues), because if I screwed up on a name or made an unnecessary tense-shift, he’d catch it. So I could relax and create.
Those were the good old days.
And I discuss what I try to do now to get around what I call “Life, Interrupted.” I write prose notes on days I can’t do anything else. I think a lot about my stories (I didn’t say this at Deborah’s blog, but I hope it’s implied in subtext). And I do my best to keep my husband Michael uppermost in my mind on the worst of days, because he believed in me — and dammit, if he could believe in me, so can I.
I do hope you will read the rest of the essay. It’s about 1400 words long, so I only excerpted a little bit of it here to whet your whistle.
For other widows and widowers out there, or those touched by tragedy in other ways who are struggling, know that your life can continue. It is frustrating, difficult, sometimes exasperating, but you can keep creating if you make the effort. It won’t be the same — it can’t be the same — but you don’t have to lose all of yourself when your spouse dies.
It took me a while to learn this. But now that I have, my hope is that I can help others along the way.
Barb Caffrey's Blog 