Moving from End to Beginning

As most readers of this blog know, I was widowed suddenly and unexpectedly in June of 2013, when the car my husband was driving was struck by another car and spun into oncoming traffic. My posts about the process of grief since then have generally been the most read posts on this blog, and they are also the posts about which I most often get messages from strangers telling me how helpful they were. 

They are all tagged with "widowhood", so you can access this corpus using the "labels" menu on the blog, but that widget will provide them in reverse chronological order. This page gives them in chronological order, from the end of my marriage through the beginning of the next chapter of my life. 

This process has not been linear, and it has not been pleasant. And I feel very strongly that we need to talk about the complexities of grief, grieving, and building an ongoing life after loss. 

There will not be a simple way to navigate from one post to the next as you're reading. You'll need to use your back button to return to this list at the end of each post. 

1. What I Need Right Now - initial announcement post and instructions for collective grief
2. Don't Wait for Tragedy - a reflection on friendship
3. Gratitude - for help right away
4. Unusual Grief - on resisting expectations and stereotypes
5. How Are You? - on language and performativity
6. black - a reflection on my choice to wear only black for a while
7. ring - on not wearing mine anymore
8. milestones - on the events that are highlighted by grief
9. first days back - on the struggle of returning to something resembling my regular work life
10. zweifelt - on choices and discernment
11. preliminary hearing - on the court case with the at-fault driver, part 1
12. lingering fog - on the cognitive effects of grief
13. (literary) companions in grief - on the poems that kept me company
14. Walk in the Light - a sermon on advent, candles, and living my values
15. things - on dealing with objects
16. disposition - on the court case with the at-fault driver, part 2
17. color - on bringing it back
18. things I miss - on the quotidian poignancies of grief
19. real - on virtual community
20. paperwork - a lament and an outrage
21. road not taken - a pondering 
22. dust - which we all are
23. empty - on confronting bigger changes
24. flannel hope - on the opportunity to re-make choices
25. a glimpse of remembrance - on memory aids
26. girl power - on empowerment and friendship
27. seeing myself - on changing identity in grief
28. unniversary - on how to mark an anniversary that no longer exists
29. sable letter - on social expectations and why I hate them
30. angry - it is a legitimate stage of grief, and we need to make more room for it
31. fear - also an underappreciated aspect of grief
32. perspective - on seeing things differently
33. chalk - on regaining my professional self
34. still in love - with love
35. breadwinner - on the frustration of being one
36. done not done - on being ready to move but feeling trapped
37. donate - on organ and tissue donation
38. walls - lament on selling our house
39. on moving - ambivalence
40. a glimpse of freedom - joy at selling our house
41. uncertainty and the purple - on lent and liminality
42. free at last - on independence
43. begin again - contemplating that space between end and beginning
44. promise - on what we owe to the dead
45. three - a reflection three years later
46. audacity - shock at my own self
47. finding the joy - on poignant moments
48. birthdays - and why I love them!
49. loneliness - a lament
50. guessing wrong - on the stress of choosing again
51. death has a body - and we should view them, actually
52. justice and mercy - why we should all work toward restorative justice
53. lovely weather, for a duck - on intangible inheritance
54. forty - was a big birthday for me
55. color, revisited - a reflection
56. feeling complexity - in which it is okay to feel more than one thing at a time
57. raisins and tears - on grief bursts that surprise you (me!)
58. fifty - was not a birthday for him