After Mike died – indeed before he died, when he was ill – I know I set a clear intention to carry on living fully afterwards. In truth I never questioned whether or not I’d want to carry on living. For the last many decades, for as long as I can consciously remember being aware of such things as “choice”, “intention”, “the miracle of life” (by which I mean the chances of that particular sperm meeting that particular egg at that particular time and becoming me), etc…, I have had a passion for life, for living life fully, and maximising the miraculous chance I have been given.

Of course I wobbled when Mike got ill. I definitely questioned my will when he died. More than once I remember looking into a fast-running icy stream and just wondering if it would be an easy way to make it all go away. Choosing to live doesn’t mean there isn’t also excruciating pain, deep sadness, questioning, regrets, wonderings. And losing Julia has fanned flames of anxiety within me that I never knew existed. I get so scared now of something happening to me before Ben and Megan are “properly on their feet”. I am petrified of anything awful happening to Ben or Megan. I know I cannot take another loss. I am in anticipatory grief of my parents dying – which they will, of course, because they are 80 and 81.

And I feel that when Black the dog dies, which he will, that my fragile world will unravel again. The dog. Who represents the hearth and the heart of the house in ways that only people with a dog might understand. The dog Mike chose. The dog who Julia, of all the kids, had an uncanny way with, despite her weighing only half his weight when we first got him.

The dog who outlived Mike and Julia.

The big news is, we found a place to rent here in Kona that has agreed to the dogs. It’s only up the block, so moving should be relatively easy. It’s expensive…but thankfully my boyfriend is with us for all the support both emotional and financial that it will entail. 

It has not come easy. It took weeks for the owner to come around to us (apparently, two dogs are better than a group of young single people or a family of 10). We had to endure a long, detailed financial application and background check. And the hardest, for me, has been the emotion of it all.

My stay at the house my beautiful late husband and I shared is coming to an end.

I will leave part of me behind here. My heart, or most of it, it feels like. 

I'm not sure how long I will be able to continue to write here at Widow’s Voice. It breaks my heart to think that, and to write that, but various things are moving at a seriously rapid pace and I can barely keep up.

I write a lot about how strange and even unrecognizable my life is now. I can’t explain exactly how I got here, but I can tell you a little about what it’s like, just over three years after my husband died. 

My friend and fellow widow Karin here in Kona was talking about her husband’s death day last month…the conversation went on before I really realized how that term flew by so clearly and succinctly without us having to explain what that meant, though I hadn’t used it before. Death day. That day, we all know; that day, we all remember, that day, we can never forget.

Mike’s death day was yesterday, February 17. It has now been three years. 

Three years.