The word “widow” usually conjures an image of an elderly woman. While any thoughts of death are depressing, the idea of a younger woman losing her husband is a sensitive subject that most people prefer not to think about.
The issue of losing a spouse at a young age often remains in the shadows until it impacts a celebrity such as “Today” show anchor Katie Couric, whose husband, Jay Monahan, died of colon cancer at 42, or Katia Gordeeva, who lost her 28-year-old husband and Olympic skating partner, Sergei Grinkov, at the peak of their career. Grinkov died from a heart attack as a result of heart disease.
While these examples seem rare, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 1999 almost a quarter of the nation’s 13.5 million widows and widowers were under 64. Yet most resources are designed for retirees; WidowNet.com, one of the nation’s largest Web sites for surviving spouses, is peppered with links for seniors and publications from the American Association of Retired Persons.
What’s worse, a young widow’s friends are often so uncomfortable about how to respond that they just stay away. And the isolation only compounds the widow’s grief.
“People kind of avoid you because they’re afraid that it could happen to them,” says Jill Schecter, a licensed clinical social worker in Highland Park. “Just your presence seems to suggest the fear of what it would be like for them to go through that. So you do lose a lot of friends.”
Melissa Meade, a technical writer and consultant in Chattanooga, Tenn., lost her husband, Ken, in December 1996 when he and a fishing buddy got caught in a whirlpool below a dam in the Tennessee River. When their boat got pinned under the floodgates, the force of the water tore it to shreds. The friend survived; divers found Ken’s body 17 days later.
“I felt like an outcast, and there are still people who can’t look at me,” says Meade, 38. “When they do, they see Ken and they just see me as Ken’s widow. It hurts them because they miss Ken and it hurts them because it makes them mortal and it hurts them because they don’t know what to say to me.”
A social twilight zone
Chris Overholt, a 50-year-old employment specialist in Santa Rosa, Calif., became a widow six years ago when she awoke to find her husband, Tom, had suffered a massive heart attack and died in his sleep. He was 44.
“The thing that came up first for me was a sense of being in a social twilight zone, where I immediately didn’t fit in,” Overholt recalls. “I was alienated from couples with whom we’d been friends for 23 years. I didn’t feel at all comfortable with my single friends. And I didn’t have anything in common with my divorced friends because I wasn’t coming from a place of chosen singleness. For a while I really believed that couples felt that it could be contagious, that somehow I was carrying a disease.”
What many people don’t realize is that the grief extends far beyond the physical loss of the person who was going to be a lifetime partner. The future, as envisioned, is gone.
“With every loss we experience, we lose dreams that we had for that relationship,” says Kirsten Levin Randall, a licensed clinical social worker in Hyde Park who specializes in grief and bereavement issues. “Often people who are older have had the chance to realize those dreams, whether it was reaching their 50th anniversary or taking a second honeymoon or watching their children grow up. And young widows and widowers have not only lost the person but they’ve lost an entire set of dreams that are now going to go unrealized.”
The abruptness of the loss brings other challenges. Young widows are often, with little or no warning, thrust into the role of single parent.
Busy moms don’t have time to process their feelings, which can delay healing. And whereas an older woman might have her grown children as sources of support, a young mother has the added stress of helping her kids deal with their grief.
Death of a spouse can take a toll on the widow’s professional life as well.
Overholt lost her momentum at work when she took time off from her position at a job development center to be with her grieving 16-year-old daughter. Because she was unavailable, she lost out on promotions and the career ladder she had been climbing collapsed.
Loss of income
Other young widows say that, unlike their older counterparts who have retirement and pension plans to fall back on, they were unprepared for the loss of their husbands’ income.
As if that were not enough, well-meaning acquaintances often try to force unrealistic expectations on the survivors.
Lisa Iannucci, a 36-year-old writer in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., lost her husband, Jeff Brinkley, to Hodgkin’s disease in the summer of 1999, two weeks after his 37th birthday. It wasn’t long before friends started urging her to find a “replacement” father for her three small children. Some young widows face the opposite problem. When Meade started dating, family members questioned her loyalty to Ken.
There are plenty of other myths surrounding the death of a spouse, especially a young one. For one, says Randall, there are no nice, neat stages of grief–denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance–as outlined in Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ book, “On Death and Dying.”
“People can go through all of those feelings in one day, in one hour, and then start back again,” she says. “The next day it can be more like a roller coaster. Particularly for young widows and widowers. They may jump back and forth between different feelings because they have more things to juggle.”
Another myth, Randall points out, is that the widow shouldn’t make any major life changes for a set period of time. “I know of one woman who had moved with her husband to a city where she had no family members. And then the husband died and people kept saying, `Well you can’t make any move for one year.’ She really needed to be back where her family was.”
Iannucci has launched a Web site (www.youngwidowsandwidowers.com) that seeks to offer emotional solace as well as practical information on topics ranging from finding good health insurance to making new friends after the loss. She wants to help others overcome some of the obstacles she encountered as a young widow. “When you’re older, say in your 60s or 70s, there’s a good chance that you’re going to have single friends, other people who have gone through the same thing,” says Iannucci. “I don’t have that. I didn’t expect this to happen for 30 or 40 more years.”
Working through the pain
After my husband, Van, drowned three years ago, I searched everywhere for something to help me through the endless days of crying and the achingly painful nights–a book, a support group, an online chatroom for survivors like me. But all the resources were geared toward older women, not a 40-year-old who had suddenly lost her mate.
But there are things a widow and her group of friends can do to help work through the pain.
Kirsten Levin Randall, a grief and bereavement specialist in Chicago, offers this advice:
For the young widow:
– Call your local hospice and ask the bereavement program coordinator about support groups for widows your age.
– Remember that no two people grieve the same way. It’s OK if you need to cocoon for a while. If you feel like socializing, go ahead.
– When others offer help, take them up on it.
For friends:
– Remain a part of your friend’s life. This is the time when she needs you the most.
– Don’t be afraid to bring up the name of the spouse or to recall stories about him. It can be more painful for the widow if you avoid the topic, and doing so could damage your friendship.
– Offer tangible ways to help, such as taking the kids to a movie or cooking dinner. Grieving people often don’t know what to ask for.
— Nancy Bearden Henderson
