When you are widowed, people don't always know what to say or what to do. They might even avoid you because they are anxious about saying the wrong thing, or are afraid to be around grief and death. What people don't realise is that often all we want – all we need – is to hear our loved one's name. We want to talk about them, and we want to hear people's stories about them.
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Around the world there are over 258 million widows*, and according to the Loomba Foundation , almost one in ten live in extreme poverty. In parts of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, around 50% of women are believed to be widows.
In parts of the world, widows:
According to the census, there were just over 2 million widows in England in 2020. In the UK, an estimated 1.5 million widows lost out on pension income after bereavement, with almost 60% seeing a major drop in income. It was only in February 2023 that unmarried cohabiting parents could claim bereavement benefits. Cohabiting partners without children are still not eligible for benefits. The origins of International Women's Day On 23 June 1954, Raj Loomba's mother, Pushpa Wati, became a widow at the age of 37. That very day, she was ordered to remove her bangles, jewellery and bindi, which gave her the status of a married woman, and wear white for the rest of her life. When Raj Loomba, who was ten at the time of his father's death, got married to Veena Chaudhry, the priest told him that his mother had to sit away from the alter in case she brought bad luck to the couple. Five years after his mother died, Loomba and his wife set up the Shrimati Pushpa Wati Loomba Trust (now the Lomba Foundation) to support widows and their children. The Foundation created International Widow's Day in 2005, and in 2010 the United Nations declared 23 June to be a United Nations day of action to highlight and combat discrimination and injustice suffered by widows worldwide. What we can do to safeguard and advance widows’ rights From The UN Women explainer on what you should know about widowhood:
*While The Widows Handbook usually uses 'widow' as a non-gendered term, this piece talks about female widows The day Tim died I had to do the hardest thing ever – break the news to his parents. I then had to tell my family. Friends passed the news onto friends. It was unbearable. Every conversation relived the awful shock of that morning.
The next day, the news had travelled fast. People around the village, people on social media, sent me messages of love and concern. What I hadn't realised, though, was how often I was going to have to tell people that he had died. His bookshop customers. All the people involved in the sadmin – banks (over and over again), DVLC, business contacts. People we hadn't seen for years. Even years later it still catches me. A mailing list he's still on. The tax office because his company is dormant but not yet closed. Breaking the news doesn't seem to end. As Father's Day approaches, sending love to all who are:
After the death of her husband, Geoffrey, fashion journalist Felicity Green said: " I have got plenty of people to do something with, but nobody to do nothing with". After Tim died, I missed the big things. Going away together. Planning Christmas together. But it was the little things that I missed the most. I worked upstairs in my office and he worked downstairs in the shop, and I'd potter down with a cup of tea in his favourite mug, or to tell him something about my day, and he'd potter up to show me a new book that had just come in. I'd notice when he'd cleaned the hair out of the vacuum cleaner (a job I hated), or when he emptied the bin in my office. He'd do things around the house when I went away for work, and I'd wander round when I got back and spot them. If we were both awake in the night, we'd talk about anything and nothing. If I got up early to work I'd come back to bed with a cup of tea and he'd warm my feet. Like Felicity Green, I missed doing nothing with him. Losing a partner is devastating, and it's at times that this we need people around us to support us.
One of the things that surprised me when Tim died was the people who reached out to me. Some of them were the people I expected. My family. My closest and dearest friends. But some of them were people I didn't expect. People I didn't think I was close to, or I thought I'd lost touch with, but who were kind, loving and actually, all-round amazing. And our friendships grew. Sadly, some widows say that what has surprised them are the people who don't reach out, or who cross the road rather than talk. Who send a message saying 'is there anything I can do', and then just vanish. This may be because they don't know how to deal with grief and are afraid to say the wrong thing and upset us more. It may be because they can't bear to see us in pain. It may be because they have experienced bereavement, our grief has reawakened their feelings of loss, and it's all too much to deal with. It may be they think we are after their partner. Or it may simply be that being around death makes them feel too vulnerable. It's so hard to lose friends, especially at a time when life is tough. Sometimes we can reconnect with these people, and sometimes we just have to let friendships go. Grief support groups (for me it was Widowed and Young) are so valuable at times like this, because they are full of people who just get it. Grief isn't a competition. It's not worse or better because one person was only married for days before their husband died in a road traffic accident at 23, or another person died peacefully of natural causes at 94 after 68 years of being together. Its not easier or harder when a partner died suddenly and unexpectedly or after years of illness. Grief is grief. Your experience of grief doesn't lessen mine, it's just different. I can care for you and you can care for me.
For complicated reasons I have had a bad week, and the thing that happened has brought a lot of the grief back. I have been living with a feeling of impending doom for a few months – that something awful is going to happen and it will be my fault – and a sense that I don't deserve happiness. I'm not allowed to be happy.
I just want to say that after what we have been through, we do deserve happiness. It probably won't be the happiness that we thought we would have before we lost our person. It may not be what we previously saw as happiness. It may take days, weeks, months, years to feel it. But we – and I – deserve it. And today – if you need it – I give you permission to feel happy. 'Self-care' is a bit of a buzzword. It's become about 'me time', bath bombs, scented candles, manicures, facemasks, herbal teas, touching trees and drinking a lot of water out of an enormous plastic water bottle. While none of these are wrong in themselves, they offer a fleeting moment of care, and may not appeal to everyone. They can also become a pressure, leaving grieving people feeling worse when the solutions don't make everything better.
In grief, self-care is actually about caring for our mental and physical health and keeping ourselves safe and well. Caring for ourselves The most important part of self-care, which sounds easy but is actually quite hard, is being kind to ourselves. It's about being as good to ourselves as we would be to others in the same situation, giving ourselves permission to feel sad, to say no, to take breaks and to get things wrong sometimes. Remember, we are doing our best in a situation not of our choosing. Self-care can include:
Meditation and mindfulness may help. However, as someone with ADHD, these allowed too much space for intrusive thoughts; it was too much for me but some people find it very useful. There isn't much information on the issues associated with the combination of grief and the menopause. So this is going to be rather shorter than I hoped it would be. The symptoms of the menopause, such as lack of sleep, loss of self-confidence, low mood, anxiety, brain fog, weight changes, emotional overload, exhaustion and flare ups in other health conditions, can overlap with many of the experiences in grief and blur in together. This can make it harder to work out what is grief and what is the menopause and makes both feel worse. The stress associated with grief may also worsen menopause symptoms, and there is a possibility that stress could even bring on an earlier menopause. There can be grief associated with the menopause itself, which could complicate the grief of bereavement. Menopause can bring up thoughts of the loss of youth and of aging, which may trigger grief about the loss of a partner.
For people who are grieving, the menopause can highlight the secondary loss of the chance of conceiving and carrying a baby. This can be especially hard for those who were trying for children at the time of their partner's death. The menopause also comes at a time where people may be caring for aging parents, or grieving their loss and missing their support. The fact that the symptoms of perimenopause and menopause and the symptoms of grief are so hard to separate may also mean that women (and trans and non-binary people) don't seek help for menopausal symptoms at what is already a difficult and overwhelming time. Coping with grief and the menopause Like grief, there is no one solution to the menopause. Be aware that the menopause may be masking or adding to your grief symptoms and be gentle with yourself. If you are struggling with the menopause talk to your doctor – there are options that can help you deal with the physical and psychological symptoms. Grief is bad enough without the menopause making it worse. HRT can help with some symptoms (I have just started with HRT patches to see if they can help with my fluctuating body temperature and disturbed sleep). The Menopause Charity's website has information, news and expert advice, and the NHS website has a section on 'Things you can do'. |
AuthorI was widowed at 50 when Tim, who I expected would be my happy-ever-after following a marriage break-up, died suddenly from heart failure linked to his type 2 diabetes. Though we'd known each other since our early 20s, we'd been married less than ten years. Archives
May 2024
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