been talking with women who have had a loss of a partner in the last year… they are coming up to or just passed the “anniversary” of the death of their loved one…

it seems that for many of us, just getting through that day is tremendously stressful… I found that even the next day a great weight had been lifted off my shoulders… I hadn’t anticipated that at all…

another thing that we have noticed is that other people we are connected with are “past it”… it was a year ago and they have moved on with their lives… they were extremely supportive early on, but now their focus is on other things, and that’s okay… I realized myself that I had forgotten that someone’s partner had died nearly a year ago…

I know it’s been a year, but my focus is still on how my life changed in an instant… and it is a slow process to deal with that change, every morning, every night… I am moving forward, and doing a good job of it, I think, but my life is now irreversibly different than it was…

I think it is going to take years to completely settle in to my new life… without my beloved… which makes sense since I loved 42 years with him…

the words to We’ve Only Just Begun sung by Karen and Richard Carpenter (Songwriters: Roger S Nichols and Paul Williams) have been floating around in my head… just realized that song was at the top of the charts in 1970, the year we were married…