My first widows’ picnic is where I learned that having partner loss in common is enough to bridge gaps of religion, politics, age, language, and more. Since then, I have hugged and cried with people whose names I don’t know, whose language I don’t speak, whose paths will probably never again cross mine. There are widowed people I hardly know except for how they lost their person. Before I knew Carol’s name, I knew her husband had died saving their child from drowning. Linda lost hers to cancer. Fuck cancer. Ellen lost hers to a bicycle accident. Georgia’s husband went scuba diving and disappeared off the coast of Honduras. Sue’s vanished in an avalanche while skiing. Mine never woke up after surgery.

I was fifty-two. It seemed impossible that a man just nine years older than me could go from climbing ladders and riding motorcycles to having to learn to walk again after a massive stroke. It seemed even less fathomable that after we weathered the stroke and spent nearly every minute of every day together for a year during his recovery and a global pandemic, I would find myself utterly alone for the first time in my life.

I scrolled through Facebook widow groups and attended widow picnics, hungry for tips on how to hack the heartbreak I was feeling. What I found instead is that we were all walking wounded and there are no hacks. No one claimed to have figured out how to escape the pain. The groups and picnics were about commiseration, reassurance, and camaraderie in what they all called “the club nobody wanted to join.” 

Posts in the Facebook groups are often intimate and shot through with pain. Widows write about feeling suicidal, family feuds around estates, being cut out of their former in-laws’ lives. They ask questions about sex, how to sell a house or buy a car or find an accountant. They share observations about bad dates and tough memories. They flex new dating skills, ask for honest feedback on selfies or drafts of dating profiles, request prayers or good wishes. They share photos of new loves and grandchildren.

The Facebook widows regularly post variations on a meme that shows Winnie the Pooh and Piglet from behind, walking down a country road. Pooh is saying to Piglet, “How lucky we are to have had something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” Widows are as vulnerable as a little pink piglet in a sweater and Pooh is right—saying goodbye is really fucking hard.  

The act of saying goodbye is punctuated by doing things without our loved one for the first time. People post about the first time they went to the grocery store after their person died, the first time they slept in the bed without him, the first time they make it through a day without a meltdown.

Then there are the lasts: the last time they held his hand, the last time they said I love you, the last picture they took together. Every few months, someone posts, “Hey, let’s all share the last picture we took with our loved one,” and there is a flurry of postings of last photos. Men in hospitals, collarbones pushing through their gowns, giving thumbs up signs, grinning to the best of their ability, with their wives standing next to them, arms around each other to the extent the tubing allows. Happy selfies at restaurants or the Grand Canyon or the kids’ soccer game.

I post the last photo of my husband and me together, taken just a few days before his surgery. He is in his motorized wheelchair, wearing a bright blue helmet and sunglasses. I am grinning gleefully, my hand on his shoulder. The photo was taken by a friend after Tom terrified me by zipping up and down the street in his motorized chair with me running after him yelling, “Be careful! Be careful!” My cheeks are flushed from the run and adrenaline in the photo. The right side of Tom’s face is turned up in an impish smile. He is no doubt pleased that he has scared the bajeezus out of me.

I don’t post the very last photo I took of Tom, which is of him the day he died, the day his life support was removed. I took the photo maybe an hour before the respiratory therapist bent over him and said in the gentlest voice, “Tom, I’m going to remove the ventilator now and it may feel funny as the tube comes up out of your throat. I’m going to be as gentle as I can, but the tube may hit your teeth. If that happens or if you feel any pain, I’m so sorry.” The picture feels too intimate to share, even with other widows. I wasn’t even sure if it was ok to take the photo, but I knew I’d want to remember how peaceful he looked, his face relieved of the weight of living. I remember thinking of the surprising lightness I always feel in the yoga pose savasana, feeling some sense of the relief of shaking off the mortal coil. I hoped that Tom was feeling that.

I am mostly a lurker in the Facebook groups. I read others’ posts and feel normal. I know that my habit of greeting the box of Tom’s cremains on my nightstand every morning with, “Good morning, my love,” isn’t weird. I say it in my normal voice, exactly as I would if he were in bed with me. I put my hand on the box as I would on his shoulder. I know I’m not the only one whose heart pounds in panic at the sight of certain aisles in the grocery store.

The idea of living the rest of my life without Tom is crushing. I do the math sometimes—if I live to be 80, that means 28 years without Tom. If I live to be 85, that’s 33 years without him. Every day is a struggle—how will I manage decades?

Much of our life was spent planning for the future. Tom was going to retire. We got a pandemic puppy that he was going to train. He was going to ride one of his motorcycles from Alaska to Argentina on the Pan-American Highway and I was going to fly down to Buenos Aries to meet him. After his stroke, we took the motorcycle trip off the list and replaced it with buying an action tracker, an all-terrain wheelchair with a snowplow attachment. Tom was excited to use it to shovel the neighbors’ sidewalks.  

Instead I travel alone to Portugal and cry every day over vinho verde on my hotel’s rooftop patio, watching the Tagus River empty into the Atlantic. I walk through the streets, the air thick with the scent of bougainvillea, wishing I could tell Tom about the cathedrals and markets. Every shop sells painted porcelain tiles that remind me of the tilework Tom was so good at.  

I remember his hands laying the tile in our bathroom so clearly that I cannot go to the bathroom without thinking of his hands. I sit on the toilet remembering those big hands moving across the walls with grace and precision. Tom’s voice whispers to me through the tiles, “I love you.” Sometimes I whisper back, “I miss you so much.”

 I will spend the rest of my life missing him, stumbling across reminders of our life together. The guest bedroom is piled high with his books and blankets. His clothing is still in our closet. It took almost a year to work up to the garage sale where I sold many of his tools and things I knew I would never use. The couple who bought the blue wheeled duffel opened it up to be sure it was empty. I had forgotten that I last used that when Tom went to the hospital. They unzipped it and there was the salt and pepper shaker set designed to be used with just one hand that he brought on every hospital stay. A punch to the gut. 

 The widows I hang with do not appreciate being told “everything happens for a reason,” or “God had a plan for your person,” or anything that begins with the words “at least,” as in “at least you got to experience love” or “at least you got to say goodbye” or “at least you had life insurance.” If what you’re about to say to a widow begins with “at least,” you can just fuck off.

Other widows understand things non-widows don’t. When I get pissed off about a form asking me if I’m single, divorced, partnered, or married, other widows understand why the lack of a “widowed” option outrages me. A non-widowed friend tells me, “Just check single” like it’s no big deal. But I don’t feel single. I still wear a wedding band. I still talk to the box on my nightstand. I am still madly in love with Tom.

Other widows understand why every time I need to complete a form that asks for my emergency contact, something in my gut curls up tight and I want to vomit.

 Other widows understand that well before I’m ready to date, I have an itch that needs to be scratched. They call it widow’s fire and teach me how to find a friend with benefits. Mr. Florida travels to Denver to enjoy a three-day weekend with me in a hotel downtown. I go home every night to the box of Tom’s cremains on the nightstand and return in the morning. At the end of the weekend, he suggests we do it again, but he talks too much and his hands are too small.

 I tell the box of cremains about Mr. Banker and Mr. Ellipsis. The night before my second date with Mr. Ellipsis, I have a dream about Tom. He is standing on his own, a bit rickety but not even leaning against a wall. He says, “Hey, babe, check this out.” I am thrilled and exclaim, “Look at you!” I hug him, partly to hold him up because he’s moving like the Tin Man crossed with one of those string finger puppets. He is lean and strong. I miss his body so much, his voice, his beard, his big hands. Then I remember that I have a date lined up with Mr. Ellipsis and think, “Did I describe myself as widowed in our messages prematurely?” and I wake up thinking, but I am a widow. Still, I can’t shake the feeling on my date that Tom is home, waiting for me. 

One of the best types of support widows give each other is permission to lay low, to sleep the day away, to not be social, to not go to church, to stop over-achieving or even achieving. Our days are full of arguing with insurance companies and bill collectors who want money from our dead spouses and answering questions about how they died, how we are doing, what we will do with the motorcycles or scraps of copper he was going to use to make yard art. Rearranging the fridge to accommodate the glass with the dregs of his last juice takes time. Crying until you are so dehydrated that you only pee twice in a day may take hours and then you may think you can’t cry anymore, but the tears will keep coming, hot on your dry skin. Wandering around the house touching things that remind you of him can fill a day. You might be doing just fine, having a lovely day, and then you hear the attic fan click on and are flooded by memories of him installing it and then saying “you’re welcome” on every hot day.

It turns out the heart heals at its own pace and doesn’t give a shit about the meetings on your calendar. Other widows tell me the time between low points will get longer, but the low points will keep showing up.

A year after Tom’s death, I go to a conference for widowed people called Camp Widow. There are breakout sessions on what to do with your loved one’s things, common concerns for people who are newly widowed, navigating widowhood as an introvert, dating. Being in a room full of widows is liberating. We get tired of managing our emotions. At Camp Widow, we can cry, show our anxiety, get up and leave the room suddenly, and it’s all considered normal.

At lunch, I talk with some other widows about traveling alone and maintaining interests we used to share with our dead husbands. We compare notes on walking the tightrope of moving forward with your life while still staying connected to a dead man.

I confess to them that I still have recurring appointments on my Google calendar to remind me about Tom’s care after his stroke: helping him stretch in the mornings, prompting him to write in his journal. “Date night dancing” shows up every Saturday, even though we stopped dancing after his stroke. I can’t bring myself to delete date night dancing. It is a reminder that the life I remember did happen, that it was just as real as the life I am living now, even though I can no longer smell Tom or feel his hands on my waist, pulling me into him. 

I wonder if I would have been friends with the widows before Tom died. I no longer know the person who put “date night dancing” on her calendar. That person isn’t me, has nearly nothing in common with me beyond the glasses and unruly red hair. That person had a husband; I do not. That person went rafting and camping and lived a life of adventure. I stay home, nap with the dogs, get teary over attic fans. Would I even have anything to say to that person?

Maybe I would show her the lock screen photo on my phone of Tom in his blue and yellow drysuit and life jacket, rowing the raft through Westwater Canyon, the granite walls reflected in his sunglasses.

“I took that photo,” she might say. And then she might smile, remembering the cold spray of the river as he deftly guided the raft through Last Chance Rapid, how their bodies came together in the sleeping bag that night, the infinitude of the stars overhead.

 -Elizabeth Kleinfeld

Elizabeth Kleinfeld writes about grief and trauma on her blog and in academic and memoir essays. She directs the writing center at Metropolitan State University of Denver and is a trustee of the University Press of Colorado. She is writing a memoir about being her husband’s caregiver.