Poor Widow Me: Moments of feeling & dealing & finding the funny along the way

My life stopped on April 13, 2006. At 6:19 that evening Jimmy, my high school sweetheart and husband of 33 years, died of Burkitt' s Lymphoma. He was sick for barely a month, and had just turned 56. Our daughter and son were grown, and our little granddaughter was two. I worried, Am I going to end up being the grandma in the back seat of the car? But after some time, and a lot of bereavement therapy, I miraculously found myself eagerly anticipating my future more often than I lived in our past. Along the way, I wrote down the small moments that had a big impact on me. Some of them brought me solace, or, as I like to call it, grief relief. Others are moments that stayed with me because they each, somehow in their own way, captured the experience of widowhood. As a comedy writer, I'm wired to be funny, so there's plenty to chuckle about here. Humor is honest, laughing is healing. And though these incidents are from my life, of course, I've come to see that the essence of my story is very much every widow's story. This is what Jimmy said to me when he realized he wasn't going to live, This will be a life-changer for you. It'll be an adventure. Often I say to him in death what I rarely said to him in life, You were right, honey.