The New Season

It's been almost ten years since I embarked on a new season called widowhood.  I was fifty-two when the unwanted journey began. Instantly I felt old, afraid, and alone.  The previous tweny-four years of my life had been spent attempting to keep our daughter alive with never a thought of someone else in our family succumbing to poor health.  Then one knot found under my husband's arm ended our known life and sent us spiraling into an unexpected battle against Melanoma...a battle we lost in August of 2003.   In a sense,  I completed that battle and entered another one....widowhood.  The grief was hard and there were days I thought I couldn't keep living.   I'd longed to be a wife and mother and grandmother but the widowhood club was not one I'd ever expected to join...at least not in my fifties. I made mistakes in my quest for healing but  gradually I learned to accept my new role and flourish in it.  Singleness was not what I'd expected but it was what I had.

This fall will mark the tenth year anniversary of that club entrance.  As the anniversary approaches, I must share that I've learned a lot.  I am now happily remarried and wear the title 'wife' again but I will always be a widow who has remarried.  The pain and lessons learned are woven into this tapestry called life.