Widows Walking in Wild Weather
April 19, 2024 1 CommentPhotos my own 16 July 2023 It is almost fully five years since I wrote a piece called “Widow Walking in Wild Weather”. It’s here: http://www.widowingemptynests.com/2018/09/23/widow-walking-in-wild-weather/ And, potentially lacking in imagination, this piece is called “Widows Walking in Wild Weather”. Plural. Simply because this time it is not just me, but me and fellow widbud, […]
Read MoreEndings, endings, endings everywhere
April 19, 2024 No CommentsMain image by Ben Wicks on Unsplash 9 July 2023 One of my favourite “change” models (and I know quite a few) is that of Bill Bridges – and crucially, it’s called “Transitions”. I love this man’s work for so many reasons – not least because I trained for my first marathon, back in 1997, […]
Read MoreFour Years – p l e a s e let him be right
April 19, 2024 1 CommentPhoto my own 30 June 2023 Most of my death and dying, and grief and loss reading, has been in English. While my French is “fluent for a Brit”, it’s nowhere close to perfect, and by golly does grief take a cognitive toll. I don’t often willingly pick up a book in French – much […]
Read MoreThe Trickiness of “How Are You?”
April 19, 2024 4 CommentsImage by Markus Spiske on Unsplash 24 June 2023 Yesterday, a fellow widbud, a woman I have never met but who someone connected with me, and who lost her husband just before Christmas 2022 after a very short illness, wrote the note below. I responded to her with both sharing some of my recent writing […]
Read MoreTime After Time After Time After Time
April 19, 2024 1 CommentPhotos my own 17 June 2023 This is – and will continue to be – a weekend full of experiments. A lot of my life is still versions of experimentation, if not in the ways it was immediately post-loss(es) when even just venturing out of the front door and heading to the shops felt like […]
Read MorePress “send” for instant panic
April 19, 2024 No CommentsMain image by Melanie Wasser on Unsplash 9 June 2023 Last Sunday, after I had arrived in Milos in the early morning but still too late to join the other intrepid swimmers for all day open-water swimming, I just pootled around. It was a blissfully leisurely day. I enjoyed a second breakfast, unpacked my belongings, […]
Read MoreΠαρακαλώ και ευχαριστώ
April 19, 2024 No CommentsMain photo by Sergio Garcia on Unsplash 3 June 2023 Back in the very early 1980s – or perhaps it was even the very late 1970s – I am not entirely sure… my mum started to learn Greek. I don’t know why she started, (nor why she eventually stopped), but she engaged a private teacher […]
Read More“The relationship I always wanted….”
April 19, 2024 No CommentsPhoto of my parents from their photo archives – Córdoba, 1961 29th May 2023 Medjool and I have just had a lovely 10 day “working break”, based mostly at my parents’ house in Céret in the Pyrénées Orientales, just inside France on the Franco-Spanish border. Now into their 80s, I try to get down to […]
Read MoreI wish I could better imagine…
April 19, 2024 3 CommentsPhotos my own, Christmas 2022 21 May 2023 Sometimes I stop short in my tracks and realise with desperate sadness that I can no longer imagine what my life would be like with Mike were he still alive. In the last years since he died, I have lived through what would anyway have been a […]
Read MoreWhat do Mother’s Day, Handy Men, T-shirts and Jazz have in common?
April 19, 2024 No CommentsPhoto my own 14th May 2023 You might well ask. Well, one answer, and the only one I have right now, is that these words, or words related to them, are on sticky notes, forming a dense, colourful and messy pile, worthy of investing in 3M. I am trying to reduce my use of sticky […]
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