A Smiling Young Widow

When did he die? How long were you married? Did you have any children?

I listened to a podcast that talked about the math of suffering. It resonated with me and offered a label to something I’ve struggled with – are people trying to quantify my grief?  (The podcast also referenced Star Trek which made me laugh – Tom had been rewatching all the seasons, and I definitely was making fun of him for that!) 

These questions can be people trying to process, or they come out of the awkwardness of not knowing what to say. The timeline of grief is still surprising to me while I’m living it, so I can understand where people are coming from. Somewhat. Asking how long it’s been since Tom died is maybe supposed to offer rough calculations for the person to gauge if I should be over it. The thing with time after a devastating loss though – it makes no sense. The widow life is weird. There’s shock to protect you early on. There’s all these people around at first. Then the shock fades and most people head back to their regular lives. I feel like I’ve restarted this grief journey a few times already.

“I’m a big fan of bad bad math…
We have to just assume we can’t add up other peoples’ lives.”

– Kate Bowler

I was eight months out when someone from the organ donation team phoned me. I hadn’t met her before. They needed my permission to email something and then it rolled into a bigger chat. It included the dreaded math questions, to get to know us. I’m sure she thought she was being supportive and had kind intentions. To me, it felt like I was justifying my grief to a stranger. Towards the end of the call she asked if I had any suggestions to improve the organ donation experience for other families. In that moment I knew she had never lost someone this close to her. I’m sure it was just very routine. The phone call totally derailed my day though. I wasn’t expecting to relive that traumatic time when I picked up my phone. It might have been 8 months on paper since Tom died, but that’s not how it felt. It’s still impossible to fully wrap my brain around this. I probably should at some point tell the program my honest feedback on phone calls, but I’m not in a place where I’m looking to make suggestions for improvement. I’ve learnt to screen my calls better. From that number, and from others too. I wait for a voicemail to see if I need to call back or if an email will suffice. Talking to strangers about all the post-death admin stuff is not exactly a good time.

I was reflecting back on other times I’ve answered these math questions since Tom died. Like remembering the first time I was asked if we had kids – it was from the charge nurse as we were about to transfer hospitals. Tom’s organs were going to be assessed for donation. I had just learnt that my husband was absolutely not surviving and it was time to give up the sliver of hope we’d been grasping. I’m sure she said something about how sorry she was first, then the follow-up was whether there were any babies at home. I was caught off-guard. That was the first time I responded with “No, we just have a dog”. A line I’ve used quite a bit since, to like what lighten the mood? Offer up that hey I still have some sort of little family unit left behind? Dodge sharing what Tom and my shared intentions had been? Thank goodness I have Frank to talk about!

Nora McInerny offers up advice in her book to counter nosy questions with a question of your own: “Why do you ask”? I really should use this more. Share some of the awkwardness. Sometimes I am genuinely curious about what motivates questions, while other times I’m just super annoyed and brush them off quick. When someone asks how long we were together… I want to know like would you feel worse for me if we’d been together for decades? Or do you think it’s worse that I only got to be married to Tom for a few years? The plan was to be with him for a very long time, if that changes anything in your math? When someone asks if we had children… are you trying to count out how many people you should be sad for? Would you be more sad if I was also parenting through this? Or is it worse that I’m left without kids as a piece of my Tom living on? What I want to say … I was 33 and Tom was 36 when he died. I should still have the options to either grow old with just my amazing husband or to have his babies. But yeah, thanks for the unwelcome reminder of all that was lost here.

I know it’s hard to know what to say to someone who is grieving. Acknowledge it, absolutely. But please don’t do it with any sort of invisible math calculations. I’m much more conscious of that now, to leave the numbers out of other peoples’ losses.

And hey maybe you can help take on a bit of the awkwardness too. I don’t exactly love the “I’m so so sorry” that ends in just sad eyes looking at me. Having a story to share or a bit of a follow-up after that, is always appreciated by me, and I’d imagine by others too.