With friends like these...

...who needs a bodyguard?

Write on a blog with any real content long enough--with real sentiments, soul-baring honesty, and really tough subject matter--it's inevitable that you end up with a few haters. A few nasty comments. Flame-wars in your comment inbox. And if you're particularly popular and widely read or if you have a particularly divergent personality or writing style, you're even more likely to fall in some dickwad's cross-hairs.

I'm nothing of the "widely read" or "highly popular" categories, nor "highly divergent" unless you count my subject matter--writing about grief and loss and learning to live again. And I've been remarkably lucky over the 2 1/2 years I've been writing on this blog--I've only gotten a very small number of nasty-gram comments...maybe only 4 or 5. I can't even remember anymore.

So when I got home early this evening after an absolutely delightful playdate with a good friend this afternoon, at a sunny park on a glorious fall day, and checked my email on my phone, I wasn't expecting the "gem" that awaited me:

When I first read the comment in my email inbox, I snorted. Really? How moronic can some people be?!? I laughed to myself.

But after about 30 seconds (I've always been slow to react to things and mellowly wired, compared to a lot of people), it started to burn in my gut. "Stuck"? "A downer"? I need to write about "moving on"? The only thing that would have made it worse was if it had been an anonymous, dump-and-run flame. (I'd wisely disabled anonymous comments over a year ago, after another too-pansy-to-use-my-real-name attack.)

I debated with myself. Do I even bother responding? Stoop to this commenter's level and dignify her schlock with a response?

I figured I'd give myself a few hours--24, ideally, or maybe 12--and see if I even gave a shit after that time, before potentially responding. But as I sat down to check Facebook after dinner with my daughter, I saw that another blogging widowed friend of mine, Alicia at Forever Changed, had already seen the comment and was itching to come to my defense.

Kill two birds with one stone, while I was debating if/how/when to respond? Yes, please!

And Alicia's response is so well-formed, intelligent, and delicious, I had to repost it here:

Caroline, I don't know who you are, because your profile doesn't link to a blog. So I have to ask, Who the hell are YOU to post a comment like that?

Are you a mother? Candice is raising a beautiful daughter all by herself. Every day that she looks at her daughter's face, she sees her husband, who was ripped brutally from their lives. At every stage of her development, that little girl will have to process her daddy's death all over again -- over and over again for the next 15 to 20 to 25 years -- and will have to talk about him, will have to ask questions about him. And Candice will be there for her.

Do you work? Do you have a job that guarantees you a paycheck? Candice is starting her own business. She is setting out in troubled economic times and investing herself in a venture that may crash and burn.

Are you talented? Do you have any artistic gifts? Candice is taking her eye with the camera and her gift for portraiture and offering it out to be critiqued and rejected. She is exposing her art and her SELF to criticism and rejection.

I'm not even going to ask if you're a widow, because no widow would ever complain that another was being a downer, and that "the widow thing was getting kind of old" -- even after 5 years. Trust me when I say that Candi's blog is NOT a downer. She may write about widowhood and grief and loss, but she writes with more dignity and strength and self-awareness than a whole "bunch of widow blogs" that I read. She doesn't fill the pages with inspirational quotes and wishful thinking; rather, she writes with introspection and integrity.

She is NOT stuck. If you read her blog with half the depth that she writes with, you would see how profoundly she is "moving on." She may not use those words, she may not SAY that she's moving on to a new man, new life, new this that and the other. But every word of this blog is testament to Candi's journey, bears witness to her fierce determination to honor the life she and Charley had, even as she builds a new life for her daughter and herself.

When I first read your comment, "Caroline," I laughed and thought how ridiculous it was. But then I got angry that your words were just going to sit here. I don't know who you are, but I do know that you have no idea what you're talking about.

Who needs a bodyguard, indeed? ;o) I've had a rather goofy smile on my face ever since I read Alicia's rebuttal.

Michele Neff Hernandez, the amazing founder of the Soaring Spirits Loss Foundation (and another cycling widow who just passed her fifth death anniversary too...and who married a wonderful Aussie last month), calls us widows warriors. And I have to agree. We go to battle for each other fearlessly (not to mention while learning to survive, live, and thrive along the way), and that's why I continue to write on this blog..."Debbie Downer" or not.

I don't write all that much on here anymore. Why? Because I have, largely, "moved on" in the inaccurate, yet pervasive, vocabulary of our society. It's a nauseating term to almost anyone who's lost someone as precious to their soul as a loved one--a spouse, a child, a sibling, a parent. We know there's no "moving on" or "getting over it," to the point that the loss or the missing will never touch us again. We move through it, we get through it, and eventually we come out on the other side.

I started this blog because I wanted a place specifically for writing about grief, about my loss of my 28-year-old husband. I didn't write about pixie dust or share cooking recipes or my favorite find on YouTube. I don't do fluff. By this time last year, I'd written 92 entries on here. The year before, I'd written 76--and in only 6 1/2 months of blogging. To my math, that's an average of one entry every 2.6 days in 2008 and one entry every 3.2 days in 2009. This post here is my 45th for 2010...an average of one post every 6.5 days, or ~4 posts per month. And if you go back and review the posts from this year, you'd find that most of them are rather...fluffy. Anything of substance is few and far between, and the emotional ballast of them is generally light-years lighter than the bilious purges of years and entries past. Hmmmm...does that sound like "stuck" to you?

So if all I'm left with on here, blog post after blog post, are a bunch of entries where I sound mired in grief still:

1. First, plug your ears to drown out the sound of my snorting and sarcastic laughing.
2. Factor in all the days, week, and months where I don't write anything at all. Multiply them by 4. No, by 10.
3. Take the number of insubstantial/fluffy/filler posts on here in 2010 and multiply them by 3. Subtract this number from my total number of posts to date for 2010.
4. Add in all the days where I'm off doing something with my daughter, family, or friends, too busy and away from home all day to have time to get on my computer, much less write anything--regardless of subject matter.
5. Total the time each week I spend editing photos, communicating with friends and potential clients, and setting up my photography business. Square this number.
6. Add in all the time it takes to wake up my daughter, get her dressed, feed her, prepare her meals, answer her questions, snuggle with her, play with her, parent her, laugh with her. 
7. Total all the numbers from items 1 through 6 above. Multiply it by the times I smile and laugh from deep in my gut every day. 
8. Take a poll of my closest friends, my fellow widows who've met me in real life, my family, my circle of casual friends and acquaintances. Ask them how often they hear anything from me about grief, about how hard things are (ha!), how overwhelmed I am, how it's not getting any better, etc., etc. 
9. Ask me the last time I cried.

That's how not stuck I am. That's how much I've healed and "moved on" in the past five years. And I have no idea what that number actually is, because the whole notion is ludicrous. 

I think about Charley all the time...but they're just thoughts, not an emotional life force into itself. I talk about him to close friends, in the same way I tell stories about things that have happened to me over the past 33 years. I may mention "my husband" to people when the context warrants it, but that's because it's what it means to remember someone, to continue to love them even when they're gone, to honor their memory. To keep their presence alive for their six-year-old daughter who, just today, brought him up randomly during lunch out at a bakery.

I live my life, as fully, openly, and happily as I can. I love deeply. I laugh frequently. I am the phoenix that has come out of the flames. 

But most importantly, I know myself, inside and out. So you'll just have to take my word for it when I second Alicia's sentiments: 

"Caroline": You have no idea what you're talking about.