I am Liz and on January 20, 2019 I became a widow.
It was sudden and unexpected - officially he died of a Pulmonary Thromoembolism situated in Deep Vein Thrombosis. It is what Doctors call a catastrophic event. And something they cannot save you from, as one Doctor pointed out, ''even if we had him on the operating table with his chest cracked open''.
It left four young children (aged 12, 10, 9 and 6) without a father and me, at 39, without a husband.
I became very aware very quickly just how loved my husband was by a lot of people, and it was wonderful. Because I thought he was a pretty good bloke, but its always nice to know a lot of other people thought he was, too.
I also became aware that some of the ways I was conducting myself - like leaving the house in the first week after he had died to get myself a coffee - was very unexpected 'widow behaviour'.
People told me this. Never in a negative way, just a 'how are you are still capable of functioning?' kind of way.
And it made me wonder if I was, in fact, doing widowing wrong.
I do know you can't actually do it wrong. There is no right or wrong way to grieve.
But so ridiculous (and overwhelming) was my new situation, that I turned to humour to cope. Putting aside the enormity of what we were dealing with, I had to find the funny side of things. To make an offhand comment about how it's all going, lest I dissolve into tears every time someone asked how I was ...
Amongst friends I would recount the situations and conversations I would find myself having, and ironically joke about #winningatwidowing or #notwinningatwidowing and 'failing at widowing' when the wheels completely fell off, or someone noted just how out of the generic widow behaviour (whatever that is) I was. And there are days were I absolutely fail at widowing. Things do not function. We do not cope. We all fall apart.
So I decided that I would just write it all down. The good, the bad, the ridiculous, the funny (because there are some funny things) and all the rest of it to try and understand and make sense this new normal we find ourselves in, and help friends and family afar know how we are going.
Also, writing a blog to purge my brain of all of this might be the cheapest sort of therapy I have undertaken.