Losing your husband isn’t just dealing with grief, that is only one piece of the pie. Losing your husband is losing your life. My life as I knew it ended the day his ended.
Now, I carry on because I must. Because Howard would want me to. Because God expects me to. I must stay strong for the kids, and I do. They are college-aged and need help because they’re not launched yet and they’ve lost their daddy, so they have their own grief to deal with.
I am struggling to move forward with my life because in one instant it went from being a full, rich experience to zilch. I feel like a refugee who has lost everything. It’s all gone. In. One. Instant.
It’s weird to go from a full-on life to nothing. I can only liken it to being a refugee, and I know there are people who hear that and their first reaction is that I live a life of privilege and what do I know about being a refugee? Well, I ask them, what do YOU know about being a widow?
I’ve left everything behind, everything that I know in my daily life. Everything from how I drink coffee, to how I make the bed, or grocery shop, or plan the weekend, or wonder about the future. There is nothing that is the same. And, it all went away in a second. One moment I was living my life as normal, and the next, everything is upside down.
Even my relationships with the friends I still have are ‘different’. The only exception is my group of widow friends, and that’s because they ‘get it’. They understand what it’s like to lose everything in an instant. Even the two whose husbands were fighting cancer for years. They still lost their men in an instant.
It would be easier for me to recount the things in my life that are the same as before Howard died than it would be for me to list the changes after.