Hot Young Widows - A Club You’d Rather Not Join.
Imagine looking weeks out at the calendar to see you have a retreat coming up in the beautiful mountains of Utah. You are traveling alone and know no one who you are meeting. You’ve only ever seen some of the young women on Instagram. You are anxiously awaiting the travel and the trip in general. It is what you’ve needed, what you’ve been looking for. People ask if you are going somewhere fun when they hear you are taking a few days off work. The location is stunning, everything is so well organized and planned. There are even little welcome bags waiting for you. It is beautiful.
Except it is also not.
Because this group of 20 women under the age of 45, all have one horrible common denominator.
All of their husband’s are dead.
The words people, outside of this experience, use to describe upcoming travel; amazing, exciting, fun. It is often hard to choose to use those words myself about this experience, because there is a huge part of me that hates that any of us are here to meet each other.
I wish all of us were anywhere but here.
But we are here, and there is no changing that.
There is only leaning into what is, no matter how badly I want a do over.
This is the place where I choose to lean in, these are the connections my heart has been longing for since the day Jason died. This isn’t where I want to be. But it is where I am. We lean in hard. We embrace joy and grief together. We grow together. We listen. We don’t judge. We laugh. We cry. We move forward, because really, life hasn’t offered any other choice.
We do it together.
This is the worst club, with the best people.
I got off the plane and my plan was to meet up with some of the other ladies who were arriving at the airport that morning. Just a bunch of strangers meeting up in the airport to get in a car of a stranger to drive to a remote lodge location in the middle of Utah. It is a bit funny when put that way. But I think it shows how important this connection and time together was for all of us. A handful of people were from Utah, but many others flew in, just like me.
I am one of the first ladies to land. I am texting with another one who landed around the same time as me. We meet up. We are trying to find some food for breakfast and making small talk. After we order she goes “So when did your husband die.” She opened the door. It was a reminder of why we were there. We were not there to hide our pasts, hide that our husbands are both dead. We were there to fully embrace it. My body almost forgot what that was like. To have space to freely talk about it all. Anything. I have felt like I am tiptoeing around it, when I am around certain people. People don’t mention it. It is like the “he who should not be named” from Harry Potter. Which makes no sense. Someone talk to me about Jason! The conversation didn’t stop. We just started talking. It made me realize I was exactly where I needed to be. I didn’t need to hold back on my story or my reality, I was about to be around 20 other ladies who got it.
We had a couple hours in the airport until our carpools arrived and more girls arrived and it all felt so natural. The conversations flowed. We got to know each other quickly.
Each women’s story is different. Each is so uniquely their own. Their love and the loss of their husband. Each time I heard someone else’s version of loss my heart hurt. There are so many tragedies that all brought us to this shared word “widow”. Not one is the same. I think that is SUCH an important life lesson to carry on through life. I recall when I would tell people Jason had Colon cancer and people want to connect you immediately with their sisters husbands aunt who also had colon cancer and beat it. Except, his cancer was different, and even if it wasn’t “different”, it still was. No one walks the same road, even when sharing the same common denominator. That’s the difference between life and math, life is unpredictable, even if you are calculated and doing everything right. Not one of us there will share the exact same feelings or experience when it comes to losing the person we love most in this world, our other half. But we are far closer to shared experience than most. People were speaking, or I was sharing, and for the first time in this lost I found myself clinging to the fact that instead of being looked at like deer in the head lights where I shared my story, my pain, there was a room of women there sitting there saying, “I feel this too”.
I could spend hours recapping all the activities and conversations. But I don’t think that’s necessary. I think this space was sacred for those who were there and there a certain beauty in keeping that in our hearts.
I do think I will leave it to this.
Shay asked us to bring photos of our husbands. We spent the first night introducing them and ourselves to each other. The weight of the room as each of us joyfully got to introduce the love of our lives, followed by the pain of their loss, was apparent.
Each woman on a timeline that is different. Some 7 years out, some as recent as 4 months. I find myself on the “earlier” end of the loss spectrum. What stuck with me, is the tears shed by all. Those 7 and 5 years out, who all made the same comment, “It never leaves you, and it really doesn’t get better”.
Those words stuck with me because there is a part of me that believes that is true, a part of me that wants it to be true. Knowing this pain is validation that Jason was real. Validation that the love we shared was real. Validation that the love we shared needed more time. I don’t want this love to leave me. I want to learn to carry it.
As an outsider to a grief like this for most of my life, I always thought people just moved on, they healed, life was ok again. Because on the outside, that is what grief can look like. There were so many people who said this retreat would be a healing experience for me. I never looked at it as that, I wasn’t searching for healing. I was searching to be seen, validated, less alone. As a 31 year old widow, holding, (hopefully) the biggest loss of her life, I no longer believe in the words of fixed, healing, move on, better, normal.
Healing is defined as: the process of making or becoming sound or healthy again.
I don’t believe there is a healing from this pain. Implying healing implies a fix, a resolution. Like a broken leg that heals in a cast after some time and it returns to normal, there becomes a certain point where the bone is strong enough that your body forgets it was ever hurt in the first place.
Fix is defined as: mend or repair.
I definitely know there is no fixing this. I also know grief does not need to be fixed. I think culturally, the nature of people is to fix things, make them better, find any way to make someone happy, to avoid sad. Over time I am realizing that the idea that grief can be fixed is not the right mindset. Because, grief is not the problem. Grief is a reaction to a problem, a problem that cannot be fixed. The problem is, is that Jason is dead. No one is trying to fix that, because they know that they can’t. So they try to fix grief instead. But the route of the problem can’t be fixed, it never will be.
Grief is meant to be witnessed. It is meant to be shared and it is meant to be seen.
It is all those things because it is deep proof that love existed, and love still exists. Love that is searching for expression without my other half. Love searching for a place to land. All because Jason existed, and our love was so very real.
I leave this retreat feeling different. Because I am not searching for a means of repair of this pain, I never have been and don’t plan to.
I’ve been searching for a place to be seen, to share in this grief with someone who understands it.
Last weekend, I found that.
I found 20 other women who are brave enough to share their grief in a world that is grief illiterate.
Because of that courage, I sit here and write this and I know, for a fact, there are others out there holding this same loss, searching for that connection.
It lights a fire in me to keep sharing.
This is the worst club, with the best people.
