About this journey

I believe life’s journey is fuller and richer when shared with others; be it a spouse, family or friends. There is something priceless about the collective memories of shared experiences stored in a common history. The journey is sweeter still when shared with a soulmate.

My journey was taken off course when death snatched my spouse, wife, best friend and soulmate on 3/1. Death hijacked the journey I expected to continue taking with her. Now what? In looking at the road ahead, I see grief and all of the emotions that come with it. There’s no shortcut to wherever the destination beyond grief lies. It is a journey I must take. There’s no avoiding it.

But I feel hopeful too. Grief’s tears and loneliness are infinite without hope. That’s a sentence I will not accept. And I know, Christy would not want that for me. So for now, my travel companions are grief and hope bound together as life takes me on this journey.

I am sharing this journey with you. It doesn’t matter if the YOU is one set of eyes, a dozen sets, hundreds or thousands. I would write these words anyway. Throughout my life I have poured my thoughts and emotions onto paper; it’s therapeutic for me and a way to work through my grief. Why be so public about it? When I entered college as a psychology major, I wanted to be a grief counselor. That is not the path I stayed on but the desire to help others remains part of my DNA. Through my gift as a writer, perhaps I will reach someone who needs reaching.

And so, I begin this journey on what would have been Christy’s 56th birthday by blogging my way through it. I don’t know where it will take me or what it will reveal to me but I will capture it by taking pictures of the internal workings of my heart and my head with a keyboard and a pen.

“A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”

John Steinbeck