Widowhood Redux

It comes back around a lot, this widowhood thing.  Yes, we are continuously widowed, but we learn to live our lives.  Every once in a while, though, it comes back front and center.  Perhaps we are snubbed as single persons since the world is endlessly coupled or perhaps we find ourselves partially waking in the night and it takes a moment or two for reality to set back in.  The latest, for me, is having three poems published in an anthology called On Our Own: Widowhood for Smarties and getting my copy in the mail.  All we widowed people writing, writing, writing.  I’m not sure we’re “smarties,” but we all have this common thread.  Too many of us are too long alone, coping with a condition that, for most, will be for the rest of our lives.  After the grief recedes to a more or lesser degree, we are not always sad, but we are always aware.  Widowhood is a companion that is always with us and ever silent.