I am....

Flashback photo memories are a bittersweet gut punch every morning. I’ve considered ignoring them but I think it’s important, for me at least, to see the reminder, feel the feeling(s), and acknowledge both the joy and the grief that the photos bring me.  Pete and I went on some incredible trips. There are a lot of photos. A LOT.  Right now I’m in the midst of the four year anniversary of our one month trip to Europe. We were going to go back next year for our ten year anniversary.  What I’ve struggled with this week is this question: “How do you bail on a life that includes Trdelnik ice cream cones?”  Obviously, it’s not just the cone. It’s the vacations, the ballgames, the family events, the quiet walks on the perfect spring evening when the clouds are so puffy and white they look like they were drawn by Pixar artists? How do you tap out of that life? How do you make that choice? Then you remember that mental illness doesn’t give a shit about an ice cream cone.  Prior even to his fina

This may seem sacrilegious to say but I did not like my husband the day he died. Or the day before. Or maybe even for most of the few weeks ahead of his death. I loved him, yes, but I did not like the version of him that I was living with at all. Not even a little bit.  I was hopeful that after he worked through the grief, and the mania, and the relapses that I could figure out a way back to the comfortable camaraderie we had for much of our marriage but that I also needed to be a realist and understand that I was losing a lot of my own mental health gains in this relationship and needed to protect myself.  This may seem insulting to the dead but when I bemoaned to my therapist that “I did not understand how spouses who actually liked their partners went back to work quickly after their death because I still feel somewhat disembodied by the whole thing” she said “It’s actually often easier for people that are in healthy relationships.”  I sat with that for a minute and said “maybe that

There’s nothing quite like when you find yourself having a full conversation about the day with your dog and truly wonder how long you’ve been talking.  My brain, even prior to the death/cancer/suicide trifecta of 2022, was never been a quiet place to exist. I’ve described the world in there as a place where I’m reading an entire orchestral score, with a stock market ticker tape running across the top, a perpetually refreshing Instagram feed on the side, but I’m riding a unicycle while doing long division and juggling Rubix cubes. On the outside, generally, I appear fairly calm. I have a reputation of being a very aggressive (and creative) problem solver.  Navigating those worlds, internal and external, takes a lot of energy.  I’ve been very open that I see a therapist regularly. However, I did not initially visit her for the chaos in my head or even the sexual assaults I’ve experienced. I went to her because I was having bad dreams about a jury trial and wanted a quick fix and because

The anguish of loss is, for the loss of a better word, weird. There’s the initial shock, the overwhelm of the first days and weeks, and then there’s the moments that you think “Oh, I need to tell him that my dad’s surgery went well” that simply punch you in the gut.  And then, in the butterfly effect of bullshit that is suicide, you’re reminded that you’re still so unbelievably angry with your loved one. Can you even use the phrase “loved one” if you’re this angry?   When I dive into the “why am I angry (today)” question it really falls more under the fact I feel betrayed. Pete was supposed to be my support system as I was the support system for my parents. That was the deal. He was to help do the heavy lifting, literally, of things around their house. He was supposed to be around to listen as I shared my fears surrounding the ninth surgery for my dad in the last two years. He was supposed to the simple things like caring for our dog while I drove with my parents to out of town appoint

Easter has never really been my holiday. I gave up religion years ago and I gave up this holiday in exchange for Thanksgiving in my divorce negotiations. So, while today is a holiday, it’s not one that I associated with any real traditions but it is the first one that I’ve flown solo. Maybe it’s a gift to have a gentle introduction into all of the social media happy family posts be of pastel colors and jelly beans and that by the time we reach turkeys and trees I’ll be settled into this new routine.  I think in this whole transition I’m also coming to terms with the fact that I’ve never truly been on my own.  I met my first husband at 18, married him at 20, had kids at 22 and 23, divorced at 33, had primary custody of the kids as a single mom, remarried at 38, widowed at 46. And, while I wouldn’t change a thing about the path that led to my children, I think that the challenges I’m facing right now might be easier to navigate if I’d spent more than a minute (and part of every other wee

I am a 46 year old widow. I am neither a young widow, with a life of tragic possibility and young children to raise, or an older widow mourning the loss of the only love she’s ever known. I am someone who deeply loved a very damaged man for ten years before he took his own life.  I am finding that I am struggling to not quantify our relationship by the limited amount of years together that we actually had. I did plan on growing old with this man. I’d stopped dying my hair, stopped wearing anything that wasn’t designed for cozy living, hell, I started wearing Crocs.  I was comfortable in my skin for, maybe, the first time in my life. He was my favorite travel companion. We had found a peaceful home that we both loved. He had his first grand baby and another on the way - I got to be “Grandrea”.  He was a protector, a bit of a clown, definitely rough around the edges. We challenged each other, we were both in our own therapy, battling our own demons, talking them through, getting stronger

I lost my creativity, completely, with the pandemic. It's starting to come back bit by bit as we move from pandemic to potential world war, I think just because, truly, what is the other option? To stay in a state of languishing forever? Life continued during the pandemic so why can't creativity? The transition back didn't come through writing. Instead, I was lucky enough to be gifted a hand-me-down camera from my uber-talented professional photographer dad. Wandering the dusty county roads in my new/old home town was a pandemic safe activity filled with more scenery than most people probably think exists in Western Nebraska. And, I love it. I am so happy, content, quiet, wandering with my dog. If you told me that we were going for a hike, I'd probably tell you to "take a hike". Instead, I'll go on a photo jaunt for hours as long as I have a camera and there might be something interesting to take pictures of. The discovery of this creative quadrant in

August, 1944 - Scottsbluff, Nebraska - Barbara Neeley Journal Entry Someday years from now I will probably reread these pages and wonder why, in my youth, I thought I could write and attempted to put my thoughts and reactions into words. First, I assure myself very emphatically that I definitely have no talent along literary lines, and also that my extreme frankness sometimes could be described as almost brutal. These few pages do not develop into any particular story, except perhaps my own. Nor it is an autobiography (God forbid - I’m not that interesting). Shall we say it’s a “Collection of Recollections”. Frankly, one of the main reasons I want to write this is because I don’t want to entirely forget some of the interesting personalities whom I will describe later and I know I shall as the years pass. This little epistle started over three years ago. It starts then because that is when “yours truly” started to lead a double life. By this I mean that at times (evenings and w

This was an exercise for my latest writing class.  The Facebook 10 year photo exercise caused me to reflect on this piece. You find yourself on a park bench on the South Platte. Beside you sits a young person you gradually realize is in fact yourself, but ten years ago. For some strange reason, both of you feel more calm than you'd expected to feel. What transpires between you? We’re both here because we love water.  Water brings us peace. Life isn’t always peaceful for us, now or then.  Life is better now, yes. Life is more or less the same now, yes. Life is harder somehow now, yes.  Life is so much easier now, absolutely. All of the above. I don’t want to tell her everything about the now or the parts of the journey that she’ll avoid if she knows they’re coming.  She has had too much trauma already. She’s already running scared. She doesn’t need my advice. Yet, she asks. She’s a persistent one.  Full of questions, a frenetic energy, a terrorized exhaustion lurkin

I did not expect to see a man playing a French horn in his front window this afternoon.  It was a most perfect introduction to London. Our flight?  Uneventful, though long.  We taxied past the retired Concord at Heathrow and I longingly wished for a flight that was less than twelve hours of travel.  Denver - Keflavik - London.   Pete and I have the two ends of the spectrum of the leg room problem.  He never has enough and my feet don’t touch the ground.  I think we found our happy place in the first row after first class where we could both prop our feet on the wall and flit in and out of sleep for the last few hours of the flight. The car service from Heathrow to our AirBnB in Greenwich?  Not great.  Maybe it’s just London traffic that’s not great.  Maybe I’m just tired.  Maybe I’m just a control freak who thinks there was likely a much more efficient route.  In a city I’ve never visited.  Where cars are driven on the wrong side of the street.  Where people drive close enough to e

We leave two weeks from today to travel through the UK, Belgium, Germany, the Czech Republic, France, and Ireland.  I've never left the country before.  At 42 years old, I've never even been to Mexico. So instead of just taking a quick weekend south of the border as my virgin journey stamp on my passport I got a wild hair when my daughter mentioned studying overseas for the summer. Now, six months later, it's nearly time to go.   It started with a plan for a week long trip to fly to Ireland to celebrate our fifth anniversary and the daughter would fly on to Prague to meet her school.  But then, we'd miss London.  So the trip changed into a plan to go to London and then drop her off in Prague.  Well, Berlin is in between those two places and my childhood pen pal lives in Berlin, so the trip grew to 10 days.  London, Berlin, Prague.  Ireland could wait, right?  But wait, in between London and Berlin is the cemetery where my grandmother's cousin is buried-his death p

I've been writing online for nearly 20 years now, which is hard to believe.  I have a 23 year old diploma that indicates I have a degree in English that sits, gathering dust, in my basement.  And now, as I'm working on my first book, I've been in a cerebral battle with myself as I say "I'm not a writer." I'm a real estate agent, a mom, a wife, an amateur chef, a former piano teacher, a blogger, a fill-in-the-blank with anything except a "real" writer. Except that is bullshit.  I'm a writer.  And I'm developing my craft.  I'm a long way from the great authors that line my bookshelves in my basement writing nook.  I'm probably even a long way from some of the crappy ones that I can't force myself to throw away. Thanks to my first ever creative writing class at Lighthouse Writers Workshop I'm developing a writing practice, I'm finding my voice, and my character's voices.  My current book project is a piece of h