A career professional turned widow, with an expertise in leadership and communication, mom of three kids and grandma to six.
Solowingnow was a word I made up. It represents my status: part single, part widow .. now. It is also a jumble because that is how I was feeling as I was adapting to the fact of sudden widowhood. A year after my husband died, I gave myself a one-year personal sabbatical to try and figure out what the rest of my life might look like, where I might live, what I might do. I started the Solowingnow blog as a public journal to help me capture what this sabbatical was about. I naively thought it was going to be centered on my husband and his death. I found, though, that much of it was about the grief and how I was processing that. Eventually, I discovered that it – the blog, my thinking, my life – was about me. How I was changing and evolving, and yet how I was revisiting my former life and my old selves.
My one year is now closing in on seven years! I still don’t have a clear plan for the future, but despite that, I am learning how to live in the Now. I don’t have life figured out; I don’t have Me figured out either.
I’m living with not having to know everything (as if I could anyway). Solowingnow, this blog, is about how I’m doing that.