I love to hold tightly. To everything. Held tightly to my husband, my children, my love of the law, and my love of teaching. I don’t let go. I love hard and I work hard at loving hard. Trouble comes when that death grip is loosened and death takes over. The crushing feeling in your …
Author Archives: Melissa
PEARLS
A pearl takes center stage on a necklace given to me by a dear friend. It’s placed between two diamonds with a delicate chain that clasps at the back. I never should have met him, and he never should have died. Just like the tiny grain of sand that never should have gotten into a …
FIERCE
Five kids. Widowed. Unlovable. And certainly un-dateable. Carrying more baggage than an airborne 747. Or so I thought. It took me a good long time and a hard look in the mirror to see things differently. Yes, I am a widow. But behind that is a woman who had an 18-year marriage, ended only by …
UNEXPECTED LOVE 💙
I didn’t see them coming. Sitting across the table from me, sipping a Diet Coke°° as he proudly showed me pictures of his children. When she came to my house with a box of tissues, laid down beside me, and said, “tell me about him.” The one who looked deep into my eyes and reminded …
IT’S NOT TOO SMALL
Sometimes we just don’t fit in. Or it’s a tight squeeze that makes you downright uncomfortable. When he passed away, I lost more than the man I called my husband for 18 years. We’d built a network of friends, those who were in the same stage of life as us. We all married at roughly …
A BOOK? AN INTRODUCTION 💙
I wrote this introduction to my book while my husband was still alive… A book I’ve never finished writing. Because the minute I write is the minute I delete to keep pace with the changes in our family. I think it’s time to finish what I’ve started. ——-‐INTRODUCTION I laid on the table, naked from …
BEAUTIFULLY NORMAL
I used to think that I’d get a free pass after my husband died. 110-plus chemotherapy and immunotherapy infusions. Too many surgeries and hospitalizations to count. Then he moved upstairs with a broken body that became whole again. I’d seen enough hospitals to last me ten lifetimes. Surely I’d get a reprieve. Nope. The first …
A FATHER’S LOVE
The day you were born was the day our lives began. I never knew love until I met this tiny, squirmy baby with long fingernails and jet black hair. Daddy held you. His firstborn. The one who brought him life as he never knew it. You were everything to him. He loved you. He always …
LOOKING IN THE REAR VIEW MIRROR
Don’t forget to look in the rear view mirror to see how far you’ve come, she said. A dear friend of mine said this to me awhile back. She, like me, lost her husband to cancer. She was my age with several young children when he passed twenty-some years ago. We’d been on this stretch …
PLAY IT BIG
Sometimes you just have to shake your head, look to the floor, and start laughing. It’s a funny thing, this life. One minute we’re eating dinner as a family, the next we’re trudging our way through chemotherapy infusions and scan results. Just when we thought we’d figured it out, we caught a curveball that hit …