The Journey Begins Here

Welcome to Grief, Love, and Living in the Here and Now

Thank you for joining me today. Come on in and sit a spell.  I’m starting this blog by opening the door to my most recent and ongoing journey – grief.

In the evening hours of January 2022, my husband of 37 years moved from this mortal coil to his eternal home. The love of my life, my steady companion, my daily presence. The grief that followed was all consuming, and some days I felt like I was just learning how to breathe again. If you are grieving – whether a spouse, a child, a parent, or a friendship, I want you to know you’re not alone here. This space is for all of us.

This journey is also one of caregiving, or as I prefer to call it, careloving. My husband was first diagnosed with frontal lobe dementia from which he was divinely healed after 3 years .  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4WOKPiINnse). More about that down this winding road.

Then, September of 2020, he and I both noticed he was beginning to have issues with his memory beyond normal aging. Later we would discover that Alzheimer’s was creeping in. Anyone who’s been there knows it’s not just a long goodbye; it’s a series of daily heartbreaks. Little by little I needed to take over responsibilities that had been his since his healing of the first dementia. It was exhausting and frightening. But there’s deep love woven into that fatigue, and I want to honor the beauty inside the burden. Love shows up and love stays, even when the person we once knew is no longer fully present.

So I invite you to find a comfy seat, grab your favorite beverage, and sit with me for a while.

We’re learning together how to live with grief. Not to “move on,” but to move differently — carrying the love forward while finding ways to breathe, laugh, cry, and even hope again.

They say grief is the ultimate expression of love and the price we pay for having been loved. I believe that. It means our love was deep, and now, so is our sorrow. I am grateful for an all encompassing love with this man. A dear widowed friend of mine recently shared an exercise with me that she had done with a grief counselor. She asked me to imagine that I had never met Fred; that I did not know who he was. I simply could not. The pain and tears of trying to do that served to reinforce that I will learn to live with grief because in that grief is enduring love.

Welcome to this journey. It’s real. It’s raw. And it’s wrapped in faith — not the shiny, always happy kind, but the kind that takes us to our knees and says, “God, help me.” 

With you in the here and now . . .