I am divorced. And I am a widow. I’m a divorced (not remarried) widow.
Can those two identities co-exist? I’ve asked myself this question a lot over the past three years and I still haven’t found an answer.
AJ and I met in college and fell in love hard and fast. We were two puzzle pieces that fit together perfectly. Our love felt easy and uncomplicated. We were married in 2009 and I felt strong and confident that our marriage was one that was going to last.
By 2012, our marriage had seen some ups and downs but we were still holding strong. Soon after the birth of our son in 2013, we started down a path we never imagined taking.
AJ was struggling with mental health and his own ideas of perfectionism he sought for himself. And when it became too much, he turned to drugs. And before I really knew what was happening, I had a husband with an addiction problem.
I couldn’t believe it. I felt ashamed of this place my marriage was now in. It was like we had taken a wrong turn and ended up lost. But I was determined to fight. I knew this wasn’t the man I had fallen in love with. I knew the addiction was something we could fix. We could find a way back to us, back to the right path.
And so I fought. Sometimes I fought the battles for my husband. Sometimes I fought harder than my husband. Sometimes I fought battles I should have never been fighting. And it was exhausting and painful in a way only someone who has loved an addict can understand.
So we separated. I still loved AJ and I hoped and prayed that we could still fight this addiction and find a way back to us. But we continued to get more lost. Finally, logically, I knew we needed to divorce. I needed to protect myself and our son while AJ needed to fight this battle himself. Even then it felt more like a business deal rather than the end of a marriage. My love for AJ, my hope for him to find his way back never went away. Our divorce was finalized in 2017.
After that, we both started dating other people. Our lives were fairly separate except for when it came to our son. I’ll admit a tie had been severed between us – we both had made mistakes along the way. But deep down in my heart, I still had this hope. This sliver of hope that AJ would finish fighting the battle, overcome his addiction and return to the man I had fallen in love with. And that we could once again return to being an “us”. This was just a break in our story and the future was wide open. But I never told anyone about this hope, least of all AJ.
Then in 2018, just 10 months after our divorce had been finalized, AJ took his own life.
Suddenly, anything I might have hoped for in the future was gone. Taken from me in this cruel, violent, and shocking way. His sudden death had me questioning everything, including my identity.
Was I a widow? Or was I just the ex-wife? I was still the mother of his child, but we weren’t in an active relationship at the time of his death. What and who did this make me? Can I call myself a widow? Grieve as a widow? Can I experience those rollercoasters of emotions a widow does? Go through those stages a widow does? Or am I limited to do these things at a 50% capacity?
In my core, I felt like a widow. Honestly, I grieved like a widow. And then I would feel like a fraud. See, while I may have felt and grieved like a widow, I technically wasn’t one to the world. I wasn’t granted extended bereavement time off through work. There were no community meal trains set up. There were no GoFundMe pages created to help with the unexpected funeral costs. I wasn’t the one who had the final say for his obituary or funeral. My name is nowhere on his grave marker.
I had lost the man that I loved. But I had given him up, hadn’t I? What right did I have to grieve his death now?
I wish that I could explain these feelings I have, torn between the identities of an ex-wife and widow. Instead, I feel stranded on an island with not a soul in the world who understands exactly what I’ve been through. I can’t relate to other divorcees but I feel a bit of a disconnect with other young widows. And yet these feelings of pain, anger, love, sadness, and grief overwhelm and confuse me.
Simply put, I feel like a club of one. And it’s a lonely place. So I decided it was time to open the clubhouse doors and see if there are others out there who have a place beside me. I feel like Elsa, calling out into the unknown. “Are you out there? Do you know me? Can you feel me? Can you show me?”
So if you too identify as a Divorced Widow, I would like to officially welcome you into the club.
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Bio:
Liz Zaruba is a solo mom of an amazing 8-year-old boy. She became a divorced widow in 2018 after her former husband unexpectedly took his own life. The grief, anger, guilt, and pain are something she continues to overcome every day. She is looking for other divorced widows who might have experienced some of these strange and mixed feelings. She can be reached at DivorcedWidowClub@gmail.com
Hello,
My story of becoming a divorced widow seemed to unique.
I was married for 30 years, but my husband had been having an affair with his mistress for the year ten years of our 30 years being married.
I didn’t know at first about the affair until a few years had gone by and I was feeling out of sync with him. When I confronted him. He denied and of course continued to lie about it.
I finally go up the nerve to just leave because I couldn’t continue to live the lie.
I filed for divorce and two years later he got cancer. I didn’t understand why the mistress didn’t care for him and I got so angry.
He did radiation therapy. But the complications never went away.
The mistress married him and cared for him for the final two years.
No one respected me enough to let me know that he passed.
I had to find out by getting a letter from Social Security.
30 years of marriage and I still missed him, but she gets all the sympathy.
It still hurts….
I understand and share your confusion of being in two worlds. After 34 years of marriage my husband and I were separated and in the process of divorce when he died. Widowhood is viewed through the lease of perfect marriages, so it would seem–women lost and adrift without their husbands. Mine had been chronically ill for many years and self-medicating, and I had been lonely, tired, resentful– the one who held it all together and the solo parent, however, the finality of death brings a different kind of aloneness. I had accepted I would be on my own, but still I knew he would be there somewhere. We could discuss things, and like you I had hopes something would change because I missed the man I married before sickness and addiction took over. I have the legal status of widow, but it’s still strange and lonely and confusing. Thanks for sharing your experience.