I remember one of the early conversations I had with my therapist as a new widow. I remember some of the questions and anxieties that swirled around in my head. Will I ever be happy again? Will I ever feel normal again? Will I love again? How will the boys do without a father? What will life be like without a partner? Will the boys have someone in their lives who is a father to them eventually? I had everything figured out when my husband, Ryan, was alive and healthy, and I found myself having n

I was sixty, a widow for nearly seven years, and though I had tried to fill my time with reading, church activities, and the occasional bridge game, it was the soil that finally gave me peace. My late husband, Walter, had once teased me about my “brown thumb.” I couldn’t keep a houseplant alive, much less coax tomatoes from a vine. But after he passed, I needed something, anything to fill the silence of our little house. So I dug. At first, it was a modest patch behind the shed: a few tomato pla

After My Husband’s Riding Accident, My City Brother-In-Law Drove Out To Our Texas Ranch — Our Widow Neighbor Told Me To Get The Will The day my brother-in-law rolled up in a shiny SUV, my husband was sitting on our front porch outside Amarillo, Texas, hunched in his back brace with a mug of coffee going cold in his hands. Dust kicked up around the tires as his brother stepped out in clean jeans and boots that had never seen real mud. He didn’t even glance at the feed buckets by the door. “Dad me