-
Grief Loss and the Upcoming Holiday Season, Strategies for Getting Your ARMS Around It Early
WSN-MO: A Few Minutes with Terrell Whitener For my offering this week, I have chosen an article out of my archives to share with the brotherhood. I hope you enjoy and, most importantly, consider integrating this into your approach to the season ahead. Before you know it, the holiday season will be upon us. For…
-
Valentine’s Day for the broken-hearted
February 14th conjures up images of love and romance. Yet, some of us have only memories to hold on to. How do I celebrate this special day of love without the one I have loved? My heart, which still bursts with love, now feels heavy with pain akin to unrequited love. As much as I…
-
Christmas
Holidays are an especially hard time for those who are grieving, and Christmas may be the hardest for those who especially love it. My wife died on October 25, 2010, so Christmas came two months after her death. My three adult children were coming for the holiday with the four young grandchildren we had then,…
-
Why Christmas means even more to me as a widow
It’s the most wonderful time of the year…and the most painful, nostalgic, nightmarish time of the year now that my husband is gone. Our hearts and home scream for the void we feel. A voice that once boomed through our home at Christmas as we gathered around the piano is forever silent. The man of…
-
Dealing with the feelings that come up around the holidays
All those feelings that come up around the holidays As the holidays approach, I start hearing from folks in my widowhood community. They talk about the variety of feelings the season is bringing up for them. A widower, with sadness and confusion in his voice, tells me that the holidays were always “her thing”. She…
-
Holiday Abyss
Everyone will start to tell you within a week of your wife’s passing that you must steel yourself against the trauma of upcoming special days and holidays. We each are likely to have very different experiences during these special days. Much of your reaction will depend upon how important each of those days was for…
-
Widower: Helping A New Widower on Father’s Day
If your dad recently became a widower, there are ways you can help him on Father’s Day. Fathers who are newly minted widowers on Father’s Day are apt to be in the throes of intense loneliness, self-doubt, and possibly caught up in regrets and self-recrimination. This can lead to self-isolation and depression if not addressed.…
-
Fear-some Firsts
How to get through those hard anniversaries… that horrible first year I called them the “fierce-some firsts”: First Valentine’s Day. First Thanksgiving. First Christmas. First birthday (his). My birthday First birthday (the children’s). First “day we met”. First wedding anniversary. First angle-versary (anniversary of death). During that first year, as these “firsts” approached, I’d count…
-
What are you going to be doing on New Year’s Eve?
WSN-MO: The Perfect Catch WSN-MO Dating and Relationship Coach, Christine Baumgartner asks… What are you going to be doing on New Year’s Eve? I’ve been talking about the holiday season and widowhood for the past couple weeks. In those articles, I haven’t included the New Year’s celebration because it often impacts people differently than the…
-
A Widower’s Christmas Wish List
by Herb Knoll Author: The Widower’s Journey From as far away as Australia to the British Isles, from Canada to Nigeria, the Widowers Support Network hears the cries of men who mourn the loss of their wife, their soul mates, their partners in life. Widowed men don’t ask for much, never have, never will. After…
Widowers Support Network 