Afternoon on a Hill

I will be the gladdest thing 
 Under the sun! 
 I will touch a hundred flowers 
 And not pick one. 

 I will look at cliffs and clouds 
 With quiet eyes, 
 Watch the wind bow down the grass, 
 And the grass rise. 

 And when lights begin to show 
 Up from the town, 
I will mark which must be mine, 
 And then start down!

                 Edna St. Vincent Millay

Quote

“In the depths of every heart there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and the revelry above may cause us to forget their existence...” 

― Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Widow

“We are not idealized wild things.
We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.” 
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

I have become a "widow" and am in mourning, for all that I was and all that I will never be. I have lost my husband in a sea of memories, tears, and tomorrows yet to come. I reach out for my own hand and cannot find it. Something shadowed has replaced me,  a stranger struggling with illness and confusion, and minutes and hours and days alone, a kind of loneliness that has no solid definition.--Jane