“There is no greater agony than an untold story inside you.”Maya Angelou; I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

On April 1, 2021, my husband of 27 years, died after a valiant 13 year battle with Parkinson’s Disease. Aside from the Pandemic we had all been in for the last year, making our worlds seem anything but “ordinary,” I now found myself catapulted into a world of grief, one filled with sadness, fear, uncertainly and regrets. My grief was not something to “get over.” It was not something that could be “fixed.” It was, and still is today, something that I must learn to “get through” and come out on the other side a new person. So much of who I was before my husband died is buried with him. So I am moving forward as a very different version of myself, changed forever by this experience called grief. Changed in a very good way, I would hope.

In 2015, an article entitled: “Facing the Storm,” by Rory Vaden, appeared in the Tennessean. The article relates the story of how Bison purposefully face an advancing storm head-on, rather than huddle together and wait for the storm to come to them. “Buffalo wait for the storm to cross right over the crest of the peak of the mountaintop and as the storm rolls over the ridge the buffalo turn and charge directly into the storm.” When they do this, take on the obstacle directly, they actually reduce their exposure to the storm and, in doing so, spend less time in the most intense part than they would had they waited for it to come to them. Had they run the other way, the storm would have chased them, and would have eventually caught up to them anyway.