Widow Thrive

05/06/2026

I once thought healing meant leaving pain behind—that with enough time, the weight of loss, heartbreak, or disappointment would lift, and I’d feel whole again. But time has shown me something different. Some wounds don’t vanish. They shift, they soften, but they remain—etched into the fabric of who I am, not as burdens but as quiet reminders of love, of depth, of all I have lived through.

I no longer wait for the day when every ache disappears to allow myself joy. I have learned that happiness and hurt can coexist, intertwining in ways I never expected. There are moments when laughter spills from my lips even as my heart carries the weight of absence. There are days when I feel both gratitude and grief in the same breath, neither one canceling out the other.

Moving forward does not mean forgetting. Healing does not mean erasing. I am not broken because I still feel the sting of what I have lost. I am whole because I have allowed myself to feel it all—because I have learned to hold sorrow in one hand and hope in the other, allowing them to shape me rather than define me.

Life isn’t about getting over everything; it’s about making space for both the light and the shadows, knowing that even the deepest wounds can exist alongside joy. And in that space—in the in-between of remembering and becoming—I continue to grow.

Credit: Aimee Suyko - In Their Footsteps

***dewidow

05/04/2026

When Dan died suddenly, I couldn't bear to call myself a widow. The title was painful and conjured up the typical stereotypes our culture paints. It felt like I was suddenly sidelined, alone, and forgotten.

But then I began searching what God says about widows and turns out He says a lot! Scripture helped me see that widow wasn't a bad word and how much God loves the widow.

On this , I'm sharing 5 powerful truths for the widow.

1. God has a heart for the widow. Psalm 68:5 says God is the Defender (champion/protector/advocate) of widows.

2. God cares for the widow. In the Old Testament, God's law specifically provided for widows and in the New Testament, God instructs churches to provide for widows in need.

3. God has compassion for the widow. One of the last things Jesus did from the cross was to look out for his widowed mother. He charged the disciple John to care for her.

4. God has purpose for the widow. A widow may have lost her husband but she has not lost her purpose. All through Scripture, God used widows to reveal His character and accomplish His purpose.

5. God has hope for the widow. First Timothy 5:5 says the widow in need "puts her hope in God" and asks Him for help.

Widow is a title no one wants. But it's not a bad word.

On this National Widows Day, take comfort that God sees you, cares for you, and has compassion, purpose, and hope for you.

Credit Lisa Appello

***dewidow

04/27/2026

One of the very first things I realized when I experienced my own grief was how big it was.

How enormous it felt against me.

How heavy it was to carry.

How it operated outside time.

How human ways of experiencing everyday life were not enough.

I had to unearth the ground I was walking on.

I had to find a way to interact with the world around me without falling apart.

I had to relearn everything.

Breathing. Eating. Heart beating.

All of it was difficult.

Grief can feel like a disease at first.

It physically pains you to be alive.

So if you are in the early throes of grief, and you somehow found your way to this post, your only to do today is to breathe and eat something nourishing.

The rest will happen when the time is right.
With love on a Monday morning,

Credit: Second Firsts

***dewidow

01/26/2026

This was written by an “anonymous participant” in a grief group posting. I feel led to share it and hate that I cannot give this widower the proper credit by using his name due to his anonymity. This post speaks to the male perspective of the loss of a spouse and speaks such truth about the trauma our minds and bodies endure - true PTSD and navigating such complex trauma. It also speaks to the annoying platitudes people offer and the loss of friendships—all of which I deeply and profoundly understand and speak about to the widows I work with through Widow’s Wish.
*******

“A year ago yesterday- life was awesome. We were happy, we were leaving for Mexico the next weekend. We had hundreds of plans for the years ahead and so much hope.
A year ago today- she was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. She faced her death with grace, intentionality, kindness, and incandescent courage.
6 months ago- she died at the age of 49.
She is the love of my life. We were partners in everything. We always had each other’s back. We were together for 28 years and were absolutely crazy about each other.
No one can understand this grief apart from those who are experiencing it. People just don’t have the ability to imagine this kind of emotional, spiritual, psychological, and physical pain and crisis.
My wife walked towards her death determined to live until she died. She did. My wife walked though her life determined to radiate kindness and as she faced her death that determination only intensified.
I’m determined to walk through this grief the same way. I am trying to grieve well.
I see all of these posts from those who are just experiencing this loss. I’m six months into this and this is what I’ve learned and what I’ve done.
- people say well meaning but utterly stupid things to people who are grieving. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” “ time heals all wounds” “everything happens for a reason”. I have chosen to forgive the words and only hear “I love you”.
- Grief is its own thing. There is nothing like it. The loss you are experiencing is the most traumatic event that a person can experience. That’s not an opinion. That is the psychological and neurological consensus.
- you are experiencing extreme stress. This stress has structural effects on you body and brain. All of the things you are experiencing, memory impairment, brain fog, horrible memories stuck on a loop, extreme anxiety, fatigue. This is all, sadly, normal. Your brain is trying to survive at the expense of your emotional well being. You are not going crazy. You are in crisis. These changes aren’t permanent. It takes time and effort but you can get through this, even though it seems unimaginable now.
- I immediately went into grief counseling. It fixes nothing, but talking to a person who didn’t know my wife is really helpful. My family and her family and our friends, they are all experiencing grief. Their grief heightens mine. A counselor is only focused on me.
- I have a small circle of friends who are willing to listen. Again, most of these people didn’t know my wife or they have such high emotional IQs that their compassion overcomes their need to express their own grief. I also have a few people who have lost a spouse and are much further along in their journey. They can identify with me and give me realistic expectations.
- I immediately joined a gym. I work out and take yoga classes. I am not flexible at all and yoga is painful but the point is to breath through pain so it’s a good practice.
- anniversaries and holidays just suck. I try not to let them. My wife died on the 25th at 12:51pm. Even if I was completely unaware of what day it is(which happens often) I know that the day is approaching. I take the day off of work.
- I can’t stop thinking about her. I don’t want to either but it’s really painful and then I just can’t take anymore. I listen to podcasts on a topic I am interested in that has nothing to do with anything related to grief or love or anything like that.
- I got rid of all alcohol in the house. I immediately surrendered all of my wife’s medication to hospice. The temptation to obliterate my mind to get a break is too strong. The temptation to follow her is too strong. I haven’t had a drink. But every few weeks I buy non alcoholic beer and pretend I am drowning my sorrows.
- I get together with people once or twice a week. I ask them to not ask how I’m doing and we only talk about movies and music and work and trivial things.
- I have another few people who I ask to tell me about their problems. Talking through another persons problems helps me to feel like I still have a purpose.
- I have allowed myself to cry in public. This happens whether I like it or not. I just accepted it and stopped apologizing.
- I hate crying. I physically hate it. It happens all the time multiple times a day. I have cried three times typing this.
- I have leaned into stoic philosophy. Specifically this tenant: Control your perceptions, Direct your actions properly, Willing to accept what is outside your control.
- I have a friend who is willing to hear my dark thoughts. They accept them and hear me.
- I talk to my wife all of the time. I have no expectation that she hears me. I hope she doesn’t. My faith tells me that she is beyond all of this and is in a place where she is occupied with purposeful work. She is outside of time and she will turn her head and I will be there and no time has passed. I talk to her though. Mostly it’s to tell her that I miss her.
- missing and yearning is unimaginably painful. People talk about anger and grief. Not my experience. However, the frustration of being away from her is overwhelming. The only thing that can fix my condition is impossible. So I have to live with this missing. This yearning/ pain gets more intense the further away I get from our last moments together.
- I took care of her throughout her illness and through her coma. Hospice helped just with the last day…I think. Those days are a blur. I had to do things and see things that are hard. Seeing and hearing her die was awful. I was actively praying for her to die and be released. I had to force myself not to scream as it happened. A part of me was utterly shocked when she died. All of these thought and feelings simultaneously. I cared for her body after she passed. I cleaned her and prepared her for the mortuary. The hospice nurse helped. My girl deserved to be clean and cared for. I played music for her and honored her. There was a beauty to her passing. She died with a smile. I did my best to honor her. This process also broke me. I could not get those images and sounds out of my mind. They pummeled me on a loop. I couldn’t remember her any other way. The cancer ravaged her. I had to work hard to reclaim the image of her healthy. I created a slide show for her celebration of life. One of the most difficult processes I’ve ever been through. It helped me remember her as she was. That loop still happens though.
- grief is undistinguishable from PTSD from a neurological perspective. Hard, intrusive memories and images looping over and over is normal. I created a mantra that I say when those memories hit me, “she is not in that moment anymore. She is free. You are the one stuck. You don’t have to be.”
- I have a psychiatrist. Grief is not depression. Medicine is not going to cure anything. However (in my experience) it can help to cope with the stress and anxiety. My mind doesn’t work the same way it did before my love was diagnosed and it works differently now that she is gone. This is not my fault. This is not weakness. This is one more way for me to adaptively cope. 6 months in and I still have these earthquakes of grief. They can last for hours. They are almost like panic attacks but not really. There is no need for me to suffer them if I can’t calm on my own. I have to work. I have to take care of my kids. I have to function.
- I try to be kind to myself. This is difficult. My mind is unkind to me. I wish I was the one who had died. I believe that my family, my children, the world would be better if I had had died and my wife had lived. My wife disagreed. She told me that she was getting the better deal. She didn’t want to be in the position I am in. The only solace I can take in this is that she didn’t have to suffer what I am suffering. So I try to be kind to myself. She was always kind to me. She would be angry with me berating myself. It’s difficult though. Survivors guilt is a thing.
- I allow others to be kind to me, but on my terms. This was a process. Some people have been extraordinarily kind. Those people have asked me how they can help but not just ask “let me know if there’s anything I can do” it was a conversation about what they can do. I had to be open to that conversation and then honest with them. Those people are now the small circle I rely on for support. Some people have tried to insert themselves into this situation with what they think they should do and some have inserted themselves because there are just some people who want to be near pain. I needed to set clear boundaries. It was awkward as hell, but it was necessary.
-No one knows what you need. Even amongst those who are grieving, there’s a whole spectrum of experiences. Everything I’ve written, is just about me. Maybe this whole post was self-indulgent. I hope someone reads this and can take comfort in knowing that they aren’t the only ones feeling this or whatever. I am only six months into this. I am a mess internally. My wife’s and my dreams and hopes shattered in the course of a day. The last year has been a state of constant upset, dread, and then grief. I haven’t even gotten to the mourning bit yet. I haven’t collapsed though. I did everything I could. I left no thing unsaid. I left no arrow in my quiver. We loved each other fearlessly, and that is forever and ever. People have told me that I am lucky, because there are people who never know this kind of love. I accept that. I believe that. I don’t really want to hear that. I had true love and now I am alone. That is like trying to live off the memory of air.
Your pain is real. There are no words to soothe it. There is no way around it, only through it.”

—anonymous

08/03/2025

Grief In The Early Days

When my loved one died, I thought I understood what grief might feel like. I imagined sadness, yes, but also a slow, steady easing over time.

What I didn’t expect was how unbearably heavy those first days would be, how grief would press down on me with a weight I couldn’t set down.

The world didn’t pause for me like I thought it would. People went about their days, unaware that inside me, everything had stopped. The phone rang with condolences, visitors filled my house with sympathy, but underneath all the kindness was a rawness no one could fix. My loss was so fresh, like a wound that would bleed with each breath I took, and each beat of my heart.

In those early days, every moment was a struggle. Mornings came with the crushing realization that the person I loved was gone. Forever. And I couldn’t sleep at night because my grief didn’t rest. It wrapped itself around me, pulling me deeper into my thoughts of the life I lost.

As much as I needed people, sometimes I felt more alone with them around. No words could fill the vast empty space inside me. I learned that grief in those first days isn’t something you fix or move past quickly. It demands time, and it demands you to feel it fully, every tear, every ache, every shout of anger in your soul.

One of the hardest parts was knowing that life kept moving forward when mine had changed forever. I had to find a way to exist in a world that wasn’t familiar to me anymore. The weight of my grief wasn’t just sadness; it was the exhaustion of carrying a love so deep that its absence felt like losing part of myself.

What helped, was I stopped trying to be strong or to ‘get over it.’ Instead, I cried my eyes out. I tried to find moments of comfort in small things: a shared memory that made me smile, or a kind word from a stranger who understood what I was going through.

If you’re in those early days, feeling like the weight of grief might crush you, please remember this: it’s okay to carry that heaviness. It’s okay to let yourself be fragile and bent. Grief’s weight is the heaviest when love is the freshest, and that’s a testament to the bond that can never be broken.

In time, that weight begins to lift, reshape, and soften.

But it will always be a part of you, a quiet space that honors the love you hold inside.

And in that space…there’s hope.


Credit: Gary Sturgis - Surviving Grief

07/28/2025

Please follow this link to "Vote" for my nonprofit, Widow's Wish Foundation. This will put us in the drawing for financial grants offered by My Giving Circle. THANK YOU!!!

Each year MyGivingCircle gives $2,000,000

06/23/2025

The New Modern Widow Perspective (With a Wink)

So here’s the flip: Next time you see a , don’t think “Oh, that poor woman who lost her partner.”

Think: “Oh snap, there’s a woman who literally completed the marriage game on expert level. I should probably ask her for tips.”

Don’t think: “She must be so lonely.”

Think: “She probably has more relationship wisdom in her pinky finger than most marriage counselors have in their entire practice.”

Don’t think: “How sad that it ended.”

Think: “How amazing that it lasted until the only thing that could end it actually did.”

Because here’s the real tea: In a culture where half of marriages end in divorce, widows represent 100% completion rate. They’re not the consolation prize—they’re the grand prize winners who actually finished what they started.

What if aren’t the tragic heroines of incomplete love stories, but the victorious heroines of perfectly completed ones?

Old Script: “Poor widows, they lost their spouses 😰”
New Script: “Champion widows, they WON at marriage 🏆”

Old Script: “Widowhood is so tragic”
New Script: “Widowhood is graduation day from the University of Unconditional Love”

Honestly? That’s pretty badass.💪




Credit: Modern Widows Club

06/15/2025

This Father’s Day I offer to all widows a reminder of what a warrior you are as both mom and dad of your family.

03/10/2025

Not every loss can be transformed into something useful.

The reality of grief is different from what others see or guess from the outside. Platitudes and pat explanations will not work here.

There is not a reason for everything. Things happen that do not have a silver lining. We have to start telling the truth about this kind of pain. About grief, about love, about loss.

Because the truth is, in one way or another, loving each other means losing each other. Being alive in such a fleeting, tenuous world is hard. Our hearts get broken in ways that can’t be fixed.

There is pain that becomes an immovable part of our lives. We need to know how to endure that, how to care for ourselves inside that, how to care for one another.

We need to know how to live here, where life as we know it can change, forever, at any time. We need to start talking about that reality of life, which is also the reality of love.

Your survival in this life post-loss won’t follow steps or stages, or align with anyone else’s vision of what life might be for you. Survival won’t be found, can’t be found, in easy answers or in putting your lost life behind you, pretending you didn’t really want it anyway.

In order to survive, to find that life that feels authentic and true to you, we have to start with telling the truth. This really is as bad as you think. Everything really is as wrong, and as bizarre, as you know it to be.

When we start there, we can begin to talk about living with grief, living inside the love that remains.

Credit: Refuge In Grief

***dewidow ***de

03/10/2025

For all the friends and family who stop asking.... Yes, we still miss him.

Always will.

Yes, his kids still lost their dad, and that is forever.
Yes, we'd LOVE to hear your stories and remember him with laughter, but you've long since stopped bringing him up because it makes you feel more comfortable to forget.

No, we haven't moved on, but we have moved forward. We started moving forward immediately....we had no other choice.

Yes, I will forever love him all while loving someone new. People are not replaceable, and love is not mutually exclusive. The heart is capable of amazing love...especially after loss.

Yes, the grief comes in waves even years later. We don't look for it or expect it but happy and sad moments lead the tsunami of emotions to our shores. Life after loss is full of duality.

No, talking about him does not make me stuck, it makes me human. I talk about him because for 15 years he was the most important part of my life, he made me a mother, and he will forever be part of my story.

Yes, I think our culture is repressive and stunted. When we go through loss, we morph into a new soul, full of enlightenment and painful growth. I am not required or obligated to grieve on your terms. My life, my loss, my rules.

Yes, I'm sad you don't reach out more, say his name or ask how his kids are doing.

Yes, I've made the choice to LIVE this life and boldly move forward while carefully honoring my past...that decision has neither been easy nor has it been readily accepted.

No, I wouldn't wish my pain on my worst enemy, but I would wish my perspective on the world.

Credit: One Fit Widow

***de ***dewidow