Our friend Susan Popper is new to our town, she has also become friends with Carol Gulley, as are Maria and I.

Without really meaning to, we have become something of a regular dinner group, we seem to be taking turns having dinner at each other’s house. First we had dinner at our farmhouse, tonight at Susan’s new house in Cambridge, and Saturday, Carol is cooking.

It’s a kind of accidental thing, but we have all enjoyed it and want to keep going. I want to say that Carol, for all that she has endured, and all that she may endure – grieving is a very personal and individual thing – is all right.

She is certainly sad and acutely feeling Ed’s loss, but she is also thinking about her life and talking about her life, and sometimes, even laughing about her life.

Sometimes she needs to talk, but she also wants to listen, and that is how friendships begin.

So our dinners are not a support group,  Carol doesn’t need that, they are a group of friends sharing their lives with one another, we all have good stories to tell, we all want to hear the stories of one another. I think we will all be meeting regularly.

Carol is honest and open, she is committed to her writing, and to her blog. She worries about how she will do without Ed to share her ideas, or to live her life, but I told her that she has been writing the blog on her own for months now and she is a natural writer, full of humor, insight and authenticity.

She said she sometimes savors being alone, she has not really had a chance to think and adjust to this staggering new reality. She sounds very healthy to me, she needs time and space to think.

Ed was her life in many ways and shared her life in so many ways for 47 years. She will endure what she needs to endure and move forward with her life, that much seems clear to me.

Carol is almost obsessively polite, and I hope she learns to fend off people  who intrude on her life without asking or thinking. That is up to her.

Carol is a writer now, she is only beginning to come to grips with that idea. She writes almost every day on her blog, the Bejosh Farm Journal she writes poems and tells stores and shares the trauma, drama, love and exploration of her life. Carol is a fierce critic of Carol, she is a harsh judge of her own work and she is almost always sure she is letting everybody down.

I tell her what I tell all of my other writing students, she should never speak ill of her own work, it might be listening. I told her that I ask only two questions when I write: how do I feel, and is it the truth. If the answer to both questions is yes, I go ahead and write.

I have to say Carol is somewhat familiar to me, another woman with many gifts who does not know how talented she is, and who is struggling to find her voice, especially now that she is alone and “My Farmer” is no longer the focus of her writing.

She is, and that is a big change.

The British writer Deborah Levy asks in her new memoir The Cost Of Living, what if a woman is the main character of her own story? She writes about the challenge of finding her voice in a world “fathered by masculine consciousness.”

I see Carol  finding her voice.

I said weeks ago that I have been privileged to witness Carol ascending.

Her strength and creativity and curiosity are emerging slowly but steadily from her long nightmare. In some ways, she lived in the shadow of Ed for many of those years, he was a strong and dominant man.

Now, she has  some freedom in her life, it was not freedom she sought or wanted, but I think it is very real and will one day be important to her.

We traded stories, and Carol was as open and self-aware as I have ever seen her.

She is, it turns out, very social – something she didn’t have time to explore as a busy dairy farmer – and especially loves the company of women. She is looking for her tribe, her community. I think she is finding it.

Carol and I are very good friends, but I am not blind, she is most at ease with women like Susan and Maria, who talk openly and honestly, and who are safe and nourishing. Sometimes, the mere prescence of men is dampening and suffocating.

Maria knows how to listen, and she has a great gift for encouragement. Susan knows how to laugh, and as different as these two women are, they seemed to connect easily with one another. Carol’s life and heart  are with her family and farm world,  she will decided in the coming months and years if her universe will really expand. It seems it already is.

Carol doesn’t need to hear how bad things will be, she knows that all too well. She needs to hear that she is strong and smart and has so much to offer the world, even without her beloved Ed. She needs to talk about life, not death.

She needs to be encouraged to step out into the light when she is able and ready, and cheered along the way. That is sincere, it was a great joy to see her tonight, and then again, on Saturday. This group might ultimately be better without me in it, and if so, I’ll bow out of it.

I never tell anyone what is ahead when it comes to grieving, I don’t know. But I had a strong and good feeling about Carol tonight, she is awakening and thinking and hoping, as well as grieving.

I just know she will be all right.