How Do You Help a Friend Through the Loss of Her Husband?
By: Sara Dagen
Tags: Nonfiction, Prompt, Loss, Exulansis, Grief

How Do You Help a Friend Through the Loss of Her Husband?

Literally Literary and The Writing Cooperative prompt

He spoke of the death as if I already knew.

Earlier this week, Matt, my colleague, had told me about a friend of his who had delayed his retirement, working well into his late 60s.

“He finally retired in July, then discovered he has pancreatic cancer,” Matt told me then. “He likely won’t see Christmas.”

Now when Matt referred to a local man who died after being hit by a tree limb, it was yet another piece of mounting evidence that he should retire sooner rather than later. Matt was 65, working wonders in the industry, and he found his company wanting to expand — by expanding his role — more and more.

“I should be slowing down at my age,” he told me, “not accelerating.”

“Wait. Who died?” I had to ask.

It was a city official’s husband. He’d been killed, leaving Jaclyn widowed with 4 children, ages 4 to 14. I had met her but I didn’t know her personally. Because I was sympathizing with Matt, I had filtered Jaclyn’s horrific news through his filter — that Matt better quit soon so he could enjoy retirement before he died. I didn’t connect Jaclyn’s grief with my story in any way.

An Uncommon Networking Conversation

That evening, I attended a networking event and met Dana. We exchanged the perfunctory “what do you do” lines, talked about where we were from and how we got to our mutual university employer.

Dana had grown up in our town but went away to college and never planned to return. Yet here she was. Her daughter, now 21, also planned to leave, but she had chosen to attend our university and remained here.

“Do you have any children?” Dana asked me. Her subsequent questions launched me into my own story of death and hope.

The Story I Love to Tell

Widowed in my 20s and writing for the local newspaper, I published a column about the sudden loss of my husband Bill, titled “No Greater Loss to Be Feared.” Steve, who would lose his wife to melanoma a month later, read that column and understood that “it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” He would follow my articles in The Sun.

Steve’s situation was different. His wife’s death was anticipated. His grieving would be both stifled and magnified by parenting four children, ages 15 months to 7 years. I had never met his wife, but she and I had a mutual friend, Becky, who had told me about the situation and asked me to pray for this man and his four children. I did. Two years later, Becky ran into Steve and the kids at the YMCA pool.

“Are you dating anyone?” she had asked.

“No, I haven’t found the right person,” he had responded. “Do you have anyone in mind?”

“Do you know Sara Olson?” (Olson was my first married name.)

“Does she work for The Sun?”

Later Becky called me to ask if I would be willing to date a widower with four children. Not just “a widower with four children” but the very ones I had covered in prayer!

We met on a blind date and married with some form of rapid romance in between. Nothing could have prepared me for instant motherhood and marriage to a grieving man. Nothing about the union was easy, but it was and is a treasure 25 years later.

Dana stood enthralled as I shared the story I love to tell.

“This sounds like a movie!” she told me. Then Dana sobered.

“Your story gives me hope for a friend of mine, Jaclyn. She lost her husband yesterday,” she said. “She has four children. We used to work together.”

Ah, Jaclyn. The same Jaclyn Matt had mentioned. Widowed. With four children, now fatherless. I embraced her pain through the lens of what Steve and I individually had experienced instead of the lens of Matt’s retirement dilemma. My heart broke for this new widow.

“What can I do for her?” Dana asked me.

The Deeper Story

Tucked away deep in my heart were the memories exulansis had muted during all those hours, days, weeks, and months of overwhelming loss. Who could have understood my pain? Many of my thoughts secreted in my journal and told to God in prayer long ago I’d never expressed to another human.

I knew I couldn’t and wouldn’t ever say I understood Jaclyn’s loss; I remembered how I’d resented those who tried to tell me they “knew just how I felt” those many years ago. The pain of losing a spouse is so individual. I couldn’t imagine her vast grief at losing a spouse with the burden of helping young children grieve the loss of their father.

The bulk of the story I had shared with Dana — the clearly God-paved path Steve and I walked toward each other as we put grief behind us and dared to love again — merely touched the surface of the pain of my widowhood and centered on the magical provision of new love after loss. It hadn’t captured the pain or my journey through grief. I suddenly was aware that remembering and sharing those details might help Jaclyn.

“Be there for her in three months when everyone else will think she’s gotten on with her life,” I began, pulling from my forgotten sea of memories. “Grief for me was like an ocean of waves. Instead of getting smaller, the troughs of loneliness, loss, and despair got deeper over time. I had highs wherein I felt almost normal, as if I’d put grief behind me, but they made the lows seem even worse.”

My arm mimicked the sea’s undulations as I spoke, and Dana nodded. Obviously, time had healed my wounds, but healing takes more time than most realize. Yet some friends stayed the course.

My friend Kim came to mind, the knack she had for calling just when I was having an emotional breakdown. I remember her interruptions, her voice saying through the phone, “I’ll be right there.”

And she was. She would appear on my doorstep 15 minutes later and steal me from my isolation to her family-warmed home. I would spend many days and evenings with Kim and Gary and their children. Bill and I had taught their 4-year-old son Joel in children’s church. Joel was the reason I chose a funeral plot under an oak tree in the local cemetery.

“He’d like that the squirrels will play near him,” he had said. Joel felt comfortable asking questions that forced me to feel and face grief.

“Where is Bill?” Joel would ask. “Is Bill with Jesus?”

Kim handled me more gently, simply handing me a hot cup of tea laced with fresh lemon and walking with me to her wooden swing, where we’d dangle and sip and talk and be silent, sometimes crying, sometimes laughing.

“I think I would be OK if I could just talk to Bill about this,” I had told her through my tears.

Another friend, Esther, invited me to live with her family until a room opened in a friend’s apartment. Esther was pregnant with child number four, and because I worked evenings, I spent a lot of time with Esther’s children, doing crafts, going to the park, and cooking.

Being part of a family’s daily life was healing, even though it also made me acutely aware that I had lost not just Bill but also the children and family life we had hoped to have. I likened my loss to having a “Bill-shaped vacuum” that nothing else could fill. I missed him; I also missed being known by him.

“You don’t just lose a ‘loved one’,” I told Dana, “You lose a life. The life you had together. Your hopes, your dreams.”

That awful night when Bill died, a very pregnant Judy and Ben, our friends, appeared at my door at 2 in the morning. (The doctor, who had called me to tell me “his heart expired” and handed me off to his nurse to handle the details, had called them, as I had no family in town.) Ben and Judy took me to their house, where Judy stayed awake with me, letting me talk and cry.

In these and other ways, my friends Kim, Esther, and Judy were among the many heroes who helped sustain me as I walked through the grieving process. My heart hurt for Jaclyn, and I could only hope that what I’d shared with Dana might somehow benefit the newly bereft family.

“I’ll be there for Jaclyn,” Dana assured me as she thanked me for sharing my experience. With that, we said goodbye, and I left, sensing the value of sharing what I had left unspoken.