Letting Go of the Need to Explain Your Choices to Others
I’ve always had a tendency to overexplain things.
Not because anyone necessarily asked, but because I felt like I needed to justify what I was doing. As if my decisions needed to make sense to everyone around me in order to be valid.
After Jon passed, that feeling got even stronger.
I found myself explaining things that, when I look back now, really didn’t need an explanation at all.
I explained why I was able to stay home with my kids.
I explained how I could afford to add an addition onto our house.
I explained why I stopped wearing my wedding ring after nine months.
I explained why I chose to keep homeschooling instead of putting my kids in school.
I explained why I moved from Maine to New Hampshire.
And later…
I explained when I started dating.
I explained when I got remarried.
No matter what I did, it seemed like there were opinions.
Some people thought I was moving forward too quickly.
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Why widows need to hear their loved one’s name, and how it brings comfort, not pain
Right after Jon passed, people talked about him often.
They asked how I was doing.
They shared stories.
They brought up memories, things I hadn’t thought about, moments I hadn’t seen.
And I loved it.
I needed it.
I needed to hear his name.
I needed to know he mattered to other people too.
I needed to be reminded that he wasn’t just my loss, that he had impacted so many lives.
Talking about Jon helped me process what had happened. It kept his memory close, not just for me, but for my kids too.
But then, something shifted.
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What Grief Revealed About My Heart (Continuing to Learn to Trust God After Loss)
This March caught me off guard.
Not just because it felt heavy, but because of what God began to show me in the middle of it.
The emotions, the memories, the fatigue are often things that show up during a heavy season.
What I didn’t expect was what was underneath it.
As the month unfolded, I found myself holding my family a little tighter than usual.
My husband.
My kids.
There was this fear of uncertainty I hadn’t fully acknowledged before.
And little by little, God began to bring it into the light.
I realized that I’m still holding onto them.
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Why Grief Feels Heavier in Certain Seasons (When Your Body Remembers)
This has been a long winter.
And if you live in New England, you know how it can feel like it will never end. The gray days stretch on, the cold lingers, and you start to wonder if spring will ever actually come.
But for me, March has felt heavy in a different way.
For a while, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I would just notice it—feeling off, more emotional, more tired, a little foggy. Like I was carrying something I couldn’t fully name.
Until I remembered.
Eighteen years ago, Jon spent the entire month of March in the hospital, going through intense cancer treatments. Every day was long. Uncertain. Heavy with decisions and fear.
One year later, March came again—and this time, he was getting sicker and sicker, and we didn’t know why. There were no clear answers, just a slow decline that didn’t make sense. And no matter what the doctors did, he kept getting worse.
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Surrender, Inflammation, and Learning to Breathe Again
Looking back, I can see what I couldn’t see then.
It wasn’t just trauma.
It wasn’t just stress.
It wasn’t just sleepless nights.
It was my grip.
I was holding everything tightly.
Holding my grief because if I fully felt it, I feared it would consume me.
Holding my schedule because busyness numbed the ache.
Holding my future because I was determined nothing like this would ever happen again.
But control is exhausting.
And my body was paying the price.
The more tightly I tried to manage my health, my children, my grief, and every possible outcome, the more my inflammation seemed to climb. It was as if my body mirrored my heart, bracing constantly.
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