Secondary Losses in Widowhood Explained by Laurie Rich/ MWC Communication Director

There are so many things you don’t know and can’t imagine about widowhood until you become widowed. One of those things is secondary losses. “Secondary loss” refers to the losses resulting from a death, which is the direct loss. When you lose your partner, you’re not just losing the person. You’re losing all of the dreams, hopes, and plans you had together. You may lose financial security, your home, support systems, traditions, your sense of self, and your sense of purpose.
I’d like to read something written by another one of our Wisters (widow + sisters) that shares about her experience with secondary loss.
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When we encounter grief and loss we primarily hear of the main loss - the person who died. What we don’t often hear about are the secondary losses. I didn’t even know what that meant until I experienced it. Secondary losses are the people and things we lose after our spouse dies or situations you have to deal with related to the death. These include co-workers of our spouse, or a business you owned together, friends that were more his than yours, his family, children, people you shared hobbies or activities with, neighbors, your friends, your coworkers, selling your house, or changing jobs.
The people we counted on to be there for us, who are now uncomfortable because our spouse has died, disappear. Maybe they don’t know what to say or can’t deal with our pain. Maybe they can’t deal with their own feelings of loss and pain.
I became a widow in May 2020 at age 55. My husband of 35 years became ill in February 2020. We thought it was a stomach flu, it turned out to be cancer.
In my case, the secondary losses were my four adult children ghosting me and having to deal with Mike’s illness and death during the early Covid epidemic. Much of my grief became anger, not at Mike, but at everyone else for abandoning me at the time I needed help.
I hoped that Mike’s illness might bring us together again. Unfortunately, his death had the opposite effect.
Grief affects people in different ways. I was under the delusion that it was going to be a Hallmark movie - all of us coming together to share our sadness and remember how much we loved each other and Mike. That is not what happened. We all went into shock. His illness and death were completely unexpected. There had been no time to process any of it.
While two of our daughters and I initially came together and forgave each other for the pain of the past couple of years, within a few weeks they both had returned home and ghosted me too. My mother-in-law focused her pain from the loss of her son on me. She and I didn’t have a great relationship before his illness, so some of it was to be expected, but what I didn’t expect was that his whole family supported her. I became a pariah overnight.
My mom, who had lived with us since 2009 when my dad passed, had been visiting my brothers in Florida since December 2019 and got caught there during Covid. She couldn’t safely come back home until four months after Mike’s death. So within a month of Mke’s passing, I was totally cut off from any family support.
Since I didn’t have family or friends, I turned to Facebook. I created a memorial page for Mike, and I posted there a lot. I “talked” to him like I did when he was alive. And that’s how I started to work through the grief and accumulated losses. Well, that and my therapist.
I found our local Modern Widows Club on meetup. They were the only group still wanting to meet - and it was safe on Zoom. They saved me. My therapist was great, but she wasn’t a widow and didn’t really understand what I was going through. She gave me the tools but I needed understanding. I needed to know I wasn’t crazy and things would get better. I needed to hear from other women who had walked this path. I needed hope and they gave it to me. Freedom from judgement and platitudes that did more harm than good. Freedom to feel the feels when they happened and not fall down the rabbit hole of despair when missing him became too much to bear. Freedom to find a new life without mike and be a new me without losing the old me or memories of him and our life together. Freedom to move forward and continue living.
#widow #widowstrength #widowcourage #internationalwidowsday #iwd2022 #grief #loss #support #healing #growth #hope #resilience #modernwidowsclub