I am Widowed

When a life event becomes an identity

I am a widow.

These words hold tremendous weight.

It took me a long time to say them and even longer to understand how they could possibly apply to me.

How could I be a widow at only forty-nine years old?

I never saw it coming. Like most relatively healthy people in the middle of their lives, we assumed we had more time. I did not even get to celebrate my fiftieth birthday with the person who had been my partner in life for twenty-eight years.

Midlife hit hard.

I was a widow.

Suddenly, official forms required different answers. My marital status changed to widowed. Stefan’s status became deceased. In systems that could not possibly comprehend what had happened, I became single.

A few words in a few boxes, attempting to explain the complete collapse of a shared life.

All of it happened without warning.

A Life That Ended Without Warning

No one knows how long they have to live. We know this intellectually, but most of us do not live as if it is true.

Stefan had a sudden heart attack at fifty-one.

It felt unfathomable.

How could this happen to a man who ran and cycled until his final day? He looked fit because he was fit. We did not understand the extent of hereditary heart disease in his family until after he died.

His death prompted other family members to get examined and placed under medical supervision. What doctors learned may extend their lives.

There is something both comforting and cruel about that. Stefan became an example to others in life, and somehow, in death, he became one too.

Life can end without warning.

I knew that now.

And I was a widow before I had any idea how to be one.

Saying It Out Loud

The first time I remember saying it aloud was at a gathering.

Someone who did not know me personally asked whether my husband was there.

“No,” I replied. “I am a widow.”

The discomfort was immediate.

“Oh, I am so sorry.”

A lighthearted conversation dissolved into silence as other people came over to say hello.

I understood the reaction. What could anyone possibly say? Still, I became acutely aware of the effect the word had on people.

Widow.

The pity in other people’s eyes was not lost on me during those first months. I did not like becoming someone others felt sorry for.

At the same time, I did not want Stefan or his death to be ignored. I wanted people to acknowledge him. I wanted them to understand that there had been a husband, a shared life and an enormous loss.

It was perplexing.

I wanted my reality to be recognised, but I did not want it to become the only thing people could see when they looked at me.

Sometimes, I found relief in meeting people who knew nothing about what had happened. They did not immediately treat me as the widow. For a little while, I could simply be a woman in a conversation rather than someone whose tragedy had entered the room before she had.

There was still a me in there.

I could sense her, even though my entire identity had shifted.

I was no longer Stefan’s wife.

But who was I now?

Widowed More Than a Widow

I have come to realise that I feel widowed more than I feel like a widow.

Perhaps that sounds like a very small distinction.

It is not.

A widow can begin to sound like a complete identity. It can feel like a role, accompanied by ideas about how a widow should behave, how long she should grieve, what she should wear, whether she should love again and how visibly sorrowful she ought to remain.

Widowed tells the truth that something happened to me.

It does not tell you everything I am.

Even I had carried an image of widowhood. In my mind, widows were women in their sixties, seventies or beyond. They were certainly not women in their late forties.

I felt young.

We felt young.

This did not apply to us.

Until it did.

It simply became reality.

There was no longer an us walking through the world together. Another person had vanished from this earth, and it felt as though half of me had vanished with him.

There Was No Us

The loss of us was a reality I grappled with deeply and sometimes tried desperately to escape.

There were periods when I became so dark that the black abyss seemed to consume me.

I wanted to die.

Please, God, do not wake me tomorrow. I cannot bear this pain anymore.

I felt finished with a life of suffering.

Can I be done too?

Then came the guilt.

How could I think such thoughts when I had two wonderful children to stay and live for? Why could I not simply muster the courage to continue for another day?

But grief does not always respond to reason, responsibility or love.

I loved my children completely. I also felt incapable of surviving the pain I was in. Both things were true.

I did not understand then what had happened to my body. I knew I was grieving, but I did not yet understand the extent to which my nervous system had entered survival mode.

Slowly, the wish to die subsided.

I became intimately acquainted with my grief. Over time, I learned to befriend it rather than spend all my remaining strength trying to escape it.

I honoured wounds in myself that had existed long before Stefan died. I learned new tools. I accepted different forms of help. I began the slow work of teaching my body that it was possible to feel safe and calm again.

I had quite literally forgotten how to breathe.

For more than a year, my breaths were shallow. My entire body was braced against a threat it could neither escape nor resolve.

Eighteen months into grief, I was still in lockdown inside myself and living with immense physical pain. My physician recognised that something more was happening and referred me to a therapist.

I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

My mind knew Stefan had died.

My body was still experiencing the moment of losing him.

I Am Still Here

Life has been a journey, to say the least.

Sometimes, I am simply amazed that I am still here to write these words and connect with other people.

I am still here for my children.

I am still here to witness them grow, live and become.

I am still here.

And now, I find that wonderful again.

There was a time when I could not imagine enjoying life. I could not imagine loving so much again, or believing that a beautiful future might still be waiting for me.

But it was.

It is.

Life keeps offering me new adventures.

I am still widowed. I am still healing from PTSD and from years of living with a profoundly dysregulated nervous system.

But I am not dead.

I became a widow at forty-nine. Now, at fifty-two, I am already a year older than Stefan ever became.

That is profoundly strange.

Every birthday from now on will carry that awareness. Each year will be another year he did not receive, another reminder of time passing and, somehow, another blessing.

Could I learn to love myself enough to live again, if only for my own sake?

For a long time, living for my children was reason enough to stay. Perhaps it had to be.

But I am learning that I am also allowed to want life for myself.

I do not pray to die anymore.

I pray to live more fully while I am alive.

I pray to find the strength within me that people have always assumed was already there.

I pray that one day I will meet our grandchildren.

That is one of my simplest and most precious wishes: to witness our love grow into another generation.

Who Is This I?

I loved Stefan, and I will always love him.

There is no denying that truth.

I knew him better than anyone. We knew the ins and outs of each other, and we had our difficulties like every married couple. There were adventures, shared challenges, laughter, ambitions and an entire private world constructed over twenty-eight years.

Then, in an instant, the shared life became mine alone to remember.

Showing up alone.

Returning home alone.

Making decisions alone.

Filing as single.

No partner.

No husband waiting somewhere else in the room.

My identity as a married woman disappeared instantly, but a new identity did not arrive fully formed to take its place.

It had to emerge.

Who am I without him?

Who am I?

Who am “I”?

Who is this I?

The identity crisis of widowhood has been unlike anything else I have experienced. The unfathomable became my permanent reality, and I became known to many people as a widow.

But is that who I became?

What does the word mean when I define it for myself?

I am widowed.

This is true.

But it is not all that is true.

I am a mother. A daughter. A friend. A woman. A coach. A writer. A human being still capable of curiosity, contradiction, laughter, desire, creation and love.

I am someone who lost the person beside her and had to learn how to stand differently.

I am someone who once prayed not to wake up and now prays to live more fully.

I am someone still discovering who she is when she no longer has an us through which to recognise herself.

The forms may call me single.

The world may call me a widow.

But I am still here, becoming more fully my own.

And perhaps I do not need to have completely answered the question Who am I?

Perhaps being here to ask it is enough for today.