A Smiling Young Widow

I’ve shared about finding strength and confronting grief on my own terms. There are moments though, where I’ve been thrown back to a very shaky space. It can feel as if I’m back to square one. What triggers that? Questions. 

Questions like, “How did he die?” or, “What happened?” that come from the periphery. The follow-up questions. These hold power to send my body back to the beginning. They can remind me of other conversations that have happened since Tom died, some that have not sat well.  

I’ve come to hate these questions. Asked about my Tom, but also in a much broader sense. We hear about someone dying and it sends a shockwave through us, even if it’s someone we don’t know well. So it seems that our next question is, what happened? It’s a response that I truly believe needs to be trained out of us. 

Humans look to understand, to place things in the world. When we hear about a terrible thing that happened – even if it’s done very subconsciously – we seek to protect ourselves and our people. There must be an explanation. I think it’s an evolutionary thing. The nicest, most sincerely caring people fall into this. I’m not looking for debate here at all – I’ve seen it, I’ve lived it. I understand the intention is likely not to be harmful, yet it can be.

Until I experienced this magnitude of loss myself, I wouldn’t have really known how terrible this kind of questioning can hit. How it can come up so out of the blue as you try to go about your day. How someone else’s flippant comment or question can trigger a stress response. How fresh it all feels even when the world thinks a reasonable amount of time should have let that wound crust up. 

I’m going to frame this a different way too… Is it worth forcing someone who has lost a loved one to relive the trauma that surrounded their death? Trust me, my mind is headed back there often enough on its own. 

Perhaps say if someone in their 90s fell asleep one night and just didn’t wake-up, maybe then it’s a story that would feel ok to share? Maybe? I’m actually not convinced.  Anytime someone dies young though, there seriously would not be a situation where it would be a comforting story to have to share. Think about that. I’m convinced there’d never be a time where someone would hear the question, “How did they die?” And respond with, “Oh actually that is a really funny story,” or, “Oh that’s a heartwarming tale I would like to share. Everyone gather round!” It’s not like we’re hearing someone got engaged and maybe there’s a cute proposal story. Someone is dead. Gone. Their loved ones are left just trying to survive and come to grips with the fact their person is never coming home again. Even if I’m out and about, looking ok – sure I am holding it together but it is not solid. Apologies if I’m doing too good a job making myself look fine. It is a fragile base I’m trying to rebuild on here. 

Yeah I understand there’s a curiosity, and maybe sometimes it is stemming from a place of compassion. However, there is an actual physical response that reverberates through my body each time someone randomly brings up questions around how Tom died. I think we could agree that other people’s curiosity does not justify bringing that up for me again. I’m definitely not saying to avoid bringing up Tom, I love when others do. I’d love to talk to you about how Tom lived.

If we truly reflect, why are we asking how someone died? Most of the time it’s a knee jerk thing because we don’t know what else to say. If you do have some reason why you might need to or want to know, then how about rephrasing the question like, “I’m curious about X because of Y. Do you want to talk about what happened?” Give the griever a way out if they need (I know I appreciate that). Or maybe there is even someone else who is a few steps removed you could ask about it?

It has been fascinating for me to read about other widows’ experiences dealing with outside comments. Like oh, ok it’s not just me. And also, what the heck are people doing spouting these things off?!

In her book, Megan Devine talked about her husband’s fluke drowning and the blame people put on the situation. He was a very experienced swimmer who was in that river almost everyday. Yet they were supposed to have known they shouldn’t go there that day?

I read a blog written by a cancer widow where she talked about someone asking how her husband had died while out at a bar. She hesitantly told him and then his follow-up question was whether her husband had smoked. And yeah, he had smoked when they met in college. Her mind had already spent time caught up in the what-ifs there, and she certainly did not need some distant acquaintance bringing that up after he’d had a few drinks. 

There was a blog by a widow who’s husband died from suicide. She shared about how difficult it was putting herself out there in new social circles, knowing that inevitably it would come up that she was widowed and she just knew the question of how it happened was coming next and then awkwardness would follow. Her plea, can you please ask me something about how my husband lived and not how he died? 

Another cancer widow blogger shared about navigating the questions that followed after her husband’s death. How people would ask about everything from family history to his typical diet to whether they had missed early warning signs. She talks about the fear that underlies these questions, the real question that lurks: “There was something that made your husband different from the rest of us, right?”

There was a podcast that had Megan Devine on as a guest (sorry can’t remember which one). They were talking about emotional empathy and how certain situations can truly just be too much. Others cannot put themselves in that situation. Megan labelled it as “otherizing”. It’s a kind of protection where people are looking for a cause, something to distance them from a situation. If someone can come up with an explanation for a death, then they can believe it won’t happen to them or their loved ones. 

Trust me, if there’s any possible cause or blame – widows are all over that, even if there actually is really nothing there to blame, we are going to be looking for it. Definitely do not need other people to insert their comments. The question why doesn’t actually have an answer.

I’ve talked before about how helpful I found reading The Grieving Brain. There’s the piece where she talked about how our brains are constantly creating virtual maps of where our loved ones are and if it can’t do that alarms are triggered. One of those alarms is the question, what did I do wrong?  

The book also talks about counterfactual thinking – all the thoughts that swirl about as we think about what could have happened differently. It often involves a real or imagined role that we believe we played in the death. It’s all the what-ifs. There are essentially a limitless number of counterfactual thoughts available to us so they can swirl for a long time. Interestingly, it actually is a bit of a protection our brain gives to us: (1) we focus on all the alternative realities versus feeling the full extent of the pain which would just be too overwhelming, (2) it allows us to hold onto the idea that the world is not entirely unpredictable as again that’s just too overwhelming. She suggests that as we learn to tolerate the immense pain of the loss and our grief more, then the counterfactual thoughts begin to fade. 

Anyone could die at any moment. Death doesn’t make sense. We actually usually can’t make sense of who gets cancer, who dies suddenly from a heart attack, who is in a car accident, who dies from suicide, who lives to be 100. We all just want to believe in that predictability. The question of why doesn’t vanish though. It’s a constant dance of trying to move forward and going back to try yet again to find something that was missed, something to explain this. 

Your homework please – take the time to think through what you could say instead. Everyone is going to die someday, so we will have a lot of practice. Imagine you are hearing of someone dying, what will you say? I’m not going to share what I’ve come up with, we all have to decide what feels authentic to us, but I have reflected on it so I’m ready. I think we owe it to the next griever we encounter to have something else ready besides, “oh my God what happened”. 

Part 2 to come …