by Karen Keller Capuciati

“Somehow you wake up one morning and you realize, I’m going to be okay.”

These are the words of our family friend, Carol, as she looked back on the eight years since her husband Ernie died of cancer. But getting to this realization took time, and before she got there, she was feeling that nothing in the world was worth facing without the man she loved.

“It was my friend, Charlotte, who wouldn’t let me go into the hole,” Carol recalled. “When I wanted nothing more than to curl up in a corner and withdraw, Charlotte would insist on me getting out to do something — go for a ride, out to lunch, pick strawberries, anything but stay home. She wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer.”