Widowhood is learning to live fractured and knowing when pain is healing and when it is harmful.
Fractured is a widow’s walk through author Carole Sanek and late husband Larry’s love story, his tragic death, and the pains of healing. She is a nurse and cares for people. He is an engineer who is focused and cannot be deterred from his projects. In this soul baring book, new widows may find their touch stone. When words often fail or are too often unspoken, Carole lends her authentic emotional thoughts, reactions, and responses. Carole writes her truth in the rawness of new grief and she does it well. She has a gift for writing and offers us healing through her writing. She draws her reader into her story through vignettes of the love, the shenanigans, the turmoil, and the achievements of her marriage. At the same time, she reconciles the stark irrational shock of becoming and being widowed.
Carole became a widow suddenly, if there is ever any other way. In the middle of dinner, Larry went to water the rose bushes, lost consciousness from a stroke, and died two weeks later.
Widowhood came to me in the middle of a fast-paced life as a working mother of two teenagers. This book is needed; I wish I had Fractured to read in my first year widowed because of the insurmountable, surreal thoughts that were foreign to me then. These types of thoughts now seem to me to be universal to early widowhood. No matter where you are in the struggle to overcome grief, this book will aid in the discovery and understanding of a new widow’s identity and the necessary reconciliation of deep sorrow together with the precious joys of life.
When you read Fractured you will see vibrant love and the struggles of a strong woman finding her way through grief to a new place of heightened awareness, independence, and strength. Larry loved Carole’s bold moves and in a moment of anguish (or perhaps rage?) she decisively had the newly despised rose bushes taken away- an easy object to blame and remove.
Carole leads you through her journey, and at times, she tells you what to do. I laughed out loud when she writes “I cannot state this strongly enough. If you want invitations,you have to be bold enough to ask. If you have a yellow high-lighter, this is where you would use it.”
If you miss reading Fractured, you will miss being cared for by a nurse and learning how she cares for herself. She wants to help you heal your fracture, as she is healing hers. Carole’s realization and walk of the foreverness of love, loss, and longing of being genuinely loved comes with great vulnerability and immense pain. Her message resonates. She says Larry married a joyful woman and she seeks to rediscover her joy and to be the best of what he loved in her.
Carole includes a list of emotions and physical feelings that may accompany grief. If you find yourself asking if your emotions and physical feelings are normal or when do these feelings change or go away, then Fractured is a must read.
You always give more to deeper thoughts. You are a gift to help those of us who are unable to express themselves. Love what you do.