I read this item on the Widownet boards and was filled with excitement and awe for the author. I also like the description in her signature that says “Involuntarily Unspoused”.
I think that many Widow/ers have such a confused sense of self. I know I do. I lived the first half of my life as a child, young adult and then an adult, and the second half of my life was spent as part of a couple. A coupling of two people that spend all their available time together and experience life as a shared experience. Now we who have lost our spouses have to try and figure out how to experience life as a single person. It takes a long time to adjust to this. I’ve talked in the past about how hard it is to come home each night and have no one to yell out “honey, I’m home” to. No one to recap the days events with. You the readers of my weblog are the closest I have to that, and I guess that is one of the things I use this page for. The place I can say “hey, there readers, I’m home and guess what happened today.”
Part of the process for learning to be a singular identity seems to inspire us to go back to the time when we were last a single person. I think that is part of the reason I spend as much time with the camera as I sometimes do. Before I met Cindy, photography was the way I expressed myself and the thing I did for sheer en “joy” ment. I could sense the joy in the author’s experience of doing something that she loved before she lost her love.
It is hard to lose your love. When you lose the one you loved more than anything else in this world you have a feeling of having lost all love. I can see how going back to something that has been gone for so long, but is possible to bring back, can return that sense of love.