A Guest Post by Parentomag

The feeling of losing your spouse is tremendously painful. It’s like losing the other half of you. Your life is shifted upside down is a moment and you can see your future holding many tensed areas for you.

From experiencing trauma to gaining emotional stability, the life of a widow has so many ups and downs. However there are certain things the experience of which can only be truly felt by the Widow only.

  • The Grief she feels

The very first thing for a widow is the feel of understanding her loss. It’s the grief itself. All other feelings are followed by it. It shifts her whole life to another direction.

The trauma and the shock don’t only last for a moment but in fact can have a major impact for the whole of her life.

It’s the time when she’s feeling numbness, fear, trauma and shock all at the same time and no one knows how long this situation may last.

Another thing is each woman would react differently through this phase. For some it can be the hardest time of life and for some it may actually make them stronger.

  • The feel of Loneliness

Losing someone creates a gap of them in our lives. Similarly losing her spouse puts the widow into a position of loneliness.

Even if the widow is always surrounded by the most loving and supportive people (friends & family) there’d still be times when she’d go through a mental state of isolation.

At times there’d raise questions she won’t have an answer to. Who would she share her problems with now? Who can she trust blindly now? Who’d be there for her in every up and down of her life?

This is the time when she’s fighting the hardest fight in her mind and she’s the only one who can control herself.

  • Facing the World alone

The moment a women loses her husband, everything through her brain fades away and only the grief is left. That time she isn’t thinking about anything of the world but her husband and her loss.

As soon as she starts coming back to this world mentally, she’s reminded that she has to live her life. That’s where the feeling of facing the world comes in.

She realizes that the world would keep running the way it has always been. Nothing would really change, except the fact that she would no longer have her husband beside her.

All the responsibilities of the house and the kids would be on her alone. She’d never feel secure inside and that cannot be changed even if some close ones step up to help.

  • Listening to people’s words

The first case is when a widow goes through people’s tough words for her. People being judgmental would leave no way to hurt her. This is the time when survival is hardest for her.

Second case is when it comes from people close to her. A widow is surrounded by many people, friends and family, in her circle. And these people trying to be nice say many things to console her, which works out good in many cases

However there are still phrases she hears from them which are upsetting. Certain things which shouldn’t be said to a widow are;

  • Everything happens for a reason
  • He (her husband) is in a better place
  • You’ll be healed with time
  • It could’ve been worse

We all know these phrases are often used right in their face of widows and mostly by their very close people, but none of these phrases make sense.

  • Pressure of being a Single Mom

Parenting is never the job of a single individual; rather it’s a collaborative work. In case the widow has kids from his husband, she’d definitely have a hard time rearing them properly.

Sometimes handling the world alone can be easier as compared to raising your kids without your spouse.

Losing her husband she knows her children would feel the gap. There are always things only the father can do best. So she would have to play a double part, doing twice of the work.

The hard part is that widow moms need to ensure their kids don’t get impacted by the loss of their spouse. Thus she’d need to do anything so kids don’t feel like they lack someone in their family.

  • Always being the stronger one

Another pressure a widow mom has is to always be strong in front of anyone else, especially in front of her kids. Knowing the fact that she has intense level of sadness inside her which she in fact want to share and open up to, she still can’t do it at times.

If a woman keeps expressing her emotions openly in front of anyone, people always see her with pity. It can even have an impact on how people would behave with her kids.

Thus it’s important that she knows where she can open up about her feelings and when she got to have a firm control over them.

Conclusion

Losing your spouse is always extremely traumatic and painful. Also it comes with countless hardships and issues to deal with. Knowing that your partner in life would no longer be with you is upsetting.

However another reality is that you are alive and have to live this life through. The only things you are left with are the memories of your partner.

Don’t let the grief inside you make you weak outside. It’d only make things weaker for you. However on the other side it’s equally important that you openly talk to your loved ones about your feelings.

You’d have to make your grief strength for you now a weakness and it will in fact help you keep the memories of your late partner alive as well.

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Are you interested in being a blogger? Contact us at info@hopeforwidows.org

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