The second post to this, my newest blog, has been a very long time coming, six months to be exact. Not for lack of ideas, no, it’s the not knowing how to set up a new blog format ten years after I started my first two, “Wherever you go, there you are” in 2013  and “Dementia isn’t funny” in 2014. WordPress has changed a lot since then. I’ve been absolutely stymied trying to decipher the WP Happiness Engineers’ answers to my constant questions. Over the winter  holidays I gave my brain a rest, then a few weeks ago I had a serendipitous wake-up.

Paragraph one, chapter three  of Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout’s latest book, Lucy by the sea shoved me back on track. The words not only jumped off the page at me, they yelled! Lucy, whose second husband David had died recently, muses, “It has been said that the second year of widowhood is worse than the first—the idea being, I think, that the shock has worn off and now one has to simply live with the loss, and I had been finding that to be true… But now there were times I felt that I was just learning of David’s death  for the first time. And I would be privately staggered by grief. And to be in this place [remote Maine cabin] where he had never been—I was really dislocated is what I mean.” Lucy by the Sea, pp 47,Elizabeth Strout, Random House, 2022

Those 91 words imprinted on my brain as if they were boldface/italic and highlighted with a fluorescent green marker. It wasn’t my brain, it was my psyche in the background dealing with the loss.

My first year of widowhood, August 2021-22, zoomed along. Following the celebration of my husband’s life at the end of that September I went home with daughter Carolynn to New York State for three weeks. Spending that much time without any responsibilities with Carolynn and husband Bill was welcome comfort for me. And to see the glorious fall colors at their peak in the Adirondacks again gave me a real boost!  Thus October passed.

Christmas 2021, Samantha and Jeremiah, our adult grandchildren, and their partners weren’t coming home, so daughter Leslie, her husband Martin, my Westie Pippa and I spent a whiteish Christmas with Carolynn and Bill. The change kept me—well, all of us—buoyed. Then, the next year from early June to mid-July I had a long summer get-away, first at Carolynn and Bill’s, then on Cape Cod with most of our small family.

So I awoke on the August 15, 2022 anniversary in an altered state really. The entire 12 months had been so out of the ordinary for me that I felt adrift, “dislocated” as Lucy said. I hadn’t planted herbs or any annuals in my garden that spring, hadn’t done my July ice cream social for friends, hadn’t written a blog post for the new blog I’d planned—this new blog—nor done much of anything at all really. I was determined to write.

But my determination took a back seat for the rest of the year. In September Carolynn and I went on our long-planned mother/daughter trip to Alaska. And in November I spent a week in Florida visiting a friend.

I had written drafts that needed tweaking, but I didn’t get to work until January! For six months I’d struggled and fretted and very likely drove the many WordPress helpers ’round the bend with my incessant questions and pleas for help. WP, I groused, employed people who’d cut their teeth on computers, and had grown up with the lingo and technical know-how. I, on the other hand, learned to type on a 1950’s Royal Typewriter, in 1951, mind you. I dealt with carbon copies, typewriter erasers, inky fingers, sticking platens. Uploads, passwords, RAMs, ROMS and URLs remain a foreign language to  me.

But after reading that particular paragraph in Lucy by the Sea, I had a brain-jolting ah-ha moment. I realized that least fifty percent of my first year of widowhood had been spent dealing with tough decisions and red tape I’d never experienced before. With Leslie’s help I “dealt with the loss.”

Last year, when both daughters took early retirement after successful careers—Carolynn, an oncology nurse and Leslie, a Professor of Special Education—I so wished Peter were at their parties to share my pride. When my Pippa needed eye surgery followed by long two months wearing a cone and needing eyes drops in both eyes for the rest of her life, I wanted Peter’s hand to hold. This past Christmas when family was gathered, with our first great-grandchild under the tree, I wanted Peter to be there to make little Ember giggle. I wanted to hear him tease Samantha and Lydia, the two moms-to-be, about their impending motherhood. How he would have triumphed at the great-granddad role.

For the three years Peter lived in memory care I tried to keep life as normal for him as possible. We had tea and biscuits every time I visited; when I have my afternoon cuppa now I think of him. Before each visit I checked the tv schedule for his favorite football teams’ matches; I still cheer when Chelsea, Arsenal or Fulham wins a match. When  I see an older couple walking their dog in a tv commercial I wish it were Peter and I. When silly little things get me into a tizzwizz, I hear him say, “Cheer up, love, might never ‘appen,” and I laugh.

These first six months of my second year of widowhood—August 2022 to today—have definitely been “staggering” at times, but with all the support from family and friends it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. I do know the spark I got from reading Lucy’s thoughts made me realize that my frustrations writing this post and readying it to publish were part and parcel of  all that went before.

Courage does not always roar.
Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying,
“I will try again tomorrow.”  
Mary Anne Radmacher, writer and artist.