Suddenly Single

  The days after Christmas when all is quiet again. Looking forward to Christmas with great anticipation and planning. Where should I stay? What should I get the boys? Will they like it? I got an electronics set for the younger grandson and he loved it and I got a Panthers Chess Set for my older grandson. My hope was that he would like it enough so that we could spend some quality time playing chess together and maybe I could teach him a few things. Well not only did he love it and we played a few games but he beat me with checkmate twice so it was a great learning experience for both of us. So much excitement and energy goes into preparing for the holidays and then suddenly it’s all over. So there is a great build up and some degree of let down but for me I feel very fortunate to be so blessed for having family and friends that I love and who love me.

 We all grow up with different traditions, and one of ours was to say our prayers every night when we went to bed. We would kneel down at bedside and say Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep…  and then we would say the Lord’s prayer or maybe in reverse order but the point is we had that tradition and then as mom and dad said good night to us as they walked down the stairs, we would to call out back-and-forth saying See…You…in..the.. Mor…ning!

  The Lord's Prayer Our Father who art in Heaven,  Hallowed be thy name;  Thy kingdom come  Thine will be done  On earth as it is in heaven.  Give us this day our daily bread;  And forgive us our trespasses  As we forgive those who trespass against us;  And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil. For thine is the Kingdom The Power and the Glory Forever and ever Amen

I spent this Christmas with my daughter‘s family, my two grandchildren and their two beautiful Golden Doodles. In addition another family member brought their Bernie Doodle so Zeke found himself surrounded with rather large and exuberant puppy cousins. Sometimes I tell Zeke that he’s a ShiDoodle just so he doesn’t feel left out. The pups all had a wonderful time romping around in the fenced in backyard where they also got a whole lot of love and affection from their human playmates and maybe just a little taste of people food from the dining table.  For my younger grandson Wes, I got an electronics set that he just loved and for Nolan I got a Panthers Logo Chess Set, hoping we might play a game or two. He loved it! We played and he checkmated me which made us both feel like we were king of the world! And let’s not forget their absolute favorite 🤩  Football Cards!

I listened to this song for the very first time this Christmas 2024 while staying at my daughter’s home for Christmas. Her husband, Sam had a whole variety of Christmas songs that he was playing and somehow and for some reason, this one really stuck out there’s just something very endearing about it and about Sia herself. I’ve listened to it now at least a dozen times on repeat and it’s something that will stick with me because of its simplicity and its underlying depth. It’s just a beautiful song.

  @denisek292 commented on your video December 19, 2024 Suddenly Single and Not Lonely @denisek292 I’m truly sorry you lost your wife. I left my 2nd husband because he was abusive: it was the best decision I ever made. Now I’m single, not looking to marry ever again. There’s a freedom that comes with living on your own terms. Though I frequently stay-in-touch with friends, I actually like my own company. Sounds like you get that, too. REPLY   MANAGE ALL COMMENTS If you no longer wish to receive emails about comments and replies, you can  unsubscribe . © 2024 YouTube, LLC  901 Cherry Ave, San Bruno, CA 94066 @denisek292 replied to your reply on Denise K's comment December 19, 2024 Suddenly Single and Not Lonely @denisek292 @peteandtessTube Your video appeared on my YouTube feed, and I’m very happy it did! Your vlog is not only therapeutic for you, but therapeutic to other widows/widowers and those of us who’ve been through a divorce. I’m glad your vlog is helping with...

  I didn’t put up a tree this year. It didn’t seem like there was a reason and it’s a lot of work so I just didn’t think about it, but then, while talking with a friend of mine, she gently persuaded me to consider bringing out at least some of my ornaments and putting them on display as Tess and I have done every year… I thought about it and suddenly it seemed like a pretty good idea so I went up and brought down a couple of containers where we had carefully wrapped each of these items that are now going on 40 years old or more so what seemed like a little bit of history or memorabilia does take on more meaning as time goes on and one more reminder that the things you might take for granted that will always be here, always won’t. There was once a book by Shel Silverstein called the Giving Tree. It was a simple book with illustrations but it was elegant and profound in its simplicity. Today I asked my daughter if she thought it would be ok if I donated some of Tess’s clothing to whi...

 

As I start this morning let me say I’m happy to begin this brand new day For everything that came before  Today I’m granted one day more May God bless everyone who shares this day That through peace and love we find our way God bless Tess,  God bless Eric,  God bless Lauren,  God bless Sam, God bless Nolan and Wes, God bless Linda, God bless Fred, God bless Dara, God bless Eileen God bless Mom and God bless Dad God bless Zeke God bless everyone who has ever shown me kindness, friendship and love That knowing these things and knowing these people has given me meaning, purpose, comfort and joy in my life Please guide my mind to remember these things first Guide my tongue to stay calm and quiet Guide my heart to be thankful for each moment Of every single day

  Over the river and through the woods…but wait.. is it to your grandmothers house or mine? Or do we go see the kids? Who’s kids? Mine, yours or theirs? Suddenly Single but with a new significant other… life and celebrating the holidays can be a little more complicated these days. 

2024 was an incredibly unique, special and heartfelt Thanksgiving. This was my first Thanksgiving to celebrate without my loving wife Tess by my side. I’ve been adjusting to the single life and in my mind doing pretty well. I have found that in losing Tess I am also finding deeper relationships with friends and family in my life, including my daughter Lauren and her family/My family, her husband, Sam, and my two grandchildren Nolan, Happy Birthday 12 and Wes, 10 years old. Lauren and Sam invited me to stay with them and after thinking it over and debating between the peace in privacy or the chaos of the clan, my decision came down on the side of family and I am so blessed and so grateful. There were tears of nostalgia but there were also tears of joy. Because we shared our feelings with each other in the moment, this was truly a very  Happy Thanksgiving 🦃  I always loved this song and somehow on the night before my travels I was inspired to relive these memories of the life ...

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7qfcUCApLiYqKAj9qIG9m01m1N-8awDQ 16 Video for Hospice Volunteers Pete, Thank you for your interest in working directly with patients served by Four Seasons. Your next step in becoming a Four Seasons volunteer is to complete our Patient Family Support Training. This training is over four hours and does not have to be completed in one session. Please take your time and watch at your own pace.   Click on this YouTube link for the Patient Family Support Training Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7qfcUCApLiYqKAj9qIG9m01m1N-8awDQ   The attached documents go with the patient family support training and are for your reference. They do not need to be returned to us. I have attached the TB Process as a reminder to please be working towards fulfilling that requirement so that it is not a hold up in your onboarding process. We do have TB vouchers for the Henderson County, Buncombe County and Haywood County Health Departments. Please ...

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anu8j6_gKys

  You Belong to Me by the Duprees is one of the classic standards of the 50s. It was a Golden Oldie when I was a teen. I loved it then I love it now and today while I was listening to it, via Alexa, play See the Pyramids along the Nile… somehow it just struck a cord that I could look at some of our old pictures in the framework of this tune. I’ve often said I don’t know how young people fall in love these days with no romantic songs to fall in love to. This song brings back memories of going to the canteen as a teenager, waiting for your favorite song, the anxious moments of wanting to ask a girl to dance. These beautiful moments are precious; moments of holding her around the waist hand in hand, hers gently curled up under my chin, feeling the warmth of her body against mine and dancing a slow dance. This was it. This was Mecca. This was dancing with a girl where you could smell her perfume and breathe her essence. I remember the softness of her sweater, the softness of her cheek ...

Click here for YouTube Video 😋 Cranberry sauce is my favorite condiment with turkey at Thanksgiving. I don’t know how many cans of ocean spray I have purchased over the years but somewhere along the line. I learned that I could just make cranberry sauce by buying a bag of cranberries and mixing it in boiling water with sugar. It’s pretty much that simple, one bag of cranberries, one cup of water, one cup of sugar boil it up and while it’s boiling add a pinch of cinnamon. I tend to use less than a cup of sugar, but I also use orange juice to sweeten it up and flavor it up. So best of luck to you and have yourself a very happy Thanksgiving! 🦃🙏

  I’m starting this comment while still listening to you so I don’t know how you finish up but… but my first impulse is to say I appreciate and respect you for your honesty. I have had lonely periods and I do agree that it can feel crippling. I just lost my wife of 46 years. My whole adult life was Us. I was in shock for the first couple of weeks. I howled in emotional pain. I wanted to. I wanted to saturate myself in that pain of loss….but… But, here I go again, that depression lifted. It lifted like a weight off my mind and it went away… I mean it went away and the other day I was walking down the street and said to myself I’ve never felt so happy. I felt guilty for a minute. How could I feel happy? But it did and I do. I feel happy. I have gotten closer to my family and friends. I have gotten to know my daughter, my sister, my cousin, my friend on a much deeper level than I did when we were married. And now, as far as female friends, I have a few but I don’t want to become roman...

Click Here for YouTube Video 🙂 https://youtu.be/BSCS1bhPKQY?si=oxJm2gIro_0IDMFV  Getting ready for Thanksgiving dinner with the Family I always want to bring something simple and sweet so Sweet Potatoes with a Pecan Crust fills the bill. My cooking mantra is that Everything goes Better with Butter and Brown Sugar so this Sweet Potato Soufflé has plenty of all that. As always I don’t pretend to be a good cook or offer advice on Anything. I just always want to bring Something so I put things together that seem like they’d taste good. Baking the sweets tastes better than boiling. I was surprised they were good and soft without burning in the oven at 450 for 1 hour. I strip the skins and eat them separately. Nutritional value of Sweet Potato skins = Fiber and Vitamins; A C E Minerals; Magnesium, Manganese and Potassium… so you get all that in nature’s gift wrap that many people just throw away 😋 Suddenly Single and So Thankful for my Friends and Family 🙏 Have a Happy Thanksgiving 🦃...

 I know this is Denzel Washington and I’m Not, But… but so many of his points are Exactly what I have  been learning, thinking and experiencing as I continue into this journey of being single.  My immediate concerns of emotions of sadness and loss after her passing have given way to an inner sense of realizing that hey, I’m Ok. One day while walking downtown it hit me… I am So Happy! I immediately felt guilty. Like is this OK? Is it OK to feel happy? Am I right? Am I wrong? What do you mean? I’m happy I didn’t mean any disrespect to my wife or to her memory. It was just a spontaneous feeling I had of exhilaration it was during the hurricane I was going downtown and plugging in my devices every day and then walking down for coffee and then the process I would meet people and just have a few words of you know how’s how things going for You I kind of just share the moment and you know in that process I suddenly discovered a sense of energy I was energized. I ended up doing s...

 I think it’s safe to say that everybody needs rest. Everybody needs to go to sleep. Every creature that we observe on earth spends at least part of their day curled up, snuggled up with their eyes closed and their little heads in the clouds. It’s a beautiful peaceful feeling, and it can be very frustrating if when you lie down on your Soft little pillow and close your eyes to go to sleep that you find yourself waking up instead. And for some reason, it seems to work pretty much that way I can be feeling very sleepy. I go in to lie down to go to bed pull up the covers turn on the fan, turn on my brown noise, but next thing you know, my eyes are wide open and I begin that circular syndrome of  “oh no” I can’t get to sleep. Well, what I have discovered is that it’s that moment of  “oh no”that is really the problem. The fact is that I don’t really need to go to sleep. I only think I need to go to sleep and it’s the thinking I need to go to sleep that starts to mess with my h...

Alice and Pete prepare for the Holidays   Married, Suddenly Single or Paired up again, the holidays are special times to share with friends and family but when you are suddenly single it becomes even more complicated. Mine, Yours or Ours is multiplied by the other relationships that have evolved through our lives. We love our kids but now our kids have their own kids and their own unique family relationships. How do you make everyone happy??? Or do you? Can you? Should you? It’s complicated, it’s life and Alice and I share and explore a small part of it. Thank you for listening and please share your own experiences.

Suddenly Single  and  Seeing a New Point of View Alice and I have been friends for many years. Her husband Dave and I shared a friendship that spanned grade school, high school, college, and 50 years of marriage. Tess and I were married for 46 years, building our family, careers, and lives together. Now, after losing our life partners, we face many challenges but also new opportunities to learn, grow, and navigate the world on our own. This podcast is dedicated to sharing our experiences as we embrace these changes and the possibilities life offers in this new chapter.

Look, I know it’s bad for the planet. I know it’s inhumane. If I ever really thought about it I’d be a vegan, but since I am not, I offer my apologies, while I go ahead and made me a steak and a pretty big one at that. Whenever my loving wife Tess and I went to Longhorns, Tess would kindly ask our waiter to cook her chopped sirloin with onions and mushrooms until it was burnt! No pink… Well, well, well done. Tess also hated the whole idea of meat and hated the aroma while cooking as well so when at home I did all of my cooking outside.. Now I’ve moved indoors. I’ve cut the heat back just a little bit, but I still get that sizzling seared exterior that I’m looking for in a steak while keeping the inside nice and rare. I used what is becoming my staples in cooking; Cavender’s seasoning, Olive oil sizzling in a hot pan and chopped onions. It is pretty amazing how just a few key ingredients can make up my entire diet for what it’s worth I do eat vegetables and this video I used spinach. I ...

 You know sometimes I think I’m getting over it well yes I am. I am functioning very well thank goodness for my friends and people around me who care and lift me up but every once in a while something just happens just something like a song like going through old pictures, like just sitting in the stillness and suddenly the tears just come and I’m filled with the memories of Tess. The little song she sang to our Shih Tzu… Mama loves the baby boy better than life itself better than life better than life better than life itself. She would sing the song when she got home from work. It just lifted her heart to see her little baby boy and hold him in her lap as she would often say to me, Peter he’s a lapdog Tess taught me compassion. She taught me Patience, kindness, and love…. The wounds of my loss are healing day by day, but the pains of love and loss are never far out of reach. I never want to forget I do want to heal. I do want to live, but I never ever want to forget and each day I...

 A very dear friend of mine named Cindy got caught up with the cooking bug this weekend and whipped up the most beautiful batch of spaghetti sauce. She was kind enough to share this with me and even sent me the recipe but me being of somewhat of a stubborn nature and unable to or unwilling to follow a recipes instructions, I was inspired and had a problem to solve. Cindy is 1000 miles away. I can’t taste it from here and I can’t just hop up on a plane and fly to Boston!! In addition, my best hiking and campfire cookout buddy Chip and I have had some amazing results with flame broiled Brats while out on the trail. So what I did was run over to my local Harris ‘dam’ Teeter, buy some ingredients and I figured if I got the right stuff and just chopped it up, mixed it up, heated it up and hoped for the best 🤞  Maybe things would work out OK. So that’s what I did and I called it Suddenly Single Spaghetti Sauce and Brats

My experience with the Death Café has been profoundly meaningful. I first became aware of the local chapter about five years ago. At that time, I was curious about attending, but my circumstances weren’t conducive, so I put it in the back of my mind. About a year ago, a friend mentioned it again. After talking it over, I decided to go, and it turned out to be a positive experience. I’m reminded of a quote by Amy Grant, who said that anyone who has lived long enough has a bittersweet experience with the advent of each Christmas. What she meant is that each Christmas brings wonderful memories, but also an awareness of loss. The Death Café is a place where you can share and explore those memories of loss in a safe and supportive environment. I found that just by listening, I felt comforted. Hearing others express their feelings and memories made me realize that I’m not alone. The two people who facilitate our local Death Café do a great job of gently establishing a supportive environment....

 Death Cafés provide a unique and safe space for individuals to share their feelings about loss and grief. These gatherings allow participants to express their emotions openly without the fear of judgment or the pressure to find solutions. The core principle of a Death Café is to create an environment where people can talk about death and dying in a relaxed, non-judgmental setting, often accompanied by coffee and cake[1][2][4]. Grief can often feel like an overwhelming appetite, consuming those who experience it. It can lead to a desire for solitude, where individuals may become engulfed by their feelings of loss and sadness. However, there is also a need for expression, and finding a suitable outlet for these emotions can be challenging. Traditional social settings, like a hike or dinner, may not always accommodate discussions about grief, as these topics can be uncomfortable or unexpected in such contexts[4][5]. Death Cafés address this gap by offering a space where people can sh...

An appetite for grief. I really don't know if there is such a thing. I don't know that I've heard it describe this way before, but I've decided while observing my own process that there seems to be in fact an appetite for grief this is what I mean by that. I feel like I have been adjusting to the loss of my wife over these past three months and I'm making some progress. I mean I am functional and I'm tapping into the resources that are available to me. One of those resources is Hospice. it was in-home hospice care that we chose and home hospice care that brought us together in our more in our most profound hour of need and loss. I feel that the initial shock of loss was numbing. I think that the functioning I embodied was somewhat robotic. I knew what to do because I used to function and now I was imitating that behavior, but inside I was crushed and I needed time and space to express those deep promotions, after the business of the service and visiting with all...