5 years ago today, I started this blog. It was my birthday, and I was turning 39. Shawn had been gone for about six weeks at that point and honestly, I was still mostly in shock. I hadn’t yet hit rock bottom (though I believed I already had) and I was hoping that the blog might be a way for me to start to heal. Or at least I hoped it could be a place for me to tell my friends and family why I wasn’t returning their phone calls. My friend Caitlin helped me set up the blog in the weeks leading up to my birthday. I did all the writing but she did everything else, including getting a designer friend to make the logo and setting up the layout and all of the other little but important pieces. When I first took a look at the blog layout, I noticed that underneath the title “DC Widow” she had written “There’s No Handbook For How To Do This.” I read it out loud to her. “It’s just a working subtitle,” she said. She told me I could change it then or at any point in the future. She had decided on that subtitle after listening to me rant about how I couldn’t find anything useful on the internet for young widows. I liked it. And so, even as the months and years passed, even as I actually did find interesting and compelling writing by other young widows and even as this blog grew and changed, that subtitle remained. Because, no matter how much I wished I could find one, there wasn’t a handbook for how to be a young widow. I simply had to stumble through my life. No one was going to tell me what I needed to do to “get better”…or even what I needed to do to keep my job or be a decent single parent. I had to figure it out myself. What did it mean to be a widow when I was supposed to be starting the best part of my life? It wasn’t always pretty. In fact, it was almost never pretty in those first few months. And while I thought I might feel better by the fall, more than six months after Shawn died, it was still quite rough. It took a lot, lot longer than I thought it would to get to a place where I felt like I was truly healing. (Not healed – healing. All widows know there’s a difference.) And in that time, I wrote about the process. I didn’t actually have any sort of plan for the blog. I didn’t ever think, “okay, in 6 months, I want to be writing about X” or “the arc of the blog this year needs to look like Y.” It was just a day-to-day process, one where sometimes I was mad and sometimes I was confused and sometimes I was just too damn heartbroken to try to write about anything other than my misery. I didn’t set out to tell the whole story of how someone survives widowhood. I didn’t try and show the ways it was possible to fail repetitively…and then somehow also show that I could have good some days, too. Therapy, unexpected grief, work, home repair, finances, friendships, dating, single parenting, living with my dad – there were so many different aspects of my life that were incredibly hard, and some that stayed incredibly hard. But there were also times when I somehow had a breakthrough – when I realized I was stronger than I thought or when I figured out how to do something hard or when I just felt happy, despite everything. And all that writing, of course, turned into this blog. 641 posts over 5 years. It may not tell you everything, or even much at all about how you might face widowhood. But these posts did tell me something, over the years. They became my handbook about how I was doing it. Not how I was “supposed” to move through widowed life, but how I actually was doing it. In fact, when I’d feel unsure about any number of things, I’d often reference myself and read back on my old posts. How did I handle Mother’s Day or Shawn’s birthday the year before? What terrible dates did I have that actually were funny to reflect on months later? How much had I once screwed up and thought it was the end of the world, and actually it wasn’t? And when I did that, well, it was often comforting. I hadn’t set out to write my own guidebook, but it turned out that by writing, I forged a path for myself. I figured out the way to be a widow by simply being a widow…and writing about my life to anyone who wanted to read about it. This blog was never meant to be a handbook – not for me and certainly not for anyone else. And yet, here it is. It’s my account of 5 years of my life, an account of one way that young widowhood can look. I am by no means proud of all of my posts (God, some really make me cringe years later) but I am not taking any of them down. I am leaving them here for you to read, whoever you are. It’s not a handbook. I mean, if I said it was a handbook, I think most young widows would want to read it less. Who actually wants someone to tell you there’s one way to do widowhood? There isn’t, of course. There are about a million good and bad ways to do widowhood, even in one day. Even with some of my most opinionated posts, I truly don’t believe there’s any one right way to approach deep loss and begin to start healing. All I can say is that this blog is mine. It was the way I began healing, and ultimately, I think it tells my story the best way I could. Maybe someday, months or years in the future, another young widow will be out there, searching for some sort of answer about how to face a new reality. And maybe she’ll come here, to my blog, hoping to find a path forward. She won’t find it, not exactly. But maybe she’ll find one thing: A little bit of hope. Thank you for reading my story. Image Credit: Sharyn Peavey.
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