Life Goes On ™️

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...

Can sadness and happiness coexist?  When Mark was diagnosed with a terminal illness, it was during one of the happiest times of our lives. It felt as if I was living a nightmare that I could not wake up from. I was overwhelmed with panic. I had never had anything so devastating happen to me. A little ominous voice in my head was saying over and over again, “well, looks like your luck ran out.”  Two years ago, my life was full of joy and dreams realized. We were on a cruise with our whole family celebrating my retirement, Lindsay’s 40th birthday and Kim and Dave’s engagement. We were also planning Kim’s wedding, five months away, which I wanted to make spectacular because we were so ecstatic that she found the love of her life.  As a mother, I never leave anything up to fate; I always feel that I need to put something out into the universe that will push things along. Coincidentally, when I was working in Las Vegas, I saw these beautiful trees of life made out of crystals ...

I think I may have “turned a corner” on my grief journey.  Somehow I feel lighter and retrospective, and then, introspective. I have been re-reading the letters in my journal that I had written to Mark and it's as if I'm looking at a version of myself that I no longer am. I want to go back and embrace her (me) and say, “You’re going to be alright. You will find strength that you never knew you had and you will be a whole new person nine months from now. Trust me.”   At one stage in my “Letters to Mark”, I was watching love stories every night. This pastime not only took my mind off my sadness, but also helped me reminisce about our love story, which became very therapeutic.  Here’s the first Love Story entry:  5/9/24 Hi Babe,  I started to do a thing today, well yesterday, really.  I am watching LOVE STORIES every night and they all have the word ‘LOVE’ in them.  They make me feel warm and hopeful.  They remind me of us, especially when there...

Today was DST (daylight savings time), the longest day of the year, when we get back the hour that was stolen from us in the spring. It seems like you get an extra hour, but for me, I used most of that hour to first figure out how, and then, set all the clocks back– a task that had exclusively, always been Mark’s. They make it seem like you should be happy that you get an extra hour of sleep; however, I walk around in a daze on this day and I’m totally confused when it gets dark earlier than usual. Anyway, I always felt that DST was a nuisance rather than an advantage.   This DST I decided to use to my advantage. So, I stayed inside for the entire day. I decided to hibernate; the only human contact I had was either through phone calls, texts, emails, or facebook, and I tried to keep them short. I hardly watched TV. Instead, I read the letters I had written to Mark in a journal that I began 5 months after he died. It was the only thing I could write at the time because I needed...