2022 - If You Give A Girl A Homestead

Three Words

When Jeremy was first diagnosed and we shared it publicly with everyone, his mentor from his teenage years reached out to him and shared something that Jeremy held on to throughout all of this. His mentor said that when his wife was going through cancer, she had said she didn’t want her pain to be wasted. This statement resonated with Jeremy and he told me on several occasions that that was what he wanted. He didn’t want his pain wasted. And I think by many of you allowing me to share the pain and hurt but yet the hope and the light in all this allowed for that. I spoke to a dear friend a couple days after Jeremy’s passing and she said that she had been shocked to hear that Jeremy was going home on hospice and that only a few short days later that he was gone. She…

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August 24, 2022

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We Dance

When my husband was first diagnosed, I realized the severity of his illness. I also realized that without a medical or supernatural miracle, our time was limited. Very limited. The further we got into his cancer battle, he and I started discussing death. The first time we talked about the reality that we were facing, Jeremy told me that he felt relieved that we had faced talking about it together. I remember in that discussion and few that followed, he would tell me he wasn’t scared of death or where he was going. He was confident in that and always, “Dee, God’s got me.” However, he was concerned about the process of walking through the door from this life to the next. And every time, I promised that I would be right there with him and that he wouldn’t have to do it on his own. We would do it…

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August 7, 2022

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They Will Be Called Oaks

The last couple of weeks leading up to the two year anniversary of Jeremy's death, I have been flooded with memories of that January and February of 2020. The things that lead up to February 13. I've thought of conversations that Jeremy and I had in the hospital room after we knew he would be going home on hospice. They consisted of talking through a lot of practical things, like what truck I would need since he wasn’t going to be around to take care of our older truck. However, we also talked about unfulfilled dreams, like getting a camper and doing more camping trips with the kids or taking a trip out west with them. And we talked about the table that he wouldn’t build. Ever since we had moved onto the farm, we had discussed him building a three-plank farm table that was long enough to fit many…

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February 21, 2022

Daily Life

Life

Looking back over the last two years, I am able to see the progression in my family’s grief processing. It’s not always clear while you are in it, but looking back you can see distinct shifts. The first year was us trying to breathe. Trying to work through not only the grief of losing Jeremy, but also the trauma that we experienced. During that year, I learned how to recognize and differentiate between the two. There were times that my brain, randomly would release a trauma based memory and I would be side swiped by it. It would undo me. I realized how much my brain had taken in and had stuffed in order to keep going. Unfortunately, after his death and the immediate chaos that seemed to follow due to the pandemic, resources that would have been available, especially to my kids, were not. So we limped along, doing…

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February 3, 2022