Being a Young Widow is Isolating
Support for when you become a widow far too soon
No one tells you what to do when your life partner dies. Whether you are 28 or 82, it sets your world spinning with no axis, like an empty room with no life left in it.
The difference is that at 82, you’d likely have friends who have been through something similar. What happens at 28, when your friends are still marrying off and settling in? What happens when your world shatters and you don’t know where to turn or how to keep going at all?
What do you do when your life partner dies and your life is still ahead of you? There’s no easy answer to this question now echoing painfully around every room you enter. It sucks the air from your lungs and the strength from your bones. Grief is all-consuming, and grieving the rest of your life with someone no longer here to share it is one of the loneliest pains imaginable.
This isn’t the life you signed up for
There are no two ways about this. Whether the loss of your partner was sudden or you saw it coming, the shock of its arrival is often met with a reaction you couldn’t anticipate. Numbness, anger, denial, heart-wrenching pain: they’re all interwoven into some unspeakable horror that never lets you get a thought in edgewise. The grief of such encompassing loss colors every aspect of your world and defies an organizational understanding of what’s happening. It can be like this for any grief, but in young widowhood, there’s a particularly profound impact on the isolation it brings.
Who do you talk to? Who will hold you when you cry? Where do you turn for understanding in a world where it feels like no one is where you are? Even when you hope no one will ever be where you are, it makes sense that you also desperately crave someone in these trenches with you. The guilt of that duality alone fills you with something you don’t want to look too hard at, and once again you find yourself returning to the maelstrom of emotion.
What is the average age a woman becomes a widow?
Picturing a widow often brings up an image of a late-life person, reflecting back on a long and happy marriage. Statistics support this to a degree. In the United States, 59 is the current average age for those experiencing the loss of a life partner.
The average should be encouraging: late adulthood and beyond seem like a more normative space where you may contemplate navigating life without your partner. While this is statistically a good thing, it also creates a stark and isolating reality of being a young widow.
Representation in culture… but not reality
When we look at the media, we don’t have to go too far to find the spaces where young widowhood is represented in cultural consumption. Danny Tanner paved the way for sitcoms like Arrested Development to draw on creating representation for spouses who have experienced grief and loss far too early in their lives. Widowed men are depicted as young and clueless, deserving of the loving support of a community. Meanwhile, widowed women remain a stereotypical relic of an age where anyone still moving through the paces of professional life just doesn’t experience marital loss.
Even with the representation that does exist, it seems to have made little headway in creating a space for the unthinkable in adult life ahead of your 60s. Widowers often feel shut down or shut out of conversations and social situations by the mere presence of their grief. It’s like a foreign weight hanging in the air between breaths, pressing them into the corners of their own existence as they try to relate to a life that was once theirs but never will be again.
As niche groups begin to pop up to create the support young widows are lacking, the world is opening up beyond the prescribed idea of what marital bereavement may look like. The resources and availability of things like bereavement counseling create some space for you to turn when you’re not sure how to keep moving in a world that won’t stop spinning no matter how hard you beg. But even still, those things don’t give you the answers you need to the questions you can’t stop asking.
How do you go on?
Why did this happen?
When will it stop hurting like this?
Grief and loss change the landscape of your life forever, and when it occurs in relationships, it’s not just the person you’re grieving. It’s your entire future and the things you thought it could contain.
There is nothing wrong with you if those realities feel impossible to accept. Your feelings aren’t too big, too raw, or too broken to bring along with you for the support you can find.
Young widowhood will rewrite your life, but Resilience Counseling can help you take your future back.
