This year I pressed many bright leaves in wax paper, something I learned to do from my mother. This "leaf art" hangs in windows all over my home, as well as in the homes of my son in IL, cousins in FL and SC, strangers in FL, and a friend in AL. Preserving real leaves in this fashion (they will last for years) is like saving memories and keeping them vivid and safe.

As I move through the months, gradually returning to a sense of self, purpose, and joy, after having my world shattered by the deaths of my mother and husband, I am being asked to do some public speaking on loss, aging, isolation, and staying connected. I like to do these talks.

I also have a new art website, something my late husband would have very much liked! It is http://www.blueladyarts.com/ and features new oil paintings with my signature bold palette. Painting has been mush more soothing and healing for me in recent months, than writing has been. A writer, I find this odd! But I am listening to my heart. God led me to study the Biblical stories of the widow and her son and her little cruet of oil, and how she was able to provide for them by filling vessels with oil and selling them. That was a "nutshell" version, to be sure, of the well-known parable from I Kings. My oil painting may well be my adaptation of this parable. I will survive.

Moving Forward

Silence. Compassion. Empathy. Silence. Distance. Diffidence. Curiosity. Impatience. Love. I could go on and on about the reactions from other people as the time has passed since my husband's death. The good friends have stayed in touch. Most people probably wish I were not around for them to have to deal with.

This situation makes me feel even more invisible than I have since he died. I go about my daily life. I get things done. I am spiritual about the loss, the marriage, the recovery from the loss. Yet the fact remains that I am invisible. I walk and leave no footprints. I envy the people who still leave a footprint. A footprint shows where you have been. In widowhood, I have been where most of my acquaintances have not yet been, or walked.

Travel and Vision

A three-week car trip did more for me than I had dreamed it might. Seeing friends or family at each stop throughout the South (NC, SC, GA, FL) helped reattach me to my own past and my own present. Everyone, of course, was still full of sympathy and love for me upon my loss of my husband last May...yet their empathy did not cause me pain this time, nine months out from the death. The focus was more on what I might be doing with myself in the near future. The focus was also on encouraging me to make some plans for myself, and long discussons took place that helped me see that my life was far from over.

Being in places very familiar to me, and some new places like downtown Columbia, SC, Lilburn, GA, and Hobe Sound, FL, gave me that perspective one gets whenever one travels away from home: a perspective that puts one's own small world into place in the larger picture. The past, the losses, the happinesses, the memories, the actual places (houses, shops, streets) of "home" recede into what they are, places and memories. I will always carry with me in my heart and memory all the experiences of my wonderful marriage years. But with every physical mile away from the home we lived in, the family cemetery, the places we dined and visited friends, the old neighborhood, I could feel the enormity of that whole world shrink in the "rear-view mirror" of my mind until our world was just one small part of the whole big world I was driving into, on my own, alone.

Standing in an art museum Keister and I had never visited together, or dining in an Atlanta restaurant we had not been to, spending the night in a cozy lakeside home near Stone Mountain with friends he had never actually met in person, climbing aboard a yacht of a Westover high school friend he had never even heard of, all these things helped me heal.

My sister talked about our shared childhood adventures in south Florida and how much we had weathered in the decades since, through several marriages, births, and deaths. I drove past old family homes where I had played as a child and as a teen. I walked on the spongy grass of Delray Beach's coastline and remembered doing the same thing 50 years ago, long before I knew any of the people I spend the most time with today, long before I even thought of marriage or children or widowhood...and decades before the romance and marriage to my late husband, a man "larger than life."

Moment by moment, I started to feel a weight lift off my heart. It was not that I had fled anything awful. Yet I began to release a darkness and sadness that had been shrouding my vision. As I drove across Florida to visit a nephew and on to Atlanta to take a law school pal of my son's out for dinner to celebrate her new job as a prosecutor, and then on into the Carolinas, where my own mountains loomed in blue on the northern horizon, I was actually eager to get back "home" to my part of Virginia, to settle back into a new routine, to make some new friends, to finish up the final details of the estate duties.

I drove back through rural SC, dining with a high school pal of my son's in Charlotte, winding back up Rt. 220 into the hills of my part of Virginia, still very poignantly conscious of my love for my husband and his for me, but able to think of him with a smile and joy...and not only with sadness.

It took a car trip to wrench me from the worst of the self-pitying grief that has gripped me for so long, my feeling so sorry for myself for losing a husband, and sorry that he was forever gone to me, even as I told people I was dealing well with it all and knew I should be grateful, not bereft, for having had him as long as I did.

I pruned my three window plants when I came home. I pruned my thinking. I think I have turned a corner, again, in the grieving process. When I look at the many photos and the lovely portrait of my dear, much-loved husband, I am as likely to smile and feel happiness as I am to ache with loss. That is all part of the journey.

Faith---what do we mean? Turning a corner.

(filling it with water to the brim)

I have had some interesting reactions and responses from all kinds of people to the essay I wrote on December 31st on grief (the one on here just before this one, and with the photos of the sky in SC.)

For one thing, there have been objections to my suggesting that it would seem to be more difficult for people "with no religion" to handle grief and loss. By "religion" I meant a spiritual perspective, "faith," not affiliation with or membership in an organized religion. I should have been more careful with my word choice.

I did not mean to offend people whose belief systems differ from my own. I am a Christian but have friends in other relgions and churches. Interestingly, I think, I have almost no atheist or agnostic friends.

I stand by my statement: I do think that having a spiritual perspective on life (which obviously includes death and loss) makes Life's transitions somewhat easier to cope with, than having to cope in a vacuum or spiritual void, or absence of "faith," faith in the sense of faith in God, not just faith that there is more "out there" than we can know yet.

I am a Christian, so I mean Christian faith, when I discuss my own faith. That also confused some people. I think some have a faith that there is more to Life than we can see or know, but they do not necessarily equate that faith with a "religiously-oriented faith." In other words, where I turn to Christ's and Paul's and John's words in the New Testament and to Psalms in the Old for ideas and inspiration, these other people would not. They might turn to their own reasoning or experiences for ways to cope with change and loss.

One way to explain my belief is that, for me, a person is spiritual; and a cemetery holds the remains of that person's material existence, but not the person himself. The spiritual person continues on, unseen by us but seen by God, as he always was seen and known by God. Some people believe that the actual person is in the grave, gone forever. The end. I do not. Faith lets me believe what I believe. And another kind of "faith" apparently allows the other kind of thinking, a kind of reasoning to explain absence and loss and death. But if it were a Christian faith, it would have to, by definition, allow that the person lives on, as the Resurrection proves.

(photo taken at a favorite place of mine, The Jekyll Island Hotel in GA)

To use a cliche, and sometimes cliches are just the thing to use, I see the glass half-full. I think Life is about love, giving, receiving, and creating. I think that Life demands our full attention and our positive perspective, without anger and hate and denial. That being the case, my faith exists in a mind which already believes there is a God, and who has chosen a Christian perspective and lifestyle to accompany that belief. My glass, truth to tell, is more full than half full.

When people tend to see the glass half-empty and think that Life is mainly about coping with loss, and react with negative thoughts and attitudes to challenges, they already are coming at Life from a very different place. They may have experienced great sadness and loss in their lives, as have we all. They are the ones who say that "religion is a very personal thing." Personal, yes...but we should be able to discuss it with each other and not shut each other out because we have differing perspectives on how we define our "faith" and our ability to cope with life, loss, and love. My religious faith and beliefs may be just as "personal" as yours. But that fact does not exclude conversation or a willingness to comfort each other. Don't tell me that religion is too personal to discuss.

Some people do not see the glass half full or half empty. To coin a new cliche here, may I suggest those people see a broken glass, and are incapable of imagining a glass, either full or empty. To them, there is nothing. They may claim to have some kind of religious faith, yet they react to everything with negative, whiny, fearful, and hysterical emotions. I find, as I move through my stages of grieving, that I cannot be with people like that. They drain the life from me.

As anyone who has been reading my essays on this Blog is aware, I have had some very rough times in my path from the deaths of my mother and husband in the past 15 months. I have been overwhelmed at times by gloom and anger and fear, the usual emotions one copes with when experiencing life-changing loss. And part of the "journey" for me, with the help of this Blog and others, and with the help of friends and family and books and my faith, has been my climbing ever upward from the depths back into the sunlight on the ridge of recovery and the vista of the future.

At this stage of my grieving process, eight months out from the death of a beloved husband and fifteen months out from the death of a beloved mother, I have turned a corner. I feel it. My faith that there is a God who is caring for all of us all the time is coming to the fore. Some of the darkness is receding. Prayerful work on my part and on the part of others whom I have asked to pray for me, is lifting the gloom so that I am seeing myself not as "widow" but as "child of God." The loved ones who are in another stage of their lives now, unseen by us, but in God's sight, as my faith assures me, are also children of God...not just deceased mothers or wives or brothers or husbands. I am not a "widow." In the eyes of this world, in the social conventions that rule our society, I may be a widow. As a social entity that lives in a house and pays taxes, I may be my husband's widow. But spiritually, and in my own eyes, I can take that robe off and step forth as my own person, the way God sees me: a child of God.

I have turned a corner in the long road of grieving. I know my husband will not come back and see what I am doing here, or that the books and precious things of his and my life are in new places, and that I am trying to move forward and not just look backwards into the wonderful world I had with him. He is on his own spiritual journey, as he was before death took his physical presence out of my sight. My faith tells me this.

And I do think it must be more difficult for people who have no faith that there is anything beyond this visible existence. I know there is. That is not an arrogant or silly statement. It can be proven by other spiritual events and ideas that are as real as snow and coffee and hugs. Faith assures me.

A New Year

(The photos in this essay were taken in June on Kiawah Island, SC.)

Here in Virginia, it is a cold, windy, blue-sky day, the last of the year, the last brilliant, shimmering day of a year that was so full of change and pain and loss that it nearly crushed me. Next to me on a small table is a vase of colored roses, pink, pale coral, yellow, red, deep pink, and white, which I treated myself to yesterday so there would be something truly beautiful right next to me all day.

That is what grief does to you. It sucks beauty away. If you have seen the marvelous "Harry Potter" films, or read the books, think "Dementors." Dementors suck life away. How J.K. Rowling came up with such a perfect concept and image of the opposite of "Life" is miraculous...and helpful. It helps someone like me to be able to visualize the dementor grief for what it is, so I can protect myself from it. This blog is one of the ways.

I read C.S. Lewis's classic on grief, "A Grief Observed," finally, after being afraid to do so for months and months. Reading it seemed such an acceptance of "grief" as something to contend with. Until then, I think I had shoved grief aside, telling myself I did not need to think about something so final. After all, everyone kept telling me that I was "so strong" and doing so well with all the details of widowhood and estate-handling [I am handling two, as an executor, right now], that I came to accept that I was strong. Nope. Not true.

The "strong" they meant was the equivalent of rushing into cold lake water to swim as if the temperature did not really matter or affect me. I have done that. Lake Michigan. Everyone else stood in the shallows, shivering [it IS the second-coldest body of fresh water on earth] and hesitant to plunge in. But I often made myself stride right in up to my neck, freezing or not. And, I now see, I have been doing that very same thing all these months since my husband died: striding right into the difficulties with a certain kind of will and determination NOT TO LOOK WEAK. Aha! There is a difference in not looking weak in front of others, and in actually being strong. C.S. Lewis understood that difference.

He began his book with amazingly pertinent and chilling sentences that went right to my core:

"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing."

Wow. Seven months later and I am still swallowing that way, feeling restless, feeling as if the world is about to end. And, like C.S. Lewis, I consider myself a true, deep, faithful, and consistent person of faith, a Christian who knows there is a God, who knows there is more to this life than this life. So, imagine for a minute how people who do not have religion feel! If this is how we feel with religion, God help the others.

But as the months pass and the changes keep coming---lifestyle, economy, appearance, friendships, routines, duties, obligations, memories, dreams--I need to get a calm center again. So, put me in your prayers; put all other widows and widowers in your prayers. And may all of us have a better new year.

Christmas Past

Christmas Past---I will never forget the beautiful Christmases we had at The Grove, from 1990 until last year. I did not know that would be the final Christmas holiday we would ever celebrate together, and now, looking back through photos of our home, I want to share the memories with all of you, friends and strangers, alike. My dear husband, Thomas Keister Greer (1921-2008) loved our home, which he had bought with his late wife in 1959. This series of photos from the past few holidays are offered in his memory. Much love, me

May each of you have a blessed and merry Christmas. May the renewing spirit of the Christ fill your lives with love. Hug the ones you love. You never know when they may pass on. Tell them again and again how much you love them. Peace to you all.

in vino veritas...packing crystal wine glasses

In vino veritas, that old expression, "in wine, the truth," came back to me as I finally got around to packing four large dish-pack cartons with extremely fragile crystal glasses from our home to move to my temporary rental.

My husband was a lover of wines, had a large wine cellar, and also had an exquisite collection of crystal glasses for every kind of beverage for afternoon, pre-dinner, dinner, after-dinner, dessert, and after-dessert libations. In the past month, everything else from the house had been packed and moved except the crystal, which I saved for the last. I wanted to handle it myself, to make sure nothing got broken in transit. Yesterday I tackled the job.

The truth was that it was a much larger job than I had imagined. The truth was that I only drink white wines or sweet sherry, a little port, an occasional dessert wine, like the luscious Hungarian Tokaji Aszyu (sp!) made from grapes from the Tokay region of Hungary. I could get by in my life with one largish and one smallish wine glass. But I find that I now have at least eight sets of crystal glasses, Baccarat and Waterford mostly, that will fill several cabinets. There are also twelve Baccarat brandy goblets, six tall etched parfait glasses, six smaller ones just like them, two dozen heavy Waterford water glasses, a dozen short sorbet glasses, and many tiny nut and condiment cups of glass as thin as tissue paper.

The truth was that we had not used even half of these in our 18 years together! I wrapped each lovely glass in its own big piece of paper and set it carefully into the boxes to put into my small car to drive half an hour to my new domicile. Each box sat as high on the car seat as I do, making driving in fog and rain a real challenge. To finish the job, I will need to take two more of these boxes back over to fill with the brandy goblets.

The truth was, with the front and back seats full of cartons, I just looked forward and drove, unable to see out of the right or rear windows. The truth was that driving, in addition to rain and some fog, was made even more difficult because I choked up and cried, handling the beautiful crystal and remembering my husband's joyous comments as he held a glass up to the light before placing it on the table, each set of glasses with its own provenance and fun stories ("Oh, we got this set of glasses in London the time we were involved in a play," or, "This set is etched, bought for Celeste in Paris," or "This piece was Dorothy's grandmother Gill's") from trips before my marriage into the family.

I now have three very tall cartons standing in the butler's pantry. Inside are Irish, French, Czech, English, and American glasses, so many glasses that I have to decide if I really want to unpack them and use some of them, or just leave them in their papery dark havens. On the small drop-leaf side table in my dining room I already have a set of six tiny Irish, colored crystal sherry glasses on a silver tray. These were my parents'. The matching colored wine glasses are nearby in six brilliant colors.

The truth is that wine was a source of joy and pleasure for my husband. Here is a photo of him about a year ago at Virginia's Chateau Morrisette on the Blue Ridge Parkway. I had driven us up there for a treat, one of the "kidnappings" I used to plan for him as a surprise car trip. We sampled the wines and chose some whites to bring home. It was a gloriously fun day.

The truth is, that each goblet, fragile and meant to hold wine, reminds me of him. He was strong, yet growing more fragile, elegant, always smiling and brimming with life. I will eventually unpack most of the glasses and, with each kind of wine offered to a guest, offer a toast for my handsome and genteel husband. "You were bigger than Life. And you still are."