Hi, my name is Marcia Birmingham and I’m the founder of The Pink Link. I retired on May 1, 2021 after working at Presbyterian Healthcare Services for 35 years as the Telecommunications Manager. To say that I loved my job would be an understatement. It was incredibly fulfilling, and I worked very hard. I always told friends and colleagues that I didn’t want to work that hard for the rest of my life, and when I decided to retire I wanted to do something for God. So I prayed and prayed that God would show me what I could do for him. One day, my good friend Shari Gunther told me that she knew what I could do. Shari’s husband, John Gunther, passed away in 2018 at the age of 55. John was bigger than life, very involved in high school baseball and a teacher at Sandia High School. There were thousands of people at his funeral. Shari told me that after everything returned to normal life, all their friends disappeared. Literally no one reached out to her to see if she needed anything. She said that when she has to do things that John used to do, it compounds her grief, and she just doesn’t know who she can trust. She said if I could work on developing a network of trusted resources that widows could call for help when they need it, it would be a wonderful thing to do.
It was in that conversation that my desire to serve God by helping widows, and the idea of The Pink Link was born.
My friend Shari reached out to all her widow friends and we met for tea. This group of women have been widows for as long as 12 years, and as recently as 2 months ago. They have become a sisterhood of women who have a common bond that they never asked for and never wanted. They are all younger widows, still in the prime of their lives trying to navigate life without the dear one they loved so much. They never fail to encourage each other, to hear each others, stories, and to remind each other that they can have a good life.
The next blog will be from one of these women who has the most interesting story to tell about her widow experience.
Friendship and companionship is the number one need by far that widows have told me they have.
The Pink Link is official. We are sponsored by Metamorphi Church. If you have a widow friend, send her our way, we would love to connect her with a trusted resource or a friend.