remarriage of widowed people

An Engineer will tell you the Glass is just Poorly Designed


A glass half full

Tomorrow Rob, my boyfriend, will finally arrive. He is driving down from Alberta which is a province in Canada. We met on the internet. Apropos considering how much of my life has been spent there in the last couple of years. Last year certainly. The message board we encountered each other on is a site for young widowed people. Not exactly somewhere you would think about finding love. And it wasn’t love. Not at first. It was a friendship.

As it turned out we both have the same need to communicate through the written word, and truthfully are probably much better at communicating that way. We exchanged emails that were more like letters of old, and it wasn’t long before IM’s began eating away sleep time the way grief once did, but I was a much happier person for it and, I assume, so was he.

We met in person for the first time the last weekend in February in Idaho. And yes, that is an odd romantic destination. It will always be a romantic place in my mind however. Now, two some weeks later, he is coming here to spend my spring break with me. In Arkansas. And before you think it, I refute utterly the idea that we might not have much of a clue about romantic getaways. It is not the setting that makes an encounter between two people romantic. It is the intent.

Bryce Canyon, Utah


Bryce Canyon view from the Queen's Garden trail

Image by Alaskan Dude via Flickr

The first edition of my blog lies abandoned and forgotten on MSN’s Spaces now. I began it in July of 2006 as a way to distract myself from the eruption of the dormant grief I had been too shell-shocked to experience in the early months following Will’s death that January. As time passed it became less a distraction and more a diary of my life, such as it was, and my poor attempt at sorting out my emotions and the events they generated.

At some point around the first anniversary of his death, I began to realize that my grief had changed. It was no longer flooding every corner of my existence. It was still there, popping up at times both expected and not-so, but I was able to weather these storms and come through faster and stronger. It was time to recognize that I was no longer in an active grief pattern.

That was some weeks, months actually, ago now. A lot has happened, but that is the way of life, isn’t it. You think it is passing you by when in reality it is sweeping you along.

Just like time, life will not stand still.

More Than Friends


A couple dating in a cafe.

Image via Wikipedia

You get to this point where dating is more than the work it really is anyway and despite the fact that you are creating new definitions for the word lonely on a hourly basis, you just quit. But the need to connect with someone of the opposite gender is not one that is easily vanquished so you end up in these rather odd friendships with widowerers. You message with them on the YWBB site or you move into emails or IMing.

And there is nothing romantic about it but it is not entirely innocent either because neither of you is used to playing coy or being circumspect anymore and it isn’t long until you are looking too forward to the time you “spend” with this other person.

I had two such friendships. One that is over by mutual agreement.

The second is becoming something else. By mutual agreement.

And I have to admit that I am happy about that. I should be frightened really and sometimes I want to just tell him that. That this is really scary and that I would rather just be “just friends” again, but I don’t. Don’t tell him that. Don’t want to be just his friend. Don’t have any idea of what is propelling me onward in this aside from a need to know him.

Since the week before Christmas when we first began to communicate, I have received 128 emails from him. We IM every night now and talk for hours past the late night into the early morning hours on the weekends.

Two weeks from tomorrow I will see him in person for the first time. It is strange to have these overwhelming feelings for someone I have never been in the same room with. Not even the same country with. There are all these questions. Like why would anyone so wonderful be so concerned about me? Will I get shy and tongue-tied when I see him? Will it be as easy to talk to him when I am looking in his eyes? What will his arms around me feel like? How will I ever be able to hold everything I think and feel back when there is nothing in between us anymore? When does more than friends become more than that?