I’ve stolen the title of this post from Ian. It’s something he would say to me or my daughter, Taliesin, when we first started therapy with him after the death of my husband. Mind you, we spent the entire first year after Kim’s death with our feelings happening all over the place, anywhere, 24/7.

I am reminded of how, after a session with Ian, I rode down in the elevator with another patient of his—I’ll call him Bicycle Man. I call him Bicycle Man because I couldn’t help but notice, as I exited Ian’s office, that the man sitting in the waiting room was holding a large spoked bicycle wheel on his lap.

I’m sitting here wrapped in the quilt my grandmother made for me when I was in high school and feeling a bit reticent about this blog and the posts I’ve made so far.

According to my therapist, Ian, I have a five-year-old version of myself running around inside me, calling the shots, causing all sorts of havoc and craziness. If I don’t start paying attention to her, I’m never going to mature into the grown-up adult I hope some day to become.

Ok. It was actually only one nun. Once when I lamented the wasted time spent with another therapist years ago, Ian told me that a therapist can only take you as far as he or she has been. This explained a lot about my first time in therapy.

In case you’re wondering what’s up with the name of my blog, Please Gimme a Sign, its the title of a book I’m writing.

I’ve been dealing with grief in one form or another for a very long time, and there’s still a huge gaping hole in my heart. I don’t think I will ever get over Kim’s death. Maybe we’re supposed to “move on,” but not “get over” the loss of people we love deeply, but I only know that for me, it has been complicated, as complicated as my relationship with my husband was in life.

Now that we’ve gotten started, I should warn you about a few things.

I never expected to lose my bearings so completely. On the contrary, in the beginning, after a misstep or two, I tried hard to be the survivor I knew I could be, but, grief, my own and my child’s, coupled with exhaustion conspired against me and I took a slow-motion tumble into an emotional abyss.