Each year for the past 8 I have participated in the Relay for Life sponsored by the American Cancer Society. As part of fundraising efforts, we have personal pages telling people why we "relay". I was thinking yesterday as I was traveling home from Camp Widow about the reasons why I come back each year and continue to work on it in the months in between. 

.... than the word, "widowed".
So.
Much.
More.

I used to hate that word.
In the first two years out.
Hated.
Abhorred.
Refused to use it or answer to it.

Here I am, one of nine men sitting on nine bar stools, all of us without wedding rings. The others look a little older than me but it’s an unfair comparison; in my mind’s eye I’m still 30, the age when I met my wife. But here we are, nonetheless, peers, or at least men of similar relationship status – lonely.

Next week, at this exact time, many of y'all will be home...and when I say home, I mean at Camp Widow.

In just 9 more days I get to see some of my favorite people on the planet! A few of them are pictured here. It seems like only yesterday I was packing my suitcase and heading home after an amazing and exhausting weekend of Camp Widow. How can a year have passed already?

She says to me “Kim, you’re important. Other widows want to meet you. They ask if you will be there.”

I was talking to Michele, the founder of this blog, Camp Widow, Widow’s Village and Soaring Spirits Foundation.

She was trying to convince me to come to widow camp.

I wasn’t going. Even though I live just two hours away.
I wasn’t going.

.... last night that Jim came back.

I know.  A nightmare?  It should have been a dream.
A wonderful dream.
But it wasn't.

He just walked in to our house one day.
Three and a half years after his "death" .... he just walked in.
In this dream he had been in the Service and I had evidently been notified that he had been killed.
I guess they never found his body .... you know how dreams are.

i met another one. 

this time, holding

a baby just 

a few days past

a month old. 

she was pregnant

when her husband died.

I just got off the phone with my good friend Dominic. We don't talk to each other too often, maybe once a month, but when we do, I always feel so good. He lives up in the Bay Area, from where I moved from last year. We have been to many of the same places, and always have similar stories to share with each other. He's originally from my new home city of San Diego, so we also often talk about our favorite places here, and share recommendations about places to eat or visit.