I met Dave in 1993 when he asked me to dance. He was a cowboy and at 6’2”, I was intrigued. Plus, growing up I always loved westerns and dreamed of living on a farm so the attraction was not a stretch. We had fun and many wonderful adventures together! 

Fog. When we hear that word we understand we will have difficulty navigating through it. Things will seem unclear.

Working with people that are dealing with the pain of loss and grief I use the term foggy brain… a lot. Because that is what we are experiencing.

We can’t seem to focus on anything for too long. We struggle with doing activities that under normal situations would be easy. We forgot…a lot. We can’t seem to finish a conversation or task. We may injure ourselves. We may lose things. We are tired all the time because you can’t sleep. Or maybe we just want to sleep all the time. When we experience this we tend to be hard on ourselves. We think we are losing our minds. We believe something is wrong with us.

Have you heard…”Well, it’s just a dog.” 

It’s certainly not “just a dog” loss for me and not for most of us. When you lose a pet you are losing a family member. And even though I’ve had several pets, one of the most difficult losses for me was when I had to make the difficult decision to put down my Australian Shepherd, Spinner, after 13 years together.  

I met Dave in 1993 when he asked me to dance. He was a cowboy and at 6’2”, I was intrigued. Plus, growing up I always loved westerns and dreamed of living on a farm so the attraction was not a stretch. We had fun and many wonderful adventures together! 

As an athlete, my Dad loved all sports but baseball was his passion.  His goal was to be a professional pitcher but an injury ended that dream. The injury and the fact that he had only daughters didn’t stop him from playing sports. In fact, he would invite me, the oldest of his three girls, to play with him. I was like the son he didn’t have and I say that only because, if you know me, you know that I am not the athletic type. But I loved my Dad so it was a no brainer to play sports with and for him. 

After a wake up call with depression and an eating disorder, I went into full blown action. Also known as:  Keep busy! Really busy!

I married my high school sweetheart and the dream was that we would buy the house, have the family and live happily ever after. We bought the house, had the baby but a year later, I was divorced. Boy, I didn’t see that coming. One night he came home and said he didn’t want to be married anymore, just like a scene from a really bad movie.

I can remember a time when I actually dreaded the weekends. The weekends seemed to shine a floodlight on what I had lost, so I would hide. During the week it was easier to avoid feeling the pain of the death of a loved one as I could distract (aka busy) myself with work and volunteering which was also a form of hiding.