Widowhood, embraced

Saturday late-afternoon, I received an Amazon delivery of a book titled “The Widow’s Journal.” I don’t know who sent it to me, as there was no note included in the Amazon package, but I am sending a virtual “Thank you” and hug to the person who did. In the introduction, the author, Carrie P. Freeman, PhD, explains how she lost her husband right before her thirtieth birthday after being together for six years (married for two of them) after his fight to live with his second cancer. Although I am 20+ years older than Carrie, her story resonated with me in many ways.

Before leaving for Ohio Sunday morning to spend a week at my parents’ lakeside house, I wrote my first entry in the journal because mornings are so hard for me (and because I spend every evening in denial that I have spent another day without Chip). After I entered my thoughts in response to her question prompts, I instantly felt curious about other widows’ stories. So, I googled “becoming a widow at 53.” It seemed like as good a place as any to start.

I quickly realized that deciding to stumble around the internet reading other young widows’ stories wasn’t the best way to start my week’s travels but, in a strange way, I was unable to stop reading. The first one I stumbled onto was an article titled “The widowhood effect: What it’s like to lose a spouse in your 30’s.” The woman’s story is a heart-wrenching one (read it only if you’re in the right mood for a good cry). Her story is a solid reminder to live life as fully as you can with those you love, while you have the time, as well as to be prepared for the physical and mental outcomes of losing a spouse. She writes:

“The widowed are two and a half times more likely to die by suicide in the first year of widowhood than the general population. We are, in fact, more likely to die of many causes: heart attacks, car accidents, cancer, many seemingly random afflictions that are not so random after all. There's a name for this in the scientific literature: the widowhood effect.

It's dated now but a 1986 paper in the British Medical Journal explored death after bereavement. It opens atypically for a scientific paper: "The broken heart is well established in poetry and prose, but is there any scientific basis for such romantic imagery?" Indeed, there is, according to the author. He found that a strong association exists between spousal bereavement and death.

Multiple studies in the last 40 years have confirmed these findings. A meta-analysis published in 2012 that looked at all published studies of the widowhood effect found widowhood is associated with 22-per-cent higher risk of death compared to the married population. The effect is most pronounced among younger widows and widowers, defined as those in their 40s and 50s. The widowed in their 30s, like me, also die at higher rates than our married counterparts but the difference is not statistically significant – not because it is insignificant but because there are too few in this age group to detect measurable differences.

We are too few and too young to be significant.”

The second website I stumbled on was DCWidow, with the line ‘There’s No handbook For How To Do This” underneath the title of the blog. I read 4 or 5 of Marjorie Brimley’s blog entries as well as some of the comments to her posts, realized my heart was fully heart-wrenched, (but also that I was not alone), and slammed my laptop lid firmly shut. I knew if I kept reading Marjorie's stories, I would get more and more sucked in while relating to her loss, and would never get in the car to face the long drive.

August 9, 2020 will forever go down in my life’s history as the day I confronted widowhood, my own and others’ in an up-close-and-personal way. Now that it's done, I am fundamentally changed, for better or worse, as a widow in the middle of her life (God willing).