Tag Archives: love

Clearing Out Clutter

July 17, 2024

I have been busy looking in corners and clearing out items I no longer am using or no longer need or wish to keep—-a child’s guitar, a computer keyboard, canning jars—-and today I opened a cardboard box of sewing notions and fabric pieces of various sizes. In the box were the last two pages of a letter from my mother—inside this particular box because on the back side of the last page of her letter she had typed instructions on how to replace zippers.

Reading the letter, I can hear my mother’s voice again, chatting about the work she was doing in their garden in Oregon, the photo I had sent of my little son David, soon to be one year old, and the problems facing her mother-in-law (my grandmother) because my grandfather was developing dementia and needing more care. My grandparents lived faraway in Arkansas.

My mother wrote “I just hope that I die in a hurry while I still find the daily routine a challenge and a pleasure.”

I cannot stop the tears. She was sixty-one when she wrote those words. Twenty-two years later she would decline relatively quickly and die of congestive heart failure, surrounded by family who loved her. I held her hand. I closed her eyes.

I fold the letter carefully. I will put this scrap of letter into the blue box that holds the last of my mother’s papers.

Not everything is clutter.

Kristin Moyer

Vigil

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I have been here before

No more desire to eat
No more desire to drink
Comforted by the warmth of bed

My beloved husband was dying and
I did not spend every minute with him
Too busy trying to keep it all rolling
Calling friends to come see him
Doing laundry for gods sake

While children and friends sat with him

Though in the night I was there beside him
The hospital bed pushed next to ours
So I could touch him
And hear the change in his breathing…

There is that

So now I stay in this room 
On a bright May day
With my dying cat
My sweet boy during the pandemic

No more desire to eat
No more desire to drink
Comforted by the warmth of bed


Kristin Moyer
May 27, 2023

Let There Be Light

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It is December, with the winter solstice approaching, the season of light!

But I am having trouble producing light here on my hilltop.

First it was the four walk lights edging the pavers leading from my car park. All four lights were working, and then suddenly one evening, they were not.

I went out to the electrical corner the next morning. The transformer was plugged in and its face was glowing, meaning it was getting power. I tried turning the switch to off and then on again, and the walk lights came on. I set the timer to six hours, and that evening the walk lights worked.

But two nights ago, the walk lights were off again. I tried the same rescue operation, and last night the walk lights were shining again. For how long is anyone’s guess.

Inside the house the Christmas lights are frustrating me. The set of wax candles on the mantel has fresh batteries but I can’t get the remote control to turn them on at five pm, for six hours.

I am having the same problem with the battery-powered candles in the windows. They all have fresh batteries, but I can’t get the remote control to work their timers either. Two worked, but not the other ten.

Yesterday after reading the manufacturers’ instructions online, I learned the secret: you have to turn on all these candles manually at the base first before using the remote to set the timers. I waited until almost five pm, and then followed the instructions. And it worked. The house was lovely with flickering light. I will write a note of instruction and put it in the storage boxes, so that next Christmas I will not be frustrated. I am almost 80, and I forget things.

Yesterday I also brought the Fraser fir inside, set it in the stand by myself, and put on the strands of small clear lights. First I plugged in each strand to be sure the whole strand of 100 was working. But when I got the first strand carefully draped around the top most section of the tree, the second 50 lights were dark, so I had to take the lights off, muttering and climbing on and off the step ladder, and replace it with a new strand.

Finally I had all the lights on the tree, and I sat on the couch to admire my work.

Bill had always put the lights on the tree, and Bill had set up most of the window candles—his favorite Christmas decoration and one that he was not in a hurry to take down after Christmas. Sometimes the window candles were up until Easter; they were the old plug-in kind.

This is my thirteenth Christmas without Bill, and it is hard even after this passage of time to make the light shine without him.

I sit in the dark living room, the lights shining on the tree, the candles flickering on the mantel and in the windows, signaling to the dark sky and to the stardust that I am here.

December 12, 2022

Mothers’ Day

A Love Song, on Mother’s Day

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May 12, 2017

It is Mother’s Day, and instead of thinking of my mother, as I should by popular tradition, I am thinking of you, the father of my children. Perhaps it is because I am sitting in the corner of the couch closest to the picture window, your favorite spot to sit and read. I used to sit opposite you, in the black leather chair with my feet up on the ottoman, and every now and then look up from my book and say something to you, although often I was out at a meeting and you read alone.

Now I sit in your spot on the couch because it is easier to get up from the couch with its higher seat and arms and I am older, and if truth be told, I like this view of the garden better. I have snagged the ottoman, so I can put my feet up, and although I began reading the latest book group selection on my Kindle, I have stopped to listen to the Carolina wren outside the picture window. He is singing away, so big a song for his tiny body, and perched on a branch of the lilac shrub that we tried to kill off because it was so massive when we moved into this house forty years ago, and when the lilac persisted and did not die we let it be.

I look out the window with your eyes, seeing the wren in the lilac shrub, the wren house swaying from the eaves where this little bird is building a new nest. We bought that bird house on a vacation to the Outer Banks in North Carolina. You put up the hook the wren house is hanging from. And when the original cording broke, you strung new cord, and that cord is holding still.

Beyond the window your eyes must have seen the changing light at this time of day, when the sun dips lower in the west, lighting up the spring green leaves of the willow oak that we planted together so many years ago. The willow oak and her sister have so shaded the bed by the picture window that I replaced the struggling plants you would remember. Now ferns, hellebores, native geraniums, and astilbe grow there.

But inside, this living room is not much changed at all. You could sit down in your favorite spot on this couch and pick up from the side table the last book you were reading before you became too ill to read: A Team of Rivals. There are other books stacked on top of it, but I have not found the heart to move it.

There is a new basket for kindling on the raised hearth, and a new hearth rug. There are two new Siamese cats sitting on the rug: Jasmine and your sweet Blueberry have passed away. And there is me, not all that different after almost seven years, but perhaps stronger for this journey, sitting in your favorite spot on the couch, listening to the Carolina wren singing his love song in the lilac shrub.

Love and Loss and Grief

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April 9, 2017

My minister asked me to speak about the healing power of love at our worship services this past Sunday, and this is what I said:

Not quite seven years ago, my husband Bill died of cancer. He was one month and one day short of his 68th birthday. We celebrated our 45th wedding anniversary six weeks before his death. Bill died at home in our bedroom, peacefully with his family around him. We were able to give him the kind of death he wanted.

When such a deep loss happens to you, you feel as though someone has handed you this enormous boulder to carry, a rough and heavy boulder of grief. You stagger at first as you try to carry it, and you try not to fall down with it in public, but in private you simply collapse and sit beside that boulder and weep.

But after a time you learn how to carry the boulder without collapsing so frequently. And after an even longer time the boulder seems not as large and not as heavy, or perhaps you have grown stronger and learned how to carry it more easily. And the surface is no longer as rough, perhaps smoothed by time or by your tears, and the boulder has become easier to grip.

And once your boulder of grief does not overwhelm you, you lift your head up and you look around.

You look at all the people with such tenderness and new awareness.

And you see clearly the boulders so many are carrying. You knew on an intellectual level before, that they were burdened by grief and sorrow, but now you see their grief with your heart.

The friends who lost their son in a terrible accident.

Your colleague who struggles with depression, and the other colleague whose mother has been diagnosed with early Alzheimer’s.

Your friend whose husband collapsed while running and died of a heart attack.

The couple who are coming to terms with the fact that they will never conceive a child.

And for those whose stories you do not know, but you can imagine. No one is spared from grief.

Your own heart has been softened by grief, and your sense of compassion has expanded. You will never be the same.

And perhaps after a very long time, your boulder will shrink in size until it is a rock small enough to fit into your pocket, a warm smooth rock that is a talisman of the love that will never leave you and that has opened your heart to all those around you.

May it be so.

Diary of Not a Wimpy Widow

The Adventures and Misadventures of a Widow