grief

by myself

It was during the pandemic that Tim & I started to include the First Harvest (Lughnasa, Lammas) in our celebrations of the eight festivals of the wheel of the year. Sunflowers were in full bloom at Buttonwood Farm in nearby Griswold, Connecticut and we decided to make going for a long walk through the huge field of them our tradition. Since moving to North Carolina three years ago I have been floundering, trying to figure out another way to mark the passing seasons. And now I’ve lost my companion.

For the first six months after Tim died I was in shock. As I’ve started coming out of that anesthetized state I’ve been finding ways to live with the reality of my new situation in life. He was the absolute center of my life. I won’t go on about how much I miss him but I have noticed something unique about this grief. When I lost my parents I still had my life with Tim to return to for comfort. Life returned to normal, nothing changed in my household or daily routines after they died.

It feels like “everyone” now has gone back to their own lives, in their own houses, where nothing in their daily lives, plans, and routines has changed. Not so for me. A friend pointed out to me that widows in Victorian times wore black for two and a half years and there seems to be a good reason for this. It may well take that long to adjust to this and it’s good to remind others that while they have a life to return to, mine is forever altered.

Tim expressed similar feelings to me when his brother died in our house, after living with us for the last nine months of his life. He said the grief hit him harder and longer than when his parents died. And he thought it had everything to do with the fact that his brother had been living so intimately under the same roof with him.

I’ve been making some comforting changes in my new life with myself. I went back to practicing yoga, osteoporosis be damned. I skip the spine-twisting moves and am feeling so refreshed, more grateful and at a peace. Tai chi was okay, but it just didn’t do much for me. Sometimes I realize that I am still grieving my loss of health and living by the sea, as well as missing Tim. I find comfort listening to great music on WMVY radio, streaming from Martha’s Vineyard. Doing familiar old jigsaw puzzles reduces anxiety very quickly for some reason.

There is a sunflower field down here, but the bloom time is off for Lughnasa, and it occurred to me the other day that it is in a city park. We never got there to see it and perhaps one deterrent was the idea of driving into the city just didn’t appeal, no feeling of connecting with Mother Earth the way the drive into the countryside did.

I’ve made my peace with celebrating the Wheel of the Year by myself, at least for most of them. I now have a jigsaw puzzle for each of the 8 festivals and movies for some of them. I watched Dancing at Lughnasa for the first time since 2020, when I first had the movie idea. And I plan to go ahead with my annual winter solstice gathering with family and friends.

The two things that have been the most difficult to find a way of doing without Tim are blogging and working on our family history. I hope to write about my halting progress with those endeavors in the coming months.

But for now, I’m sharing the puzzle I started on Lughnasa and finished this morning, as well as some pictures memories from past First Harvest trips to Buttonwood Farms. I will give myself this one journey around the Wheel of the Year, starting here, to celebrate with my puzzles and my memories. Then I will probably go back to simply the combining of paintings with words to mark the eight festivals.

We are the Flower — Thou the Sun!
Forgive us, if as days decline —
We nearer steal to Thee!
~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #161)

Absence disembodies — so does Death
Hiding individuals from the Earth
Superstition helps, as well as love —
Tenderness decreases as we prove —
~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #904)

remember how he loved you

5.14.26 ~ Elm Grove Cemetery, Mystic, Connecticut
photo by Larisa

It rained all day on May 14th. I didn’t take a single picture for the entire day. But I’m glad Larisa captured this last moment Finn had with his Grandpa, checking to see how heavy his ashes were. The two of them shared a birthday and were two peas in a pod. I will never forget how much fun it was to watch them playing together.

I chose to bury Tim’s ashes in Elm Grove Cemetery because it is located in the county where we lived for 47 years of our marriage, and because the plot was purchased by my 2nd-great-grandfather, who lies buried there with his own parents and great-grandparents and other relations. They all also lived in southeastern Connecticut, and there is still room there to bury ashes, so it seemed like a good choice. Tim & I took many walks in this beautiful cemetery, which sits on the banks of the Mystic River, just north of Mystic Seaport.

We may fear change or we may embrace it, but the planets turn, life goes on, the Great Cycles continue. These cycles move Nature and our lives through death and rebirth, through containment and release, through holding and letting go. The seed pod tightens and hardens around its precious cargo, then it breaks and releases the new life into the waiting earth.
~ Philip Carr-Gomm
(Inspiration for Life, May 25, 2026)

image credit: Wolf Rock Nature Preserve website

Later in the day we all drove up to Wolf Rock in Mansfield, our northeastern Connecticut hometown, to scatter some of Tim’s ashes along with the remaining ashes he had kept of his brother, Toby. Still raining, it was a quarter-mile hike up very rocky and very muddy terrain through the woods to the glacial erratic where Tim and his brothers used to hang out as teens. Tim and Josh scattered some of Toby’s ashes here in December 2013, but now Dan, Matt and Jed had a chance to be here to scatter the rest of them.

The next day, on May 15th, we held an afternoon celebration of life at the Zbierski House at “our” little city beach. Besides the family, we were now joined by old friends and neighbors and lots of Tim’s buddies from the ham radio clubs he belonged to. It was wonderful. I had spent weeks working on a slide show of Tim’s life which was playing on a TV continuously and started many pleasant conversations and quite a few trips down memory lane…

Below is one of my favorite pictures, taken before the first heart attack and the battle with heart disease began. The fun, empty nest, middle-aged period of our lives. He was 51 and only just beginning to go gray…

Zbierski House at Eastern Point Beach ~ photo by Jenn

I feel more settled now that Tim’s ashes have been returned to the earth and that his family got to be together to say good-bye. The trip was grueling for me physically but somehow I made it and the emotional healing was worth the effort. I’m still incredibly sad and lonely for him but am learning how to carry the grief. How to take walks without him pointing things out to me…

I think my last hurdle will be resuming family history research. It’s going to be hard not having him in the next room, doing ham radio stuff, but always ready to drop everything when I came in to share new discoveries with him. I still have those last three boxes to go through… And several other projects waiting in line…

sunset from the Zbierski House ~ photo by Jenn

a slam-bang return to joy

Spring is made of solid, fourteen-karat gratitude, the reward for the long wait. Every religious tradition from the northern hemisphere honors some form of April hallelujah, for this is the season of exquisite redemption, a slam-bang return to joy after a season of cold second thoughts.
~ Barbara Kingsolver
(Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)

When Tim & I moved into our new home in July of 2023 we were delighted to have a flowering dogwood in our front yard, tucked under the towering pines. We looked forward to seeing it bloom. But when the springs of 2024 and 2025 passed by without it flowering we were disappointed. It seemed to be a healthy tree with plenty of green leaves.

After I did some research we decided to order some fertilizer for acid-loving trees. It came in spikes and, as directed, early last summer Tim was out there hammering the spikes into the ground at the proper distance away from the trunk of the tree. Then sadly, in October he suddenly died.

One lovely morning near the end of March I went out to check the mail and noticed the blossoms, mostly higher up in the tree. It was such a bittersweet moment, stopping me in my tracks. Tim never got to see the results of his efforts to bring these lovely dogwood blossoms into our lives. As time goes on I know I will think of him with deep gratitude every time they bloom.

to live with loss

The reality is you will grieve forever. You will not “get over” the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal, and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again, but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same, nor would you want to.
~ Elisabeth Kubler-Ross & David Kessler
(On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss)

I have found these words to be true. It’s thirty-four years now since my mother died and I have healed and have learned how to live with that never-ending feeling of painful loss. After my father died twelve years ago, grief was much more familiar to me and I more quickly got used to feeling like an orphan. But now, to be a widow.

I miss my husband so much. How is this much pain even possible? The loss feels like it’s cutting even deeper than the loss of my parents because I intimately shared my life with this man for more than fifty years. My days are full of memory flashes, as if my brain wants to watch the video of our whole life together in bits and pieces. (I think in pictures.) So I pause whatever I am doing, recall the scene, cry a little, talk to him a little, and then try to remember what I was doing and carry on.

Sunday evening I took another very long two-hour walk with my friends. It was cold and the atmosphere felt like it was going to snow. It was magical. (It did snow the next day in some places nearby, but not at my place.) Very healing and I am so grateful for their love and support. We were still out there when the sun set. A good memory.

late autumn lunchtime

11.25.25 ~ red-bellied woodpecker in Arcadia

I am often at a loss for words these days, but a couple of hours of birdwatching with a new friend was a welcome interlude in the grieving process.

The beauty, variety, and unexpected behaviors of birds can inspire feelings of joy, awe, and wonder, which can be a powerful counterbalance to grief.
~ AI

a hole in the world

Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling into at night.
~ Edna St. Vincent Millay
(Letter to Witter Bynner, October 29, 1920)

The above words perfectly describe this strange new chapter in my life. Widowhood. I am still numb but doing well, thanks to all the love and support of family and friends. There is so much to do!

It took me a whole week to suddenly understand that I had no idea how to transfer photos from my camera to my laptop. Countless times Tim had offered to teach me how to do that and now it’s too late. What a gut punch that realization was.

Writing an obituary took a lot of time, it felt like a labor of love, trying to honor this wonderful man who shared over fifty years of life with me. It finally got published in a local newspaper but I also put it on a permanent page on this blog.

*Timothy W. Rodgers

Family and friends have been taking walks with me. At some point I hope I will start posting with new pictures again, and trying to catch up with my blogging friends. All in good time.

on a happier note

The clearing rests in song and shade.
It is a creature made
By old light held in soil and leaf,
By human joy and grief,
By human work,
Fidelity of sight and stroke,
By rain, by water on
The parent stone.
~ Wendell Berry
(This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems)

It seems like it’s been raining and dreary for the past couple of weeks — we even turned the heat on a couple of times. But we’ve been seeing a lot of interesting creatures outside our windows, like this baby bunny I caught with my camera. One morning I saw two opossums scrounging around in the leaf litter for food, and another time I saw a coyote trotting across the back yard.

One day when returning from grocery shopping we were very excited to find four fledgling Carolina wrens trying out their wings on the wax myrtle branches in our front yard. And those darling Carolina chickadees who nested in our birdhouse had some little ones, too. They flit about so quickly I can’t count them but there are at least three and I got to see a parent feeding one of them.

And one delightful afternoon Kat and I designed a dragon garden to fill in the unused birdbath in the front yard. 💜

where the great heron feeds

7.18.22 ~ Groton, Connecticut
great blue heron feeding

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
~ Wendell Berry
(The Peace of Wild Things)