Grief Group

What Strangers Can and Can’t Do For Each Other

Photo by Danielle Bailey on Unsplash

This week's post is by guest author, Trevy Thomas, who writes "Our Hundred Years" at trevythomas.substack.com. I am very excited to share this experience, which is not yet mine, but still shines as something I will be facing. I also value learning from her experience.

We met on Thursday evenings. There were about a dozen of us, mostly women, whose spouses had died. Our group leader had once belonged to our tribe, but at nine years out was no longer really one of us. I remember resenting her a little for having nine years’ distance from death. As much as I wanted my husband back, the second thing I wanted was to be years past his death and the painful emptiness so present in my belly. Time stopped when he died trapping me in a horrible feeling. I wasn’t getting through nine minutes that well, so her nine years induced envy.

At the start of the meetings, she’d make us go around the room introducing ourselves, explaining how our loss had happened. I resented her for this too because it always made me cry to say “he died” aloud. Sometimes I would answer his phone when it rang and have to explain that “he died” in response to the question “Can I talk to Bill?” I’d get those two words out, then burst into tears. There would be a very awkward conversation afterwards, usually with some man I’d never met, who was just looking for materials or placing an order, and then he’d be stuck trying to console me. Most people are really bad at this, particularly strange men who, while they may be shocked at your husband’s death, don’t really care that much that you’ve lost such an anchor to normalcy that you cannot behave properly on a simple call.

I was curious how the other widows had lost their people so, as much as I hated going around the room, I listened to their stories. A few stood out.

*One woman got out of bed in the morning and found her husband face down on the living room floor. When she turned him over, his white face had turned black. Heart attack.

*Another was a very young woman whose husband died in a rock-climbing accident. He’d left her with a three-year-old daughter. I, who’d never wanted children, envied her that child but she seemed to resent the intrusion the little girl caused to her grief.

*There was an angry woman who didn’t come to the meetings for long. She’d discovered after her husband died that he’d been cheating on her. I think she needed a different group.

About half of us had become widowed suddenly; the other half after long illnesses. We’d talk about which was worse and concluded that both were.

When I decided to try dating, I saw a profile of one of the men from the group. I remember his wife was Japanese. He knew all these little phrases she would say to him in her language and sometimes he’d recite them to us like he just wanted to hear them again. He was a year ahead of me in loss and I felt embarrassed to be caught looking at dating profiles when I so clearly was not ready. We avoided each other. He left the group not long after.

I bonded with a couple of the women and told them to read the book “Saturday Night Widows.” I was so longing for some kind of filler in my life to cling to. If I wasn’t ready for love, maybe our shared suffering could stand in. But it didn’t work. We were too different. Grief is not a good substitute for long-term friendship. And long-term friendship struggles in the foreign space of grief.

I don’t remember when I gave up the group, but I think it happened when I started stepping back into life. It wasn’t really a plan, but life started shaping itself again somehow. Different life. I didn’t want it any more than I wanted to stay stuck in pain and loneliness. It wasn’t a clean shift. The lines of my old and new lives smeared together messily like paints that are still too wet on the page.

The things that changed were concrete.

The feelings were not.

This is how change happened, uneasily, and none of it was visible until long after.

I got different work and kept my late husband’s work going too, as best I could. I forced myself to join social groups to meet new people and appreciated whenever family and old friends could come to stay. I accepted that the third dog I didn’t think I could handle was not only in my life for good but had been a surprising gift. I moved around some old bedroom furniture and bought a new dresser. And after many tries (very many), I made another dating profile that led to the Mr. Right to whom I’m now married. He has his own widower story, though talking to me is as close as he ever came to attending a grief group.

In the early days of loss, my dogs were an anchor. They needed me and that was just enough to keep at it. And if I had to keep at it, I didn’t want to be miserable. So I just kept trying, and hoping that life would get better. I’ve talked to many people about loss since then, and it is both the same and a little different for us all. But the people I see who don’t come through this well are the ones who cling to anger and resentment. They cannot accept kindness from others, or respond to those reaching out, or even attempt to look for peace in life. Their only comfort is anger. Don’t be one of them. It’s an insurance policy for permanent grief.

I don’t know if that early group ever really helped me, except that it was an effort that signaled to my despair that some part of me still wanted to live. It was a little action that was not just lying in bed. It was like the widow I read about who simply opened her curtains in the morning and closed them again at night. Every small thing leads to another. If you’re still here, there’s a life waiting to be lived. And somebody else needs to hear your story. We light the path ahead for those behind us. That, too, is an anchor. Look for yours.