Whether you’ve been together for years, or still adjusting to married life, losing a husband can be an extremely painful, confusing, and complicated experience. It can take time to get used to life without your partner in crime and the grief from losing a husband never really goes away. But with the right supports and coping rituals, you can begin to heal.
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Losing a Husband: a Challenging Experience
When you’ve lived with someone day in and day out, and then you lose that person, it can be a real shock to the system. The experience can bring on numbed out feelings of disbelief and denial. Many describe those early days as surreal – a foggy bad dream in which you’re desperately trying to make sense of the fact that your husband isn’t coming back.
Adjusting to a suddenly empty house, financial stress, loss of identity, and simply missing your best friend can make losing a husband a pretty intense experience.
You might find yourself wandering through the stages of grief, feeling lost. And while everyone’s grief journey is different, losing a husband brings with it some complicating factors that make it especially tough.
Loneliness and the Widowhood Effect
As columnist Jane E. Brody said in a New York Times article she wrote on losing her husband, “a spouse’s death leaves an emptiness that is hard to fill.”
Not only do you miss the best things you loved about your husband, but you miss the mundane daily conversations, too. All of the things, big and small, that make up a couple’s life.
The shared ‘knowing’ that was baked in to your mutual life experiences can feel irreplaceable. No other person on Earth will understand what it was like to share this life together. The profound realization of just how much you’ve lost can bring on an acute sense of loneliness unique to losing a husband.
And this loneliness can impact your health. The physical and mental toll losing a husband can take, especially on older surviving spouses, is sometimes referred to as the widowhood effect. The burden of being a caregiver, the physical impact of grief, a lack of social support, and major changes to living environment can all influence the widowhood effect.
According to an article published on CNN.com (2021), “surviving spouses can suffer from sleep disruption, depressive episodes, anxiety, impaired immune function, and overall poorer physical health.” Without adequate support and self-care, this can have a devastating impact.
The Financial Impact of Losing a Husband
When it comes to marital conflict, financial issues rank pretty high on the list of things that lead to trouble. And when you lose a husband, money matters continue to be a source of stress.
According to a CNBC article by personal finance reporter Annie Nova on dealing with finances after the death of a spouse, “from navigating Social Security benefits to locating all of a partner’s assets, new widows are hit with a slew of tasks amid their mourning.”
When you lose a husband, there is so much to do. And financial paperwork and tasks can be a big part of the work. It can be especially taxing if your husband was the one who primarily managed the financial side of things. From bills to life insurance to retirement, you may find yourself drowning in paperwork. What’s more, the early stage of this financial transition period is a prime time for identity thieves to strike.
That’s why it’s so important to find the right supports to guide you through the process. Don’t hesitate to reach out to trusted professionals for advice on how to establish and manage your task list.
Losing a Husband Can Affect Your Identity
If you’ve lost your husband, you might feel like you’ve lost a part of yourself. This might be due in part to the way this kind of loss can impact your identity.
You go from identifying as a partner, spouse, wife, or husband to a widow or widower in the blink of an eye. You go from an ‘us’ to a ‘me’, a coparent to single parent, married to single, coupled to alone. As if you didn’t have enough to grieve already with the loss of your partner, you will likely also grieve the loss of the person you were when you were together.
Finding resources and supports to guide you through this tough transition can help you regain your sense of self and redefine your identity.
Here are a few books written on partner loss that come highly recommended by grief informed professionals:
7 Ways to Cope with Losing a Husband
Here are 7 coping strategies recommended by a certified grief informed professional on how to cope with losing a husband:
- Grieve in Your Own Way
Although there’s lots of literature out there on the stages of grief, you don’t have to power through your grief in a certain order or certain way. Especially in cases of traumatic grief, it’s important that you honor your brain and body’s methods of processing your loss.
When you lose a husband, there are so many factors that impact the effect it will have on you. Your circumstances and responsibilities are unique and so too will your grief journey be. As long as you are taking care of your needs (and your kids’ needs, if you have them), and you aren’t suppressing your grief, then the manner and pace at which you grieve is up to you.
- Give Yourself Permission to Feel Your Feelings (All of Them)
While it’s important that you grieve in your own way, a key component of that is actually allowing yourself to experience your grief. Grieving in your own way does not mean ignoring it, suppressing it, or “sucking it up” and moving on. It means finding ways to feel your feelings, express them, and move through them in ways that fit your life.
Whether you choose to journal daily, scream into pillows, weep in the shower, start a charity, design a memorial garden, take time off of work, join a grief group, or start grief counseling, the key is to make space to feel the emotions related to you loss. As Helen Keller once said, “The only way to the other side is through.”
- Embrace Your Social Supports in Ways that Feel Helpful to You
According to the National Council on Aging, “social support has been shown to be beneficial during the grieving process and can actually help counteract the widowhood effect.” Leaning on loved ones can be an ok thing to do while you are working through your grief. Even if it’s not like you to accept help, you may want to try. There is no better time to let others take care of you than when you lose someone you love.
Another way to embrace social support is through a grief group.
A grief group can offer a healing coping ritual to build into your routine. Grief groups also offer opportunities for social connection with people who understand exactly what you are going through.
You can find an online grief group or a grief group near you by starting with these resources:
- https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/groups
- https://www.griefshare.org/findagroup
- https://widowedvillage.org/groups
- https://www.griefincommon.com/connect/pages/Groups-Coaching
- Take Care of Yourself As Best As You Can
It’s completely understandable that you would feel less motivated to take care of your basic needs after losing your husband. Eating, sleeping, and showering might feel a little pointless for a while. Those feelings are normal and part of the depression state that grief can bring about. However, it’s really crucial that you find a way to meet your self-care needs during this time.
As mentioned above, the widowhood effect puts surviving spouses at risk for serious health problems and for some, even more fatal risks. If you’re struggling, connecting with social supports and professional supports (i.e. doctor, therapist, etc.) can be an important step in getting what you need.
- Get Help with Sorting Out Finances and Other Legal Matters
You may find yourself struggling to get a handle on money matters, dealing with a mountain of financial records. When the death of a spouse comes suddenly and unexpectedly, it’s not uncommon for the surviving partner to be left unprepared.
While it might feel hopeless, there are things you can do to get through it. Organizing all of your husband’s financial records is a good place to start. Leaning on trusted legal professionals, financial advisors, and accountants can help as well.
There are also resources that can walk you through the steps, too. This book for example, Moving Forward on Your Own: A Financial Guidebook for Widows is geared toward women who are looking for more security and confidence when it comes to money matters.
- Find Meaning and Memorialize Your Loss When You Are Ready
Friends might encourage you to make meaning out of your loss. To find an “everything happens for a reason” kind of silver lining. That’s because finding new meaning through things like memorialization can be extremely powerful healing tools.
BUT – your grief journey is your own. You are completely entitled to redefine the meaning of your loss in your own time and on your own terms.
When you first lose your husband, you might not be in a place where you are ready to see any other meaning or narrative than how much it hurts and how unfair it feels. And that is your right to feel that way. Trying to rush your grief along will only complicate matters.
Making new meaning and finding the right way to memorialize your loss is a process. Allow yourself whatever space and time you need.
- Get Support from a Grief Counselor
Grief support can be a major player when it comes to how well someone copes with the death of a spouse. According to the US National Institute on Aging, many people find grief counseling to be a really helpful support.
As the National Council on Aging puts it, “the complex emotions associated with losing a loved one can be overwhelming and difficult to sort through on your own. Meeting with a licensed mental health professional, whether face-to-face or online, can help you come to terms with your loss and adjust to life without your spouse.”
How Grief Counseling Can Help with Losing a Husband
As a certified grief informed professional, I have been honored to help clients process their grief experiences.
In our work together, we develop healing rituals that help them cope with their loss. At first, these coping rituals help them to initially survive the pain of their grief, but eventually over time and through regular counseling sessions, they grow to rely on these meaningful rituals to not only survive, but to once again, thrive.
Interested in Grief Counseling?
If you have experienced the loss of a loved one and you live in Pennsylvania, the Center for Creative Counseling can provide online grief counseling with a certified grief informed professional.
The Center for Creative Counseling offers online grief counseling to residents all across Pennsylvania, including busy metro areas like Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Harrisburg, Erie, and Villanova, or more rural spots like Somerset, Lancaster, or New Hope, PA.
Whether you live in Wexford, PA, or Squirrel Hill in the heart of the city of Pittsburgh, or somewhere in the Pittsburgh’s South Hills, you can receive online grief counseling through the Center for Creative Counseling. No matter where you live in Pennsylvania, the Center for Creative Counseling has you covered.
Plus, the Center for Creative Counseling offers additional online therapy services like family therapy and art therapy as well. Please visit our Services page for more info.
Online Grief Counseling in Pennsylvania
The Center for Creative Counseling provides online grief counseling all over Pennsylvania. With online grief counseling, you get to work through your grief from the safety and comfort of your own home.
I offer a free 15 minute consultation to make sure I am a good fit for what you are looking for. If you want a grief counselor who is dedicated to supporting you along your grief journey (and you live in Pennsylvania) I am here to help. Click below to schedule your free consultation today.
Getting started is easy – just schedule your free 15 minute consultation with me by visiting the secure client portal.
References
- Brody, J. E. (2010, April 5). The Emptiness and Anguish of Losing a Spouse. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/health/06cases.html
- Donevan, C. (Ed.). (2017, May 2). After losing a spouse, finding a different kind of happiness. NPR. Retrieved January 14, 2023, from https://www.npr.org/2017/05/02/521949374/after-losing-a-spouse-finding-a-different-kind-of-happiness
- Grieving the Death of a Spouse. . .You can’t get them out of your mind. (n.d.). HealGrief. https://healgrief.org/grieving-the-death-of-a-spouse/
- LaMotte, S. (2021, April 11). Losing a long-term spouse can be deadly, studies show. CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/11/health/widowhood-effect-queen-elizabeth-wellness/index.html
- Mourning the Death of a Spouse. (2020, August 20). National Institute on Aging. Retrieved January 14, 2023, from https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/mourning-death-spouse
- Noel, S. (2016, May 21). How Do I Overcome the Grief from My Husband’s Death? GoodTherapy.org Therapy Blog. https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/dear-gt/how-do-i-overcome-the-grief-from-my-husbands-death
- Nova, A. (2022, May 26). Here are the first financial steps to make after losing a spouse. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/26/here-are-the-first-financial-steps-to-make-after-losing-a-spouse.html
- The Widowhood Effect: Ways to Cope as an Older Adult. (2021, August 24). @NCOAging. Retrieved January 14, 2023, from https://www.ncoa.org/article/the-widowhood-effect-how-to-survive-the-loss-of-a-spouse
