Widows Archives - All The Single Girlfriends

House of Mourning

Jul 5, 2011 by Bonnie Simon

This is a house of mourning, even if you can’t see it among the brightly colored ceramic lizards or hear it in the laughter. I have woven mourning into every house I’ve lived in since the death of my husband in 2008. It flickers like dappled sunlight, casting shadows with the death of each cat who was part of our home, with every new chicken in the yard or farm skill learned, with the introduction of every potential long term boyfriend. Our old life slips away like hands reluctantly unclasping. Like the sun at the summer solstice, an era sets slowly. Sometimes, I sit outside at the most recent grave and talk to Spot. I tell him things I never told him when he skulked around the house, catching mice and stealing Snowball’s food. ...

Resting Spot

Jun 8, 2011 by Bonnie Simon

Mr. Spot, one of our beloved cats, died on Thursday morning. He died in the way of his choosing; at home, under the bed, where he felt safe. He hadn’t been able to breathe well for months due to congestive heart failure. Six months ago, I took him through a labyrinth of stressful veterinary medical procedures to ease his breathing, but two days after, his symptoms returned. We could have done it again. We could have submitted to another terrifying day of waiting rooms and needles, but how many times until we accept the inevitable? Since the death of my husband in 2008, I have had an uneasy relationship with the medical system anyway. When they told us Dave had leukemia, his only symptoms were some lethargy and pain in his side. He checked...

Living a Dangerous Life

Apr 20, 2011 by Bonnie Simon

Everyone knows it’s dangerous to, say, ride a motorcycle or eat saturated fat, but somehow we miss the inherent danger of being alive. My husband died of acute leukemia. In June of 2008, we were living ordinary lives. In July, I took Dave to the doctor for what we thought was diverticulitis, common to 45 year old men and easy to cure. In August, he was trapped in the hospital on chemotherapy and by the end of September, he was gone. The whole hospital episode, from diagnosis to death, took six weeks. Is it any wonder it seems to me that we barely control anything in our lives? Trouble will find you, even if you’re perfectly still. What kind of world is this? The raw truth is that it’s a world where the person...

Home Alone With Ice Cream

Apr 7, 2011 by Bonnie Simon

It’s Friday night and I am home alone, angry at the sink. This is ridiculous, of course, but I feel as if I have been doing dishes all the livelong day and couldn’t the sink please split itself into equal halves so that I can wash this very large pan in the section with the disposal. It stubbornly refuses and I mumble curses at it. I’m not really angry at the sink. I’m feeling sorry for myself. All I need now is a pint of ice cream to eat directly from the container. I text a girlfriend who has invited me out, “I’m too busy feeling sorry for myself, it’s the dating thing again”. “OMG, me too!!”, she texts back. I like that about this friend. She is like me. We are surrounded by...

A Soul in Cat’s Clothing

Mar 24, 2011 by Bonnie Simon

Spot the Cat is not doing well. Spot is one of three cats who made the journey across the country with me after my husband died. I call our little family “Bonnie and the Traveling Cats” because we all had to go. We all had to change. Did you know cats can get heart disease? Spot has it and it makes his little chest fill up with fluid. He can’t breathe well. I watch him try to carry on his normal feline activities while his chest heaves, trying to bring in enough air. He is uncomfortable. I can take him to the veterinary internal medicine specialist to have the fluid drained, but it scares him half to death and his chest fills right back up. He is not getting better. How do I know...

For Couples Only

Mar 21, 2011 by Dorothéa Bozicolona-Volpe

Disease is not an easy subject for people to chat about. Actually they avoid it at all costs. I always thought that after everything I had been through, I could always count on my girlfriends to lift me up when I was down. Not so, I learned that disease is kind of like divorce it separates you from certain folks. You know how divorce or a break-up causes groups of friends to feel an allegiance to the husband, wife or partner? Well guess what? Sometimes it happens when you lose someone due to death. Here I was feeling my absolute loneliest, eating poorly, and doing everything I could to be strong. I began to see a bereavement counselor to talk to someone – no one would talk to me about it. I blamed myself...

Two Widows .. Now Equals

Mar 14, 2011 by Dorothéa Bozicolona-Volpe

I sat by the stack of RSVP’s for the wedding in June that would not take place. I stared at them a good long while before I picked them up and brought them over to the couch and began to alphabetize them. Normally I am not this anal retentive but, I thought it’d be easier to find their phone numbers and email addresses in my address book. Slowly but surely I was done. Each card had a corresponding number or email address so I could begin contacting the folks who were kind enough to have responded early to the Save The Date and wedding invitations in the morning. Surprisingly a good number of them were from friends that lived out of town. I crashed on the couch embraced by the scent of him. I...

Ni Hao, Hello My Friends

Mar 7, 2011 by Dorothéa Bozicolona-Volpe

A few hours later, it had to be just a tad after 8am, the phone rang, being awakened by a phone during an early morning on the weekends when most of the world is in a state of slumber is well, un-nerving. At this moment, it was completely inappropriate and I was NOT going to answer. We, he and I, never answered the phone and preferred to let the machine (that was older than Methuselah) do the answering for us and we screened our calls. I thought to myself just one more ring and I can see who it is before I decide to pick up the phone – and then the beeeeeeep! I had to listen carefully because the voice sounded weak, like that of a child, almost meek and shy and slowly...

Trading Nightmares For Dreams

Mar 4, 2011 by Bonnie Simon

I’m sitting on the couch on Friday morning. A train whistles, telling tales of its journeys to places I’ve never been. Mornings like this, Colorado reminds me of W. Virginia. Snow-clouds hang heavy over the city, obscuring the ever-present mountains. I must simply have faith that they are still there, still standing over us, watching and waiting forever. I cannot see them now, but then that’s the nature of faith, isn’t it? I love this place. I love that I can see the constellation of city lights from my kitchen windows. I love how the steam from the nearby power plant clings together and stays close to home when the temperature dips below zero. Sometimes that steam even turns to snow and falls right back down on us, as if to say, “Good or bad,...

Waking Up On The Black Couch

Feb 27, 2011 by Dorothéa Bozicolona-Volpe

Returning home, the day’s events washed over me like a proper London rain. I was completely soaked in the wet energy of others, their grief and that of my own and could barely walk up the steps to our front door. Throughout the last hours I kept thinking to myself, ‘I have to get through this day, they have to know that they can count on me, be the rock, be the foundation, get this done.’ Upon entering our home, there was a deafening silence. It was so very quiet, void of all of the laughter and filled with the remnants of my rapid departure to the hospital the morning he had slipped from a coma into the beyond. In my haste to find a black outfit, that wasn’t a little black dress, but...

My Spirit Was Broken But My Heart Was Singing...

Feb 19, 2011 by Dorothéa Bozicolona-Volpe

George’s mother was a complete wreck as the funeral continued her wails and sobs at the loss of her youngest of 7 children, her ‘happy accident’ as she called him because he was born in her early forties when women of her time were simply not able to have kids, was being laid to rest. She had buried the eldest of her children a boyish man when he was 17 when George was a mere toddler and her husband 3 years prior of the same cancer. I had the idea to play some of George’s favourite music gently in the background so that when people approached the casket that did not hear church music. Portishead and Massive Attack played as softly as trip-hop could possibly. As her screams and cries echoed in the packed...

Kiss Me Like A Stranger

Feb 14, 2011 by Dorothéa Bozicolona-Volpe

George – Chapter 1: That this will be read by complete strangers, people who I have not yet met or never, makes this missive seem almost therapeutic. I had come to Atlanta in 1992 to work as interpreter for an international law firm with a large Japanese client. The assignment soon went from 3 weeks to almost 4 months. Over time I grew weary of law firm take-out food. While I was not vociferous, a young law student and runner for the firm took pity on the quiet French-Italian girl and directed me to the nearest French Bistro. It was a quaint place, small table, pseudo-bohemian students with a portrait of Miles Davis that nearly eclipsed a wall separating the bar from the main dining room. I sat facing it the right side of...

House of Mourning

Resting Spot

Living a Dangerous Life

Home Alone With Ice Cream

A Soul in Cat’s Clothing

For Couples Only

Two Widows .. Now Equals

Ni Hao, Hello My Friends

Trading Nightmares For Dreams

Waking Up On The Black Couch

My Spirit Was Broken But My Heart Was Singing...

Kiss Me Like A Stranger

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