I would like to tell you, dear fellow members of the Club No One Wants to Join, especially those younger to widowhood than I am, that it gets easier over time. And I can. For it does. It gets easier over time. I would also, so very much, like not to tell you that you…
That last Thursday in November, I had been at Miller Williams‘ sixth or eighth Survey of Western Poetry class, which I was auditing at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.I’d drive over each Thursday — it was about an hour from Eureka Springs — immerse myself in Miller’s world, do any Fayetteville errands that I…
How do we travel through widowhood and grief towards whatever the next phase of our life will be if, as we said last week, “healing” doesn’t work as a model? And let’s look at a couple of other commonly used phrases that also don’t apply; “getting over it,” and “closure.” How can you “get over”…
In the little Arkansas town (population, then, just under 2000) in which Ned and I had lived, everybody did not exactly know each other. But we certainly knew about each other. Maybe two years after Ned’s death, still deeply bereft, I ran into Freddy. We were friends, though not close. He was someone I knew…
“What’s on your mind this morning?” Facebook asked me cheerily last week. As it does daily, to any user who opens it before noon. That morning happened to be September 10th, 2017. What was on my mind? Quite a bit. It was the day before the 16th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks. It was the…
You expect things like anniversaries. Like birthdays. Like Father’s Day (if he was the father of your children). Mother’s Day (if she was the mother of your children). Like “We would have been married 31 years today.” Like, looking at your watch and seeing the exact dark beat of time, when according to the death…