10/19/2025
What I Wish The World Knew About Being Widowed
Everything changes after the loss of a spouse. This was the person you spent most of your time with. This is who you made your plans with. The one who shared your worries. Every part of your past, present, and future revolved around this person, and to be without them is hard, sad, and lonely.
The people you spend time with don’t always seem to recognize the depth and duration of your loss. This can be felt any time someone tries to cheer you up, smooth it over, or make it better.
They mean well...but it doesn't always help.
Here's what I wish people would understand. It’s a couples world and socializing after the loss of a spouse is never the same. This comes up just about every time I facilitate a group for widows and widowers. You don’t even notice how much of a couples world it is until you're no longer part of it. Going out to dinner, going to the movies, taking a vacation.
Unfortunately being part of a bigger group or going to a party isn’t necessarily any easier.
The problem isn’t just you who might feel awkward in a setting that's mostly couples. Your friends may hesitate (or all out avoid) inviting you along for fear that you'll feel out of place.
Here’s the thing…nothing feels worse than that.
Following the loss of a spouse, you feel like only half of a whole. It's a feeling that not only is your other half missing, but you feel incomplete. So you're not only missing your spouse, but you’re also missing yourself too.
Every part of your day and routine is now changed and altered, especially when it’s time to go to sleep. Household chores, sharing finances, making plans, all of these things can make it hard to get through the day after the loss of a spouse.
But the promise of escaping from these stresses that sleep may otherwise provide is something else you lose. “Do I stay on my side of the bed, or do I move to the middle?” “Even with the lights out and my eyes closed I can still feel the emptiness of the bed.” “How strange it feels to go to bed without having someone to say goodnight to, ending the day without a goodnight feels like leaving a period off a sentence.”
Your spouse filled more than just one role in your life. Following the loss of a spouse, you’ll feel like you've lost many important people. Your friend, lover, peer, co-parent, confidant, business partner, and travel companion. Meaning that this loss doesn’t mean the loss of 'just' one person.
This loss created a vacancy in many roles that one very important person had previously filled, and no one person is going to be able to take the place of all the roles your spouse filled.
A list like this can be hard to create...but it can be even harder to read.
You might be thinking...."so what's the point in highlighting all that I've lost?”
When you think about your shared investments after the loss of your spouse, you realize that it's actually a turning point. Because when you start to take a look at all the reasons that you're struggling, and all the reasons you miss your 'other half', it reveals something even more important, all the things you shared together.
Lying underneath the sadness and yearning for what you had...is the realization of the blessings that your time together has created.
Gary Sturgis
