Introducing… myself

Good day to you if you are here! I honestly don’t know where to begin. “Officially” writing to what I hope to be an audience at some point is like standing in front of a crowd about to deliver a speech. Naked. I write my heart out on so many occasions but this somehow feels different and vulnerable. I have gently shared some of my writings that are much deeper than simple social media postings and have gotten what I feel to be honest and heartening feedback in return. This is the best source of therapy I can give to my soul. Writing. So with the approval and encouragement from the people I have entrusted the most with the words straight from my inner being I am doing a tip toe to the edge of my comfort zone to give it a go with others who are experiencing the same soul wrenching turmoil as I. Thank you for coming with me.

I have a relationship with grief. I started with one so many of us have dealt with, divorce. I understood what it meant then when folks would say it is like a death. Because truly it is a death. The death of a relationship. The separation of what we vowed until our own deaths. I could feel it ripping my heart even though I knew it was what I wanted and that we just were not good for each other. Many of us have been there, unfortunately. But, I weathered it and kept on my “merry” way. There were complications of course. It was never really easy after the divorce. Life was still hard and that’s a topic for another day. Amidst the struggles that my ex and I “tug of war’d” away at each other about, we lost our first born and only son. At seventeen and a half years of age. The reason is irrelevant at this point. Again, another day. He was gone. I suffered through the most agonizing pain for the first three years afterward. It was then that my healing began I suppose. I had been in school to become a registered nurse, which saved my life I think, attained my bachelors of science in nursing and became a nurse in the Emergency room. I LIVED for work. I LIVED for my daughter. I was pulling it together. 4 years into the career that I lived for and actually woke up every evening to go pull 12 hours on night shift and would say to my brother, “I GET TO GO TO WORK TODAY!”… I lost my job. My reason in life had been sliced in half. Also another story for another day. Can we just all say “Human Resources are the devil”? Another six month recovery from the devastation that was left in its wake. But, I yanked on my bootstraps with some very special encouragement from my brother and daughter and I saddled that horse up again. Let’s fast forward to the really great part. I fell madly and deeply in love. It came out of nowhere. With someone I had known for 20 years. He lived in Michigan (My family and I are in Tennessee) and did business with my father in the cattle industry. They became fast friends in their 30 year age difference and he became “part of our family”. The Big D and don’t mean Dallas had become a part of his life too. It was like all of the sudden… we saw each other with real eyes. Like God had finally given us the eyes to see in each other what truly mattered in life. After that nothing could really be bad. My daughter was already close to him and his children. She was probably closer to them all than I had ever been. It was a natural fit. And so the blissful life began. The love between us was so evident to everyone around us. We were perfectly…happy. We both praised God for the blessings He had given to us. I literally gave thanks to Him many times a day everyday.

When I say he was a great man I need you to know that he sincerely was. I will talk about him more in other letters. Why Letters to Linda? Because Linda was our nickname for each other. Oh, you remember the cute little boy standing up to his mother with “Listen Linda”. Well, somehow it stuck to us both. It confused a lot of people because he would introduce me as Julie and then call me Linda. He was Linda and I was Linda. We were the “Linda’s” to many of our friends. It was a whole thing. We talked about marriage a lot. There really never seemed to be a question. I wanted to be “old fashioned” and have him propose. Like… “Honey, I want you to say the words”. So he did. He consulted my daughter for her approval and also his children too. They gave us their blessing and he did it. In his own way. He did not kneel because he really wasn’t a kneeling kinda guy. But with all of our friends in Tennessee around he did it on a warm June Saturday night. Monday morning back in Michigan I began planning our wedding. I decided on September. Yes…Less than 3 months. I had never been more certain of anything in my life and I had absolutely no reason to wait. I was so excited and honored to become Mrs. Todd D. Ward that I just could not wait. We had the most beautiful wedding on my fathers farm. My father had passed a few years earlier and I am in pure belief that God gave us each other to handle that loss together. He loved my father as his own. I cant wait to tell you about our wedding. It was picture perfect. All of our children as attendants, my brothers both gave me away and it was right there in the middle of a cow field. Sounds maybe not perfect but you will see that it was. We gained a granddaughter that year too. He would nickname her Juju. She became the light in his eyes. She was our special someone that we got to share a gigantic love with from the first minute we both got to meet her. Her mama found out she was expecting another girl and our other son and daughter in law were expecting our first GRANDSON! Oh the next year and a half would be the most grand of our lives. We had our children moving forward with their lives. We had a wonderful granddaughter to pour our love into, two more we couldn’t wait to spoil and we had each other. What else could we want in life? Honestly. We talked about it almost every day and how lucky we were for all we had been given.

And then it ended. The happy go lucky, blessing to every soul he met, good time charlie… was gone. Just like that.

And this is where my new story begins. This year marked TEN years since I lost my son Jake. It was JUST months ago that I shared a deep crevice of my heart to my love. It was the first time in 10 years that I had realized that I was actually excited about life. I was averse to social gatherings for so long. I was averse to making commitments even for lunch with friends. But on this particular day I felt myself actually LOOKING FORWARD to seeing people. I was actually excited for the places I for so long had dreaded. It was like a huge epiphany in my life. Sitting in a gas station in the thumb of Michigan, I shared this particularly secret part of my soul. It wasn’t too many weeks after that he told me, “Linda, I’m not going to live much longer”. I still to this day have no idea why he said that. I was so angry at him for saying that. His father died when Todd was 19 and his father was 39. His mother died 10 years later. I chalked this up to his personal DNA “growth chart” and tried to let it go. He always believed he would not live a long life but damn, the man was healthy as a horse. He was a man’s man. I believed I was going to have to hire pretty, young nurses to give him sponge baths as an old man in my mind but my heart would constantly nag at me otherwise. So he left us way too soon. He would have been fifty one years old in only a couple of weeks. He left me a widow at 49.

That is as brief a synopsis of my relationship with grief during my life as I can give right now. I would like to share with you if your heart is as broken as mine in a journey from where I am now (and maybe you are too) to a place that we must find ahead… recovery. I have walked the path of grief before. In a different way. My friends who tell me they have lost a loved one and then add on that “There is nothing like the loss of a child”, they are exactly right. It is a whole other level. But, as my cousin told me the other day… “TRAUMA IS TRAUMA”. True too. I have many questions and even more emotions. If you do too I am inviting you to explore this together. I cannot see ahead of me at the moment. Maybe you cannot either. Maybe you have a grieving friend or sibling. Maybe have trauma of your own. My hope is to share a story that will be relatable and directional at the same time. By joining me, you are lending a part of yourself that will become a critical part of one human beings healing and hopeful recovery. Mine. If it all works out… I can become a critical part of yours as well. Here’s to us friends. This sucks and there is nothing more to say.

**except that I’m still learning this program and I’m a baby writer… forgive typos and grammatical errors! I’m learning as I go!! ~check back for frequent edits and hopefully improvements!!!