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My Walk With Grief is a spiritual memoir about my 10-year search for identity and love after living as a pastor’s wife for 30 years, eventually marrying an agnostic.
This memoir is my story. When Mark died, part of me died too. For thirty years, I lived in his shadow as a pastor’s wife. Unimpeded as a widow, I searched obsessively for identity and love. This journey pulled me into soul struggles, grief, world travel, disastrous dating, dog drama, spiritual surprises, and eventually, I married an agnostic who, to my surprise, embodied God’s Grace.
The week my husband died exposed the internal conflict between my public role as a pastor’s wife and my personal needs as a spouse. In the following ten years, I set out on a circuitous journey to rediscover myself, God, and new love as a middle-aged woman.
I wrote the memoir to uncover meaning for myself. I wrote it for others so I might no waste a good suffering. Although the book includes reflections on the week of Mark’s death, it is mostly about the struggle to find me again the years that followed.
In my work as a psychotherapist, my brand was “some things in life are too hard to do alone.” This statement is also true for the journey of grief. This writing uses my own story to reflect on the four steps I experienced in my own path toward a new life. These are 1) The Loss; 2) Survival; 3) Finding a new identity; and 4) Now what? I long for the stories of my journey to be helpful to others in theirs. Through this journey, I sought God and spiritual meaning.
I want the memoir to inspire people who know significant loss and encourage them to grieve deeply, to live fully, rediscover love, and the wideness of God’s grace.