November 9, 2018 will mark fourteen years since I lost Kelly. This is what I wrote yesterday. Today is a better day, but the questions still remain.
Reflections of Widowhood after 14 Years
November 7, 2018
Sometimes what is in your heart precludes being productive and getting things done. The last few days have been that way for me. It has been a struggle to stay focused, to stay upbeat, and to look for the good. That’s not to say there is anything terribly wrong with my life, because really there isn’t. In fact, overall my life is better right now than it has been for a long time. I realize that, I recognize that, and yet. And. Yet. I feel like crying—heaving wrenching tears that begin in my toes and course upward through my body gaining momentum, building in intensity, until they are stopped — bottled up by the rock-solid lump in my throat that refuses release — No spilling out of my eyes, cascading down my eyelashes, and dripping down my cheeks leaving salty tracks in their wake.
It’s been some time since I’ve felt this kind of pain. I recognize it as what I have long referred to as a widow moment, this time, arrested in flight, blocked by a lump in my throat and iron control exerted over my emotions. But perhaps I would be wise to indulge in the tears, to let myself feel the pain, even though there is no apparent reason to be in pain. Tomorrow it will be fourteen years. Fourteen years since I lost Kelly in an instant. He was just forty-six and I was forty-three. We were in our twenty-third year of marriage. We had experience behind us and plenty of life to live ahead of us. But our life, his life, was cut short.
Too young. He was too young to die and leave me alone. Alone. Solitary. One. Single. Widow. A widow at the age of forty-three, with six children — five of them still at home. I wasn’t alone in my home. But, I was alone in my heart. Even now, all of these years later, I tell myself it wasn’t like he had a choice in the matter. He didn’t choose to abandon me to life without a partner. He didn’t want to leave me to figure out how to be both mother and father, how to support my family, how to pull myself together enough to function. Intellectually I understand that it wasn’t his choice, yet my heart disagreed, protesting. Sometimes I have blamed him for being gone, for leaving me, for not being there when I had to make decisions regarding, well, everything. Making decisions on your own is hard, and I have made so many mistakes along the way. Continue reading →
Kelly carving the Thanksgiving turkey, about 1995, note the holiday dishes. I worked hard selling Tupperware to get those dishes as a sales bonus. We still use them thirty-some years later. The turkey looks good, too! 
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