6 Months of Grief Project: Day 30

Bring light into the darkness.

This is Day 30 of my #6MonthsOfGrief Project. To learn more about this practice, feel free to visit Day One, where I explain this project in more detail.

Many widows will tell you that there are very simple, household chores that seem just unbearable to do. For me, it's replacing all the burnt out bulbs in the house. It seems like they are all burning out at once, but in reality, they've been slowly going dark over the past seven months and I have not been able to change them. I live in a little house with very high ceilings, but since my husband was a 6'9" Giant Bear, all he had to do was stand a chair to change them. Now that he's gone, I have to drag a very large, very heavy ladder from quite a ways away and change them myself.

Most of the time, I live by soft lamplight, so it was easy to ignore the burnt out bulbs in the ceiling, but since I have had to sort through paperwork and boxes of stuff, deep into the night, I've really needed these overhead bulbs to work. Instead, I ignored their darkness and started wearing a headlamp around the house, like some deranged, grief-stricken coal miner.

Well, today I dragged myself to the hardware store, got the right bulbs for the variety of overhead lights in my home, dragged that heavy ladder through the rain and changed those freakin' bulbs myself. I feel triumphant. I feel sad. I can see what I'm doing much better now. I miss my husband so much during these mundane tasks. I used to be a part of a team. I used to be part of a family. Now I am just a weird, single lady, trying to keep her house from falling into darkness and ruin with no teammate or partner to help me.

What household tasks are you struggling with in your grief?

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I am very aware that this project can bring up a lot around yours or other's grief and loss, I will always follow every post with some online grief support resources that have helped me. Please feel free to let me know of online support that you have found healing in your grief, as well:

Art with Grief:

• Photographer [Sarah Treanor] Takes Moving Self-Portraits to Cope with Her Fiance's Death by Jillian Wong

• Self-Portraits: Expressing Emotion Through Art on What's Your Grief?

• The Hard Romance of Grief by Mark Liebenow

• The poetry of John O’Donohue

Resources for Widows:

• Camp Widow

• Soaring Spirits International

Living with Grief Resources:

• Grief Bibliography on Grief Healing

• Teresa “TL” Bruce's What to Say When Someone Dies
• They Brought Cookies: For A New Widow, Empathy Eases Death's Pain by Ann Finkbeiner on NPR
• A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

• Megan Devine’s Refuge in Grief

• The Geography of Sorrow: Francis Weller on Navigating Our Loses, interviewed by Tim McKee in Sun Magazine

• How to Be a Friend in Deed by Bruce Feiler in the New York Times

• 12 Things to Know About the First Year of Grieving Someone You Can’t Live Without by Laurie Costanza in Elephant Magazine

And remember, I am sharing this project on a variety of platforms, including my Instagram, Twitter, & Facebook feeds, as well as my Pinterest page on Grief. I use the hashtag #6MonthsOfGrief, so it can easily be found on any platform. Please share this project with anyone you think might need it.

Thank you, and see you tomorrow.