The (Non) Perks of Being an Introvert When Searching for Widow Support
A few months after Daryl died, I was listening to Nora McInerny’s alternately funny and bittersweet podcast, “Terrible, Thanks for Asking, and learned she had an online support group, called the Hot Young Widows Club, nonetheless. I quickly signed up, paid my fee and downloaded the app. Soon, my phone was flooded with alerts and multiple conversation threads from fellow grievers. Rather than feeling buoyed by support (rising tide lifts all ships and al that) I immediately felt a heavy, sinking feeling. With each ding of my phone, instead of support, I felt overwhelmed by the grief of others. And, because there wasn’t a way to connect IRL, it felt strange to respond to a conversation thread about something so personal.
Was there anything wrong with HYWC? Nope. Was there something wrong with me? Nope. All that was wrong was the timing and the medium—for ME. Hundreds of people who were sharing their stories and finding grief support, I just wasn’t one of them. I don’t know why my brain must dim commonalities and spotlight differences. I’d like to think it’s something poetic and intellectual, but I think it’s a more basic human need to feel my problems are unique and possibly unfixable.
Finding Grief and Widow Support Is Hard. You Don’t Always Know What You Need Because What You Need Is Always Changing.
The annoying thing about being a widow is that you are still the person you were before you were a widow. Bad habits and ways of being aren’t going anywhere, in fact, they become exacerbated. I balk at being neatly organized into a group and when I am I find myself trying to find all the ways my experience is different. I suspect this stems from being bullied in junior high, “the group” and “the norm” became suspect to me because for whatever reason, I didn’t fit in. The general sentiment was: “You’re different. We don’t like that. Let’s humiliate you!” I will admit, my passionate rejection to group lumping has proved less than ideal as I have navigated support during cancer, widowhood and grief.
I found it difficult to find local widow support group not aligned with a church, funeral home or specifically for people over 60. It has been interesting to see another form of grouping around our ageist definitions around widowhood, death and grief. Statistically there are likely reasons for this, but it still sucks to receive literature from a hospice or bereavement company featuring a bunch of white-haired people only leaning on one another. While I would be more than fine meeting with older widows/widowers, we have segregated grief by age. At 47, I hardly consider myself “young,” and yet that’s my category.
A Few Things I Have Learned About Grief and Support:
Learn When to Say No. Early on in Daryl’s diagnosis, a listener to his podcast was also diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer and admitted to the hospital at the same time. His wife reached out and we thought it would be good to have each other for support. I quickly found myself comparing our experiences--their treatments, their progress, their life; how they processed and shared the details of their experience was very different from what we were doing. When it came to colon cancer, all I could find was comparison. I suppose it’s how new mother’s feel when their baby isn’t doing X, Y or Z in the same timeframe as another baby. It immediately felt too overwhelming and stressful to process these emotions, so I let it go.
Cancer Is Not the Main Character in Our Story. Cancer happened to Daryl, it didn’t define the other 39 years of his life. Analyzing why it happened or tying him to it in other ways was not something that brought me comfort. Is cancer terrible and can we try to eradicate it and should we throw lots of money at it via research? Absolutely. Again, if that works for you, gives you meaning and support, then embrace it. What works for one does not work for all.
How to Get Comfortable with Death. You read that right. Going to lectures on end of life care, listening to death doulas share their experiences, attending a Death Café. What I experienced the last few years and the night Daryl died has forever transformed me and to try to forget it or bury it is not healthy or possible for me.
A Deeper Respect and Understanding of Trauma and Survival. Hearing and appreciating others’ stories, whether surviving war, addiction, heartbreak or horrible atrocities helped me because I found a broad enough space for my grief and trauma to exist. It no longer felt so personal, so lonely.
Not long after my online Hot Widows fail, I started one-on-one grief counseling and it was exactly what I needed at that time, which stretched over a year. Being able to share my story with my therapist first has helped me understand myself a little better, how I treat myself, what I need (and don’t need) when I’m grieving, how to cope.
Nearly two years from the date of when Daryl died, I attended my first meeting of an in-person widow support group. I feel ready to share with others and find camaraderie among other widows/widowers. It’s been a new experience to be in a room of others who have gone through something similar, to kind of feel like you can take off your game face because the people in this room get it in a way even your closest friends cannot.
Grief Is Like a Revolving Door of Experiencing, Learning and Surviving.
On any given day, in any given moment, I’m doing one of those three things. It’s a constant twisting, one cannot be done without the other. None of us want to be here, none of us would wish this very unfortunate and terrible thing on anyone else. And yet, we have to find our own grief support, our own path to understanding what is happening, how to make grief part of our life. I think of what author and grief expert David Kessler says about grief being like a river, and we all enter it at a different point, but we are all in it together. It doesn’t matter how old we are or how we got here, we just are here.