Do you want to know the best thing that happened to me since my husband died? 

 

Meeting other widows.

 

When I realized I was a widow…the day he died…it floored me. It felt unreal. Surreal. 

 

It occurred to me, sitting at our dining room table, with that female police officer asking me about other kin, the firefighters in the bedroom with his body…it occurred to me in that most surreal, horrible moment, that I was a widow.

 

It seemed out of place, this thought. Displaced. Misplaced. A term I’d never put any thought into all my years before. I guess I stupidly also never thought it would apply to me, so it felt foreign. But there it was.

 

The weeks and months that followed were in a sort of blind stupor. I sat on my lanai drinking wine and crying, writing in my journal pages and pages and pages of curse words. Trying to fathom my world, my life, without him. 

 

If you’re reading this, you are most likely also widowed. So you know what I mean when I talk about belonging to this most terrible club. It helps to know we are not alone with our feelings. It helps to know there are others out there that get it. 

 

Don’t get me wrong. I have many other friends who are not widowed who are wonderful support. Some I knew from before, others I have met since. But there is something special about those widowed friendships. You meet someone new, and it is nice. You find out they are widowed too…and something deeper transpires. It just does.

 

I can be in a room full of people, but it is the fellow widows that keep me grounded. They are the ones I can turn to, the ones I talk to about the little things that come up in every day life, without our spouses. It doesn’t matter how much time goes by, I can pickup the phone and we are right there with each other, having similar feelings and experiences.

 

I have said to some of them, isn’t it weird how we find each other, how many of us there are…and yet, people die, all the time, and people are married, so, that makes widows. I had no idea how big this terrible club was until I joined.

 

I have not yet had the opportunity to visit a Camp Widow event with Soaring Spirits but I hope to one day. Meanwhile I have had the incredible opportunity to be a writer here, to have a forum to express what many of us share. The heartbreak, the pain of life after, the not knowing, the remembering, the struggle. 

 

Thank you to each and every one of you. In this terrible club I would not wish on my greatest enemy, I am still deeply grateful I am not alone.