Life Goes On ™️

  Dear Mark Today is our wedding anniversary.  Forty-seven years ago we stood under a chuppa*  alongside our parents,  your brother, the best man,  my sister, the maid of honor,  and committed our lives to one another.  I could close my eyes and imagine myself back on our wedding day,  so young,  so naive,  so sure that our life would never go by as fast as it has.  Today, only my sister and I remain on this earth.  Time has stolen many of the people we love.  We are like a grain of sand in this mysterious universe we are part of.  But our love is so much more than that.  Our love expands beyond the universe,  the moon,  the sun,  the stars,  the galaxies.  And my grief is the gravity weighing me down,  like a bag of sand,  that I carry around while I try to exist on this earth,   without you.  *A chuppah (also spelled huppah, chupah, or chuppa) is a canopy used i...

It’s getting closer to my 69th birthday, which is this Tuesday. I will be the same age as Mark was when he died. Sadly, I finally caught up to him. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about death, mortality, whether a higher power exists, and the soul.  I began wondering about death when I was almost old enough to understand it. My first experience with death was my father’s mother dying when I was very young. I only recall her not being much of a grandmother to me. I remember my Uncle Fintz dying of a brain tumor in his mid-forties; I can always picture him smiling at me so lovingly a few weeks before he died. He was the youngest of my mother’s six brothers and her best friend, only two years older than she was. I was not allowed to go to the funeral because I was a child, only 10, so I stayed at home watching my grandmother weep inconsolably for her child.  I couldn’t bear the thought of my cousin, Jane, who was my age, not having her father anymore. This made me imagine my own...

    Sunday. This is the day I dread every week because it's the day I began this new unplanned life, a life I never wanted. I relive the same experience every Sunday– the beeping of the life support machines; my children and grandchildren weeping; Brodie, the nurse, gently putting his hand on my back; someone calling “time of death”; the doctor embracing me and crying along with me; calling Meryl to tell her and hearing her sob. It just comes back to me, whether I want it to or not. It’s almost cathartic. Sometimes it’s as familiar as stubbing your toe or banging your knee and waiting to feel the excruciating pain, then having it slowly subside. Every Sunday. Maybe it’s to keep him alive in some way. Maybe it’s just to remind me I have to begin again–not just a new week, but a new life. Maybe in some way I believe this ritual can mend my broken heart. Can you mend a broken heart, though? The days, weeks and months seem to be going by so quickly. I am getting closer to my ...

My obsession this year was watching a new Netflix series, Nobody Wants This. I watched the entire series four times. It’s about two sisters who have a podcast about relationships and dating. (There’s a rabbi in it too, but let’s not get into that.) The writers of this series, Erin and Sarah Foster, actually have a podcast in real life, entitled, The World’s First Podcast, in which they discuss and banter about friendships, sistership, and dating, among other things. One of my favorite episodes from the series is “The Ick”, which is basically something that turns you off when you’re dating someone. Coincidently, the actual podcast’s latest episode is entitled “The Ick Episode”. So, the cosmic forces are in place because there are no coincidences. I was meant to write this entry because every time I go on a date or even talk with a guy on the phone, “The Ick” is always a possibility looming in the air. My date with the “spitter” that I wrote about in my last entry was a perfect example o...

The hardest part of widowhood, for me, is it changes your identity, without your permission.  “ I am single now”–– just saying that now makes me cringe. Single means you are one and one is an odd number.  I am from the Baby Boomer generation; therefore, I grew up believing I would one day be a wife like June Cleaver or Donna Stone; I never thought I would be Miss Brooks.  Miss was definitely a four-letter word to most baby boomer girls. As a matter of fact, in college, many girls would say I’m here for my “MRS degree”.   While I was in elementary school, I would lay in bed at night and wonder which one of the boys in my class would be my husband one day.  This is how programmed I was to believe that my ultimate goal in life was to be part of a couple.    Then came the 70s when women began to challenge the traditional roles of Mrs. Cleaver and Mrs. Stone. We stopped believing that we should only give up our virginity to our husbands.  We boldly def...