Curt died unexpectedly. I was the one assigned t
o give Sheryl the news soon after.
I did what their pastor and neighbors asked me to do. They thought it best if the news came from me. So, I took a deep breath, held back my tears, and put my own personal, painful memories aside to tell one of my long-time closest friends that her husband had passed away suddenly and unexpectedly.
To those who sat silently nearby, I did so calmly and kindly. They had no idea the effort it took to push away flashes of watching my own husband die years before. Looking into her eyes and saying the words, “I’m sorry Sheryl, Curt passed away,” triggered my own pain in ways no one else could even begin to understand.
I ever so gently, my heart aching for her, held her by the hand and led her through the door into the Land of Grief. It’s a land reserved for those whose husbands have left this earth. There are tens of millions of us in the US and hundreds of millions worldwide. We widows feel sadness for those who walk over that threshold. We know they are embarking upon a lifelong journey that nothing could truly prepare them for.
We learn as we go along that life will never be the same. Normal became a thing of the past with our husband’s final breath. There are days when the sea is calm with the illusion we’ve finally gotten through it. On other days a tsunami wave of grief hits out of nowhere, knocking us to our knees under its weight with a flood of tears.
Although widows share commonalities in this land, we each walk a path no one else can share. Our individual grief is as personal and intimate as our relationship with our husband has been. There are no rules. There is no timeline. There are no neat and orderly stages. There is no one who can carry it for a while. Even as we move forward and create a new life, there is no grief finish line on this earth.
I hugged Sheryl tightly, widow-to- new-widow. I felt her heart breaking into a million pieces, even as I felt my own cracking again with flashbacks to this day eight years before. There was a special, heartbreaking intimacy in the moment I let go of her hand as she stepped onto her own personal path of grief.
This is why we widows need one another. We relate to the shock, fog, surrealism of the beginning moments, hours, days, weeks, and months. We understand expecting him to walk through the door as our brain tries to wrap around the realness that he is no longer here. We know the unexplainable feeling of searching for someone, something….maybe for him, maybe for the missing piece o
f our own self. We know the secondary losses we must deal with that others don’t even think about.
Our heart hurts for a new widow who is facing a lifetime of grief exiting between two worlds with a mixture of sorrow and joy, tears and laughter, sad memories and happy ones, while missing him through it all. We also recognize that she will be given strength beyond what she could imagine to rise above the ashes of sorrow. (Isa 61:3)
About Carmen Myrtis-Garcia
Carmen Myrtis-Garcia has faced her fears head-on while snorkeling the Great Blue Hole of Belize despite her phobia of the ocean, ziplining above a jungle canopy even though she is afraid of heights, walking barefoot across red-hot coals at a firewalking event, or moving alone to a foreign country. She does not consider herself brave, just curious.
The hardest challenge she faced was the suffering and death of her husband, Michael, to pancreatic cancer. Faith, prayer, and community got them through three stays in the hospital in a Third World country 3000 miles from family. Michael died in 2015 following an emergency trip back to Colorado just 3 years after they began living their long-planned for Dream on a little Caribbean Island.
Carmen is a published fiction and non-fiction writer. She is a contributor to Chicken Soup for the Soul and author of Land of Grief; Hope for the Widow’s Journey (devotional; release spring 2025). She is founder of Hope for the Widow’s Journey (private FB group) and Faith-Filled Widows (public FB), and her blog Thoughts-in-Grief. Her mission is to assist over one million widows to live life forward with hope, faith, and healing through her writings, podcasts, workshops, and grief mentoring.
She is the proud mother of two sons and a daughter-in-law and “neena” to two adorable grandchildren. She resides in Colorado and Belize and wanders at times when her gypsy spirit tugs at her.
Please don’t forget the widowers. Their numbers are far less than the widows, but many of them struggle the same way. I have been walking alongside a good friend who lost his wife in a tragic accident. My husband has been gone 6 1/2 years and I find myself grieving and crying alongside my friend often lately.