Ready for Christmas

It always seems there isn’t enough December for all the things I want to do during the Christmas season!  It took me three weeks to put up all the Christmas decorations.  I would work for ten or fifteen minutes and then get distracted or (better yet!) tired.  We always wait till about 10 days before Christmas to get a tree […]

Distraction

I’ve learned something valuable this past month – distraction can get in the way of grieving, and not in a good way.  A few weeks ago I was at a baptism for the daughter of a friend and right at the end, I found myself crying for no apparent reason.  Despite the fact that I write a public blog I’m […]

Maybe Just a Little Angry …

I’m not feeling strong or brave or submissive.  We got through the first major holiday without Tom and honestly, there was so much going on and Thanksgiving is always more about the whole group than about our little family so it wasn’t bad.  What was hard was being the single one in the midst of all the couples and being […]

Coping with Change

Back in 2002 (I think), when Tom called to tell me that his job had ended, I had a flood of worries fill my mind. How would we pay our bills? What would we live on? How long would it take Tom to find a job? What should I do? That’s only a small sample of the questions I had. […]

Courage

Sunday morning as we were singing the sacrament hymn (the sacrament is another word for communion) this phrase in the song stood out to me: “for courage to accept thy will”. The word courage seems to describe perfectly my feelings. It is hard and sometimes scary to be living this new life. I never thought it was possible to live […]

Quick Fix

Eight years ago, when we moved into our present home, we bought our first set of grown up furniture for our living room (translation: not hand me downs or thrift store finds). We’ve loved the leather couch, love seat, and chair that we purchased. They are a small scale, have classic lines, and have held up well. Except for the […]

How Are You Doing?

Is there anything to write about besides the obvious? Everyone wants to know how we are – is it getting better? How are the kids? What can we do to help?  I feel like I have no good answers.  We’re doing O.K.  Life is moving forward, mostly in the way that it did before – just with less laughter (because, […]

My Grief Observed

In a nod to the incomparable C.S. Lewis, whose book A Grief Observed I recently read, I thought I’d write about some of the things I have experienced the past twenty-five days.  How I have grieved has been surprising to me, though I’m sure many will tell me that my experiences are nothing new (and that is actually a comforting thing). When […]

Thomas Wood – 1965-2014

A week ago I found myself trying on dresses.  It was the first time I had left my house since I had arrived there Monday afternoon.  As I stood among the clothing racks I had this sense of dislocation.  I was doing this completely ordinary thing – picking out a new dress – but it was for this terrible new […]

Big bump in the road …

23 years ago when I first started dating Tom, he took me for a walk and warned me he had something to tell me. He was so serious and I suddenly felt nervous. I imagined all sorts of awful things. I was actually relieved when he told me that he had diabetes! It didn’t seem like a big deal then, […]