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Moving to a New Writing Home
I’m excited to announce that I’ve found a new home for my writing! From now on, you can find all my new content at elizabethkleinfeld.substack.com. While this site’s archives will remain available, all future posts will be published exclusively on the new site. I’m looking forward to this next chapter and hope you’ll join me…
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Different not Worse: My First Christmas Alone since My Husband Died
It’s my fourth holiday season without Tom. Facebook’s “On This Day” feature has been particularly aggressive lately, serving up memories of holidays past like a relentless digital ghost. Here’s Tom and me at Christmas dinner with family. Here we are making latkes with friends. Here we are camping in Death Valley. Each photo is a…
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Holiday Grief: Empty Chair, Full Heart
I set my dead husband’s photo at the table again this year, propped in front of an empty chair at our fourth Thanksgiving without him. I look to his spot at the head of the table and smile. It’s not like a wound anymore, but like a familiar mark on a cherished family heirloom. We…
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My Choice to Respect My Dead Husband’s Privacy
After his stroke, Tom spent hours at a small black desk facing our porch, a compromise when his wheelchair made actually getting outside too difficult. The desk became his command center, gradually accumulating the tools and supplies for his unlikely new hobby: knife sharpening. Who else would take up knife sharpening after a stroke? That…
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Election Grief: When an Election Breaks Your Heart
When folks ask how I’m doing since the election, I find myself saying, “Hanging in there, all things considered.” And by “all things considered,” I mean watching over half the country vote for someone who thinks it’s okay to mock disabled people, treats sexual assault like it’s no big deal, plans to legislate from an…
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When will I feel normal again?
Whenever I meet someone who is newly widowed, they ask when they will feel normal again. I remember asking that question of my new widowed friends, too. We all want to know how long it will take before the crushing pain in our hearts cools lets up a bit. I worried during the first year…
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Accepting “I Did the Best I Could” is an ongoing process
Accepting that I did the best I could when my husband had his stroke is an ongoing process. I often find myself thinking, “yes, I did the best I could,” followed by “my best wasn’t very good,” and then I dwell on that second thought. Of course I would be a better caregiver today than…
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Sharing Grief (and seeing fire starting as an act of love)
I have been very up and down with my grief the last few months. The three-year anniversary of my husband’s death was less awful than I expected, but then I was a bit blindsided by hard grief a month later. The last few weeks have felt less tumultuous and I’ve noticed a kind of tender…
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Making Peace with My (Dead) Mother
For a long time after my mother died, I was angry. Sometimes I was angry that she had died when I was only 12, which made me feel like even more of a freak than I had when she was alive. Other times my anger was directed at her more personally, fixating on what I…
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Cumulative grief at 37 months
The three-year anniversary of my husband’s death was what I expected it to be—very sad for a couple of days before and the day of the anniversary and then a feeling of relief when the anniversary had passed. I’ve noticed myself feeling relief whenever a milestone passes—anniversaries, his birthday, the holidays that meant a lot…
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