Grief and transition part 1: Losing Mandy and finding Maria

This is the first part of a two-part guest blog post by Maria Margetts - the second part is here. Maria is a WAY Ambassador representing the widowed LGBTQ+ community

​In February 2015, after seven years and two bouts of cancer, my fabulous wife Mandy died and my world turned upside down.
 
She looked after the house; she looked after my kids and I. She loved me and I couldn't see how I could live without her. It wasn't until I was a few months down the line that I realised how much this was true.

Six months after Mandy died I found WAY (Widowed and Young), joined and I got to listen to hundreds of voices who sounded like me. That were going through the same things as me. And I realised I hadn't grieved, and I crashed and burned. My first December, first Xmas without her, her birthday and our 25th wedding anniversary hurt so much that I melted down Christmas Day, at my mom's and found myself, Sunday best clothes on, in the pouring rain, trying to climb up the Client Hills, where I scattered her and my son's ashes, to be with her. Halfway up, soaked and mud filling my shoes, I turned back and went home and sobbed all afternoon.
 
Me and my other self
I had been questioning who I was all my life. My late wife Mandy met, fell in love with and married him. My other self. She didn't start to meet the real me until a couple of years into our marriage, after I tried on some clothes that I'd bought her but she didn't like.
 
When I was around 11 or 12 I stole some of my mum's clothes, but I got too big for them. I started college then work, I had to hide who I was and forget about it. But in my own home, with my wife's acceptance, I started showing this part of me.
 
For 25 years I hid who I was from the outside world. My wife was very apprehensive about people seeing me or knowing about me. "What would the neighbours say?". It wasn't until the last three years of my wife's life that we went out together.
 
Mandy knew how much I hated being on my own and a few weeks before she died she told me to find a new wife, which really upset me. But she didn't realise how much she impacted on this side of me. I realised, very quickly, how much her acceptance of 'Maria' had impacted on how I came out.
 
The first year after Mandy's death I tried to come out a couple of times and I didn't feel I was able. I was crushed by the grief of her loss and I felt that I was just an indulgence. That trying to become 'me' wasn't and shouldn't be my priority. I went back to my male self.