On December 18, 2011, author Kathleen Iannacones life as she knew it ended. Her husband, Chuck Folker, who had been diagnosed with stage 4 renal cell carcinoma four years earlier, died. In A Widows Musings, she tells how she coped with losing the love of her life, after more than thirty years together. Through personal thoughts, inspirational materials, and virtual hand-holding, she narrates events and anecdotes from their life together, the loss of her husband and her grieving process. With space included for writing notes, A Widows Musings shares some of Iannacones innermost reflections and feelings as she journeys through the grieving process. She has started a private Facebook page A Widows Musings, as a place for others to share their stories. This, as well as the book, are meant to be a resource and source of inspiration for others who are coping with the death of a loved one.

Gathers together humorous essays on such topics as returning to college, plastic packaging, Christmas letters, moving, traveling, and garage sales

How did I end up publishing my most personal thoughts in a book for the world to see? What made me decide to allow total strangers to peek into my heart and glimpse the raw pain and grief that overcame me following my husband's death? When I began this grief journal, it was out of a survival instinct. I had always attempted to use journaling to sort through my thoughts in an attempt to gain insights into my feelings, to elicit and capture whatever furtive thoughts lurked deep within my mind. For most of my adult life, writing through painful emotional events soothed me. Composing poetry helped me extract and experience all the pain my logical brain kept me from feeling. After my husband's death, writing was all I had. I met Rick Palmer when I was nearing forty. After a few years of unsuccessful relationships, I was the single mother of one son, and I had given up on ever finding "the one." However, Rick and I knew from the first meeting that it was meant to be, and we enjoyed twenty-one wonderful years together. Rick was diagnosed with small cell lung cancer in October 2016. By our 21st wedding anniversary the next July, he was in remission, but was suffering from several side effects of the chemo and radiation therapy he had undergone. He died unexpectedly after falling and breaking his hip on August 13, 2017. Rick and I owned a web design company, and a blog was the natural receptacle for my journal of feelings, thoughts, and memories. It was also the perfect way to honor the man I loved beyond life and a place to dedicate my thoughts, love, poetry, and prose to Rick. However, the blog was private, only shared with my closet friends and family members. After a few months, I began to share a few of my posts and some of my poetry with other widows in the Hope for Widows Foundation private Facebook group. Group members often responded to my writing by telling me that I put into words what they could not express. I was invited to become a guest blogger for the Hope for Widows website. At that point, I made the decision to "go public." I chose a pen name, the Writing Widow, and publicized my website on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Since opening my blog to others, I have been immensely rewarded with comments and thank yous from many other widows, and those who have lost other loved ones, as well. Some suggested publishing my poetry, which I did in, I Wanted to Grow Old With You: A Widow's First Year of Grief in Poetry. This book, A Widow's Words, is a compilation of my most popular blog posts from the first year, including the poetry from that book. Grief is universal. No two widows grieve in the same way, but, hopefully, my musings will comfort others as they navigate the perilous and emotional journey of widowhood on their own.

"Contradiction after contradiction, said the man, the Bible is full of them." I wondered what Bible he was reading. Most apparent paradoxes resolve themselves with careful study and research. I love the old book, it is my God, speaking to me. Oh, there are love stories that would make a romance novelist author blush and tales of extra-terrestrials that surpass the fiction of television and movie space travel. There are also truths about how to enjoy life and how to live it to the fullest. I've spent many years in the book and I hope to spend more. For forty years I've studied the end days and what we are to expect in the future! A short course in what heaven is like and the condition of today's churches is included in this book. Warning, not all churches will be automatically represented in heaven. When I was born, there were less than two billion people on this earth, now, there are more than seven billion. The earth can't hold many more. Despite wars, that kill many, and crop failures the population growth soars. The earth's population is soon to peak. Soon, the end will come.

Three women on the run. After the death of her husband, Clara flees a hanging judge and seeks refuge with her brother in Wylder, Wyoming. With secrets of her own and good reasons to flee, spoiled and vain Mary Rose joins Clara on the trek to Wyoming. Surely a suitable man exists somewhere. Emma is a mystery. A crack shot and expert horsewoman, her harrowing past seeps out in a steady drip. She's on the run from something, but what? After the three women descend on Wylder, a budding romance leads to exposure of their pasts. As disaster looms, will any of them escape?

The Politics of Emotion explores the intersection of powerful emotional states—love, melancholy, grief, and madness—with gender and political power on the Iberian Peninsula from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. Using an array of sources—literary texts, medical treatises, and archival documents—Nuria Silleras-Fernandez focuses on three royal women: Isabel of Portugal (1428–1496), queen-consort of Castile; Isabel of Aragon (1470–1498), queen-consort of Portugal; and Juana of Castile (1479–1555), queen of Castile and its empire. Each of these women was perceived by their contemporaries as having gone "mad" as a result of excessive grief, and all three were related to Isabel the Catholic (1451–1504), queen of Castile and a woman lauded in her time as a paragon of reason. Through the lives and experiences of these royal women and the observations, judgments, and machinations of their families, entourages, and circles of writers, chronicles, courtiers, moralists, and physicians in their orbits, Silleras-Fernandez addresses critical questions about how royal women in Iberia were expected to behave, the affective standards to which they were held, and how perceptions about their emotional states influenced the way they were able to exercise power. More broadly, The Politics of Emotion details how the court cultures in medieval and early modern Castile and Portugal contributed to the development of new notions of emotional excess and mental illness.

The survivor of a bitter marriage, widow Marry Inlow stepped gently through life, quietly burying her dreams of true love and children along the way. Until a fierce stranger holding a bloodied child appeared on her doorstep, demanding entry into her world—and into her heart. Rafe McCade would have sold his soul to the devil to save his little girl's life, but he bartered it instead to a soft-spoken angel with the power to heal his daughter's wounded body, and the tenderness to rescue him from the torments of his own bitter past.