Widowhood- one way to describe it

Did you ever play blind man's bluff as a kid? You put a blind fold over your eyes, turn the lights off and everyone hides. You'd then try to feel your way to find someone to tag. Or maybe at a family picnic you played the relay race where you put a bat to your forehead, leaned over and touched the bat to the ground, ran around it a couple times, then stood up and tried to run in a straight line to hand-off to your race partner?Both are really disorienting. Both take time for your body and mind to adjust. But you have to go before you're ready or else you'll lose the game. Try as hard as you might, when you're blindfolded you just can't help but bump into things or put your hands out to feel your way around. It's scary to take big steps because you might fall down or crash into something.

And when you're in the relay race, you're dizzy but you run anyway. You know what you have to do. Run in a straight line. You tell yourself you can do it even though you know you'll be dizzy. But the second you start, your body is running in a different direction than your brain. You just can't get the two working together in that straight line. So sometimes you just had to fall down and lay there a second until the dizziness went away. Then you could get up and start running again. Usually by then the race was over and you lost. You lost because you spent too much time on the ground waiting to feel ready to get up and run again.

That's what widowhood is like. On the good days.

-Written by Heidi P from Young Widow Bulletin Board