While the idea of creating a blog called The Widows's Handbook​ had been floating around in my head for a while, I finally took the plunge and posted the very first post on 23 September 2021, one year ago today. Thank you to everyone who takes the time to read the blog - I hope that it helps you, whether you are a widow and part of the club no-one wants to join, or whether you are a supporter of someone who is bereaved.

Amazing news this weekend - WAY Widowed And Young has awarded the Helen Bailey Award for Best Widowhood Blog to The Widow's Handbook. I am so glad that my blog has helped widows and I am so grateful to all the WAY members who voted for me.

About Helen Bailey
Helen Bailey wrote the Planet Grief blog.
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"On the 27th February 2011, whilst on holiday in Barbados, my husband got off his sun lounger, adjusted his glasses and headed into the sea for a swim. Moments later, I heard him call for help, and watched helplessly from the beach as he was pulled out to sea by a rip tide. He drowned. Bizarrely, after he died, almost the first thing I said was, "But I’m wearing a bikini!" as if bad things can’t happen when you’re wearing a good bikini. But they can, and it did. At the age of 46, I crash-landed on Planet Grief, a place where nothing, not even my own reflection in the mirror, felt familiar."

She worked in character licensing by day, and in the rest of her time she wrote and published over twenty books of short stories, picture books and young-adult fiction. She disappeared on 11 April 2016, and her body was found, along with that of her dog, at the house she shared with her partner, Ian Stewart. Stewart was arrested for her murder, and given a life sentence.
 
WAY Widowed and Young created the Helen Bailey Award for Best Widowhood Blog to celebrate Bailey's blog and her book on grief, When Bad Things Happen in Good Bikinis.

I'm a writer by trade. Science writing pays the bills and fiction provides the creativity. After Tim died, I used my blog as part of my grieving, sometimes writing to Tim, sometimes documenting the steps I took, other times just setting down in words how I was feeling. There were bees in there too. Writing The Widow's Handbook is helping me work through parts of my grief, and helping me to understand why I feel how I feel.
 
Writing your grief
Writing can be a way of making sense of the world, of getting feelings out of our heads and putting them in order, of processing our grief. It can help us to manage the chaos in our heads. Writing can trigger emotions, so be prepared for what I call grief attacks, those moments that feel like waves of the sea catching you behind the knees and sweeping you off your feet.
 
Writing can actually help our health – it can boost our immune systems. It can also improve our mood. While depression isn't the same as grief, a study of people with depression showed that writing every day lifted their mood.
 
Getting writing
Just sit down and do it, with paper and pen or pencil, or on a computer or tablet. Whatever works for you. Don't worry about whether what you are writing is any good. Later you can edit it if you want others to read it, or if you want to keep it as a record, but for now, just pour it out on the page.
 
Writing for yourself means that you can be more open and honest than you perhaps can be with other people. You can just let out exactly how you feel, whether that's anger, relief, hope or heartbreak.
 
How to start

• Keep a notebook and pen in your bag, on your bedside table, in the car, on your desk
• Write regularly, perhaps for 15 to 20 minutes a day or a week
  • If that seems a lot, begin by setting a timer for just 5 minutes
• Write whatever you want to, because it's for you:
  • a diary
  • letters to yourself or to the person who has died
  • a blog to share how you feel and explain grief to people who haven't experienced it
  • a memoir
  • fiction or poetry based on your feelings