The end of 2024 certainly set the pace for 2025 and for the years ahead. My husband of sixty-two years passed away on December 30, 2024. We had been married all those years, and I truly loved being a wife and mother. Widowhood was never a role I imagined for myself, certainly not one I ever wanted.
As 2024 came to a close, I stepped into that most undesired role. The beginning of 2025 opened with an enormous hole in my life. Of course, you know that someday, if you are married long enough, one of you will pass on. But who is ever really ready for that? It always seems like something that happens to other people. Certainly not to us. Or so I thought.
My life had always revolved around my husband, my children, and our family. Now the children are grown and living their own lives, and my husband is gone. I find myself having to make my own way again, almost like starting over.
I have had to ask myself who I am now and what I want the rest of my life to look like. I was not ready to take on that task. Instead, I found myself not caring much about the things that once kept me busy in mind and body. Being retired only deepened the emptiness. After the funeral, the holidays, and the gatherings that naturally keep you occupied had passed, the quiet felt overwhelming.
There were also the relentless thoughts: What should I have done differently? Did I make the right decisions? Those questions seemed to crowd out any positive energy that tried to surface.
For a long time, I did very little. I simply existed. I knew people would say I needed to move on, but I did not want to. So I did not. I have never been good at doing nothing, yet I spent many hours just thinking. Perhaps that was not wasted time after all. Perhaps it was necessary.
It has helped immensely to be surrounded by family and friends. Celebrations, invitations, and simple time together have filled many days and evenings.
When I was newly married, my older sister, Kathy, passed away from complications of multiple sclerosis. At that time, I remember feeling so guilty that I had trouble enjoying something as simple as a beautiful sunset. I felt she had been forced to leave the party early.
It has now been almost a year since Art passed. His ashes sit on the buffet in my dining room. I talk to him often and still feel that we are a team, just in a different realm. The difference this time is that Art did not ask permission to leave the party early.
I am moving forward. With the love of my family and friends, I continue to share life, stories, and laughter. I will carry on as I always have. I am never without something to decorate, read, plant, plan, visit, or think about.
Hopefully, I will not be leaving the party early. There is still a great deal of living to do, and I would very much like to see how it all turns out.
Sidetracked Sisters
Sidetracked Sisters is a foursome of family members who love to get together, talk incessantly for hours, and have big ideas that go in all different directions, no two seem to be the same. We are two sets of sisters and have always been close. Two of these characters are my daughters and one is my sister. It creates hours of fun, hysteria, lots of laughs, and, yes, sometimes tears. We are very diverse in our personalities and styles. That creates lots of “interesting” discussions, chat sessions, and more often than not some hysteria.
