Three state troopers came to my front door at five o’clock in the morning and told me my husband was dead. He had fallen asleep driving on his way back to the National Guard base on Cape Cod.
I just saw him four hours ago. Smelled him. Kissed him. And told him we were pregnant. And now, all at once, I was a widow. My daughter was a toddler and I had one on the way.
I was twenty-six years old.
But how could I be a widow? Widows were old, with white hair and sensible shoes that cushioned their bunions and who waited for people to visit them in assisted living homes. Or maybe they were fifty-five and had lost a spouse to cancer. Someone with grown children. Not pregnant, like me. Not with a toddler who’d never heard the word death.
Grief Shadows: Young, Pregnant and Widowed was the book I needed then.
Grief Shadows holds the reader’s hand and explores both the dark and light places I found during my grieving process – showing them that they aren’t the only ones. Others have done this before. Others have come out the other side. Those dealing with grief will feel less isolated, as if they’ve met a fellow traveler.
Grief Shadows is a memoir and shares my spiritual and emotional journey back to wholeness, reaching out to those who are searching for that connection.
I wrote of my horror, my sadness and then how I moved through life without my husband. I sludged through the muck of mundane to cancel his credit cards. I picked my way through horrific minefields, just waiting for the one thing that would send me into a catatonic state: Would it be picking out the coffin? Would it be telling my daughter that her daddy is never coming home? Or what about giving away his clothes? Throwing away his toothbrush?
Throughout the book, I wove in old love letters written by Rob, some of our family snapshots, and newspaper clippings of the accident.
A key element to my healing process was redefining myself and, conversely, remembering who I was. All the labels I had once associated with --mother, wife, friend, student -- were stripped from me in a matter of seven minutes. That’s how long the state troopers were in my house. Yes, I was still a mother, but now I was a single mother. Yes, I was still a friend, but not to the same people as before the accident. Grief changed me, and my relationships to other people necessarily had to change along with me. Here was an opportunity – albeit an unwelcome one – to grow and redefine who I was. To remember who I was underneath all the labels and layers. To discover the person I wanted to be after this tragedy.
The other theme woven through the chapters is that grief had never fully left me -- always seeming to shadow my experiences. But the intense pain did yield, and grief – soon enough – became something manageable. Something I wore with grace, like an accessory: a watch that was my grandmother’s, a scarf my mother bought me, or a necklace my daughter made.
I cried in cars, went to water aerobics, decided to move cross-country and delivered my baby. I found art and pottery, and journaling became a lifeline for me. But before I moved to Oregon, I started the strangest trek of all – seeking out a spirit medium. And then there was the dating.
Somehow this seemed worse than the spirit medium.
But it worked. I dated, I moved on, I doubled back, I cried some more, and I learned how to ride the grief bursts. I joined a new family and we created our own hybrid of hearts – understanding along the way how not to feel like I was betraying Rob by being with another man.
Grief Shadows is more than a legacy of memories; it’s a way to reach out and
connect to other grieving souls – to let them know they aren’t alone.
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