STANDING AT THE FRONT of the church, I gazed into my husband’s eyes and repeated our wedding vows—promises that would join our lives together in marriage. “I Linda take thee, Marvin, to be my wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love…
WHEN YOU KNOW LOSS IS COMING, when does grief begin? Afterwards? Or before? And how do you work through it? Tracy K. Pratt’s book, Anticipatory Grief: The Journey of a Thousand Losses and Endless Grace, is a book I shared three years ago on Heart Talk but want to share again because I believe this book is so important in…
“TREAT HIM LIKE SILVER AND GOLD, LINDA. Treat him like silver and gold.” Jean sat forlornly on the couch, relating to me the bizarre set of circumstances she had recently experienced when her husband collapsed from a heart attack and she was unable to give him the required mouth-to-mouth resuscitation because she had a broken jaw and the doctors had…
WHEN I TRY TO PICTURE my husband entering Heaven, I imagine him surrounded by lots of family members and friends who’ve gone before as they greet him and welcome him to his new home. Occasionally, I also wonder if among the crowd there might be a rambunctious Akita, a fluffy, tail wagging Peek-a-poo, a white cat with the shape of…
THE FLOWERS SENT by my publisher after the death of my husband were beautiful. The red and white roses, settled amidst the drama of orchids and the soft gracefulness of blue hydrangeas blended together in a stunning Christmas arrangement that lifted my spirits in the sad days following my husband’s death. Now the flowers were dying. As I gathered the…
I SEARCH THE HEAVENS, looking for what is unseen by human eyes, wondering where you are, what you’re doing, longing to touch you again, longing to hear your voice. The partition between heaven and earth is vast and is not to be traversed by the living. You are on one side of this vast chasm, I am on the other….
IT’S STRANGE HOW the journey of life moves us through various circumstances so that a story might impact us one way at one point in our life and as we turn a corner, it suddenly meets us once again to impact us in an entirely different way. When I wrote Broken Heart on Hold, I tell the story of walking…
THE OTHER DAY as my husband and I were enjoying some quiet moments together, I started thinking about our marriage and how to describe it. I knew we didn’t have a fairy tale marriage because even though it started out that way, it obviously didn’t continue. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have experienced a three year separation after over 20 years together….
AS I SAT at the kitchen table before breakfast, reading an article in the Wall Street Journal, I was thoroughly baffled. The article debunked everything our culture had been telling us about what is nutritious and what is not nutritious for the past 30 or 40 years. Hadn’t this all been scientific certainty? Everyone agreed on it. There had been…
It was one o’clock in the morning as I tossed and turned in bed. Two huge problems loomed before me the next day, and I didn’t know how I would solve either one. Restlessly, my mind churned through a myriad of possibilities, searching for answers. Tired and longing for sleep–which refused to come, I sighed and again looked at the…