I worded the title that way because I am not fond of the word “widow”.
I am 33.
My husband just turned 38 and he died in his sleep less than two months ago.
He left behind me and our daughters aged nine and three months.
His death was unexpected and sudden and I wrote a really long post about how it all went down that night when I announced the news of his passing on the dope.
He wasn’t terminally ill, he was fairly healthy, he was happy, we were happy and he just like that…he was gone one day.
Side note: I didn’t know he was having chest pains until I read his last post on the dope after he had passed. I was aware of his GERD symptoms, but not chest pains. He never mentioned it to me.
Somebody suggested that I start this thread and I decided to do it because I realized that talking and sharing stories about grief and loss has been helpful for me during this time. And, more importantly, I wanted to do this hoping that I might be able to offer some support to someone else going through a rough time and dealing with loss in their own lives, or trying to process loss from years ago.
Please feel free to ask me anything (really) and I will respond honestly. Or feel free to share your own stories.
I’m so very sorry for your loss. I remember your thread and I remember your husband. My heart aches for you.
Have you experienced a lot of family support? From your family and/or his? Do you find that you are closer to your in laws then you previously were? More distant?
I lost a friend (OD at 31) last year who was married with two small children and his mother has been a true rock for his wife and vice versa.
Family on both sides have been amazingly supportive.
I was always close to his mother but his passing has made us closer, I think. A few weeks after Jesse died, while I was laying still and thinking about my kids, I felt this horrible, strong pain for her. Jesse was her only child. I felt so close to her at that moment. I have always been open with her and she has such a calming presence. I have reached out to her many times when Jesse’s battle with his chronic back problems was taking a toll on our marriage a while back. She was the first person I called after I called 911 that night. We don’t have any family in CA but have a lot of great friends. And she was the first “family” to arrive. We cried together for a while.
We talk on the phone everyday. She reads my blog. I have a feeling that she thinks that I might somehow forget about her now that her son is no longer around. But that won’t happen.
My family had just made their trip to the US from India and left two weeks before his death. My sister left everything and came right back to be with me and the girls. I have my mother with us now and she’s staying for six months. I really don’t know what I would’ve done without her help at the moment with two kids to raise on my own and take care of myself.
I am grateful and consider myself blessed that way.
With regard to dreams…I still cannot sleep very much. A few weeks ago, I moved myself to the guest bedroom because I just couldn’t sleep in the room in which he passed and on that bed we once shared. I still can only get around 3-4 hrs of disturbed sleep. I dreamt about him for the first time a few weeks ago. His aunt Rita had found a way to “communicate” with him using his iPhone. So she spoke to him and Jesse sounded different…youthful…and he said, " oh I just had so much to eat, I am full and I drank quite a bit too." and then, strange enough, he said " I live in Colorado now." That’s where aunt Rita lives at the moment. And then he asked if our older daughter wanted a bedtime story. And she said yes. She was laying next to me in the dream and I asked her to tell daddy that he sounded “young” and Jesse responded…“yeah” and then I told her “tell daddy I love him very much” and that’s when I woke up.
Reading bedtime stories was one of his favorite things to do with our daughter. He read to her a few hours before he passed.
I was glad I dreamt about him and that he appeared healthy and happy but the dream was also unsettling because it felt he was avoiding me, like he didn’t want to talk to me.
The second time I dreamt about him, he was reading a letter that he wrote to me. I cannot recall anything that was in the letter other than “tell Dana I miss her.” Dana was a good friend of his.
Then just three days ago I dreamt about him again. His dad was visiting us and all I recall is Jesse walking in the door and saying…" ok dad, fine. I’ll start going to meetings." He was referring to AA meetings. Jesse’s dad is a recovering alcoholic and Jesse went through his own battles with alcoholism back in the day and addiction to opiates.
Other than these three dreams, I recall one other dream where our second daughter began talking and saying some words out loud. I just haven’t slept very much and for some reason I keep fighting the urge to let myself go and fall asleep…even if I am beat and my eyelids feel real heavy. I still fight it. I’ll grab my book or my phone to read and stay awake.
First, I can’t tell you how sorry I am for your loss.
How hard has it been from a purely logistical perspective? Were there areas of your life together (retirement accounts, paying bills, filing taxes, grocery shopping, fixing leaks, whatever…most of my examples are a little sexist but in reality it could be almost anything that he took care of) that were so clearly his domain that it has been not just emotionally painful but also a practical struggle to figure out “sh*t, how do I do this, he knew the details but I don’t?” If the answer is “yes”, how are you coping with that?
My mother was widowed when I was a little girl (she also never embraced the word “widow”) when she was about 37. She had two children - a 9 year old and a 7 year old. She was a stay-at-home mom, and hadn’t worked outside the home since the kids were born.
And like your husband, it was so sudden. My dad went to a local clinic complaining of chest and neck pain, the doctor examined him, and deemed it to be a pinched nerve in his neck. (Wrong - It was a heart attack that killed him less than 24 hours later.) Dad was only 44.
Anyway, as you can imagine, there was a difficult adjustment period for everyone involved. The first Christmas without him was just unspeakably painful.
Eventually we got settled into a new family unit - single mom & two kids, and life keeps moving on, you know? It was okay after awhile, and my mom even remarried about 10 years later. It’s been about 27 years now. Everyone’s okay.
Mom also had terrible issues with insomnia and bad dreams in the first year or two after Dad passed. She’d also “see” Dad in a crowd of people, at the grocery store for instance, and she’d freeze in her steps for a moment until her eyes stopped deceiving her.
It does get better. I am so sorry for your loss.
Do you think it would be helpful for you to chat/email with someone who’s been in your shoes? I could put you in touch with my mom.
My mother lost my dad when he was just 49. I was an adult, but I had two little sisters who were just 7. I am so very sorry for your loss. It’s unimaginable and only time will lessen the grief.
This is probably very obvious advice, but do try to get back into life as soon as you feel comfortable. In the small town where I grew up, a woman who was a good family friend was widowed when she was only about 26. She threw her life into her children and the community and never, ever thought to marry again. She said she’d been married and that was it. She told my mom that she’d made a mistake, and that talk helped my mom know that she could still have a life in the future. In may be too soon for this words for you right now, but I hope they help if you need them.
My question: do you have a hard time telling people? I suffered a similar loss (a child) and it’s always been hard to tell people. It’s too much attention on me, and it makes them so sorrowful I hate to give that to people. On the other hand, I hate lying when asked how many children I have.
Has there been something that made you sad unexpectedly? My best man was killed in Afghanistan almost two years ago and, oddly enough, “The Avengers” made me a little depressed. He was really into comic books and would have loved the movie.
I’m so sorry for your loss. Your story hits me in the gut; I’m 37, my wife is 32, so we’re very close to you and Jesse’s ages, and we have two young children as well, ages 3 and 1. I’m also my mother’s only child. You’re going through what I fear most for my wife (and mother, for that matter). You have my deepest condolences, and I don’t know if you’d care to know, but you and your daughters are in my thoughts and prayers right now.
If you don’t mind my asking, do you know what the official cause of death was? (I may have missed it somewhere, apologies if I did.)
ETA: I also see in the pics that he’s wearing an SEIU shirt; was he a member?
To me the word widow is just so depressing and I imagine an old woman in a rocking chair, sitting on her porch, just waiting for her life to be over as well. I guess a lot of it has to do with my culture. I was born in India I spent the first 21 years of my life there. A woman’s life once her husband is dead is pretty much over and society just doesn’t care about them anymore. The pain I am going through right now is huge and there have been moments during my grief when I have wished for death as well. But its fleeting. I understand and acknowledge where its coming from. For some reason, when my father in law referred to me as a widow a few times, I felt like I was no longer married to Jesse. I am still his wife even though he is dead. I also feel like the word makes people want to pity me. I don’t want pity.
I was the one who managed all our joint bills and the household expenses, so nothing much changed there. I had to however go through and close all of his credit cards and let them know of his passing.
His domain was the stereotypical man thing of fixing up the house, taking care of the ant problem in the kitchen, fixing leaks, mowing the lawn etc. The garage light went out a few days before he passed and he was going to take care of it that weekend. That never happened, but when people were going in and out of the garage with a flashlight, I wondered how I was going to get that fixed. His dad however did it. Our neighbor is mowing our lawn for now. But he also loved to cook and would fix me breakfast often because he knew I would get busy with the baby as the day moved forward. I miss our weekend brunches as well. That was a family tradition.
We always carried the four month old in a wrap, but now that she is getting heavy, I decided the take out the stroller. We used the stroller 2-3 times in the past and Jesse was the only one who knew how to fold and unfold the damn thing and attach the car seat to it and all that fun stuff. So the first time I had to do it last week, I lost it. I cried and cried, but did it. I still have a hard time with pulling the car seat in and out of the car, but I am getting good at it. Jesse just did it with so much ease.
Yup. It will get better.
I would love to chat with your mother. Please private message me with her information. A family member of mine put me in touch with a wonderful friend of hers who also lost her husband in a car wreck almost two years ago. She also has two young kids. She has been a great source of support and she knows my pain, even though our circumstances are different, the underlying pain is similar in a lot of ways. So yes…I would love to talk to your mother. It’s good to feel hopeful.
Of course getting married again is the last thing on my mind right now, but thank you for sharing this. The thing about telling people has never come up much. I still wear my wedding ring, so people assume there is a significant other some where. But yes…sometimes I don’t feel like telling people because I hate having to deal with taking care of their awkwardness around death and them not knowing what to say to me.
My nine year old has been doing well. I have been trying to keep her life consistent and continue to do the things that daddy did with her…like the early morning chats they used to have since Jesse and her woke up at the same time in the morning. Or showing interest in video games…something she did with daddy as well. She is doing well in school and everyone in school has been amazing. She also starts therapy this week. The baby also had a hard time and I was told that babies as young as three months process grief their own way. The baby was in Jesse’s care from the time he came home after work and she was daddy’s girl. I bet she missed his smell and the way she slept in his arms.
Since my loss is still fairly new, everything makes me sad…expectedly. Especially…things involving the kids. Maya’s first bite of solid food, Isis’ science fair…
Now that you mention “The Avengers”…Jesse would’ve loved it too. His best friend opened his comic book store a week after Jesse’s death and Jesse was looking forward to going to the store opening for weeks.
Thank you!
I am a therapist by profession and I have been in therapy myself in the past. I know I need to start seeing a therapist again. Right now, my personal journal, and also my blog has been the biggest way that I have been coping. I am not ready to see a therapist just yet.
If you don’t mind sharing…why did your marriage end? Just curious.
Thank you! I appreciate the prayers. I only received the temporary death certificate and the cause of death is still being investigated. The last time I checked with the coroners office, they said it would take at least three months to figure out the actual cause of death and issue a permanent death certificate. So we really don’t know how he died. He did look peaceful when I found him. He was laying down in the same position when I last saw him, alive. It seemed like he didn’t struggle much during his last moments.
Yes! He was a proud member of SEIU! He wore that purple union shirt a lot.
Glad to hear it! And yet another way Jesse’s story connects with me: I’m a proud member (and employee) of AFSCME, and likewise I’ve got my green AFSCME shirts on probably more than my wife cares to see them.
