There are plenty of downsides to widowing - but there are a surprising number of upsides.
There's the people and the love and the friendships and the kindness and the growth and the understanding and the strength.
And some of that has occurred only because of the worst downside ever.
A few weeks ago I went to Camp Widow.
It's a thing ... and it's neither a cult nor a coven as had been suggested to me prior to going after people heard it's run by an organisation called 'First Light Association'.
Basically its a gathering together of people who have lost their people. And might be the only place on this Earth where every.single.person in the room actually, really and truly knows what it's like to go through what you're going through with the grief of losing your spouse.
So many people have said to me: Oh, I can't image ... when referring to losing a husband.
Noted here that many people who couldn't imagine it, still waded through the quagmire of it with me. As always, I will never be able to thank them for just being there even though they had no idea. #myvillagersareamazing
But every single person at Camp Widow did know.
There was a level of relief in that one fact when I was booking it. Also one of fascination. What would it be like to be with people who actually knew?
I wondered if, 3.5yrs into this caper, I really needed to go and sit through sessions that kind of tried to explain what it was like and how to support my own self through that. I probably needed that 2 or 3 years ago but it wasn't an event in Australia then.
But what did make me go was the fact I was going to be able to meet in person, people I've met since losing Pete. People I would never have come across if he hadn't died. People who have provided me with a level of understanding and friendship - virtually - for more than 3 years.
Those people were going to be at Camp Widow and I was going to be able to meet them in real life.
One was my international widow doppelganger I accidentally found while trawling widow hashtags on social media. She was my age, had 4 kids of similar ages and her husband had dropped dead the week before Pete.
One wrote a blog called the Unicorn Widow - and knowing how much unicorns were joked about in my household, it seemed she would be someone that could see the irony of the lack of magic to this whole palaver, too.
Together, they created something called Widow We Do Now? An online community and podcast basically just talking about all the stuff we have to deal with and interviewing other widows to see how they are doing it.
I did a podcast with them back in June 2020 when we we all still pretty new to all this (I was episode #25 and they are now up to #130) and we probably laughed WAY too much about the things you need to deal with - because it's utterly ridiculous some of the things you have to deal with ... like introducing people to the dead body of your husband. You can hear it here
But they also live in the middle of America - and so them coming to Australia for the event was a BIG drawcard.
Another one I met through a work friend. When Pete died, she kept telling me she knew someone who would understand, because she had this close family friend who's husband had dropped dead the month before Pete. We simply had to meet one another, this work colleague insisted ... so we did, via Facebook and messenger, and we have shared so much of this widowing caper together.
But she is in WA. And distance and covid and all sorts of things have prevented us actually ever meeting. She was going to Camp Widow.
And it was awesome. They are great people in person and online. And I met other great people who I just clicked with. And I would not have ever known them if Pete hadn't died, and their husbands hadn't died. And none of us would be friends or have met one another.
But we are - so there's an upside to the downside. The people you meet.
The downside to the upside of meeting them and attending camp widow and spending the best part of 12 hours in one day talking about how your husband died is the crash afterwards.
I'd had a bit of a panic attack before I left - the logistics of leaving 4 kids behind while I trot off somewhere without them messes with my brain. The people who picked them up so I could go are amazing.
When I got back though - there was a whole new level of not okayness like I hadn't experienced for, well, years.
I got lost in the loop somewhere of where I'd been and what I'd been through and the gravity of it all and the amazingness of seeing these people and challenging myself to go back through it all...
And I fell apart.
Like a good and proper fall apart panic attack, where my body actively convinces my brain I'm have I have a blood clot travelling around by body after a throb in my artery somewhere, a pain in my calf, a pulse through my neck or a pain in my brain ... and it brings on the complete and irrational fear of dying from something that doesn't actually exist ... except it does, because that's what killed Pete.
And so while shivering, and trying to breathe like all the experts say, while vomiting and crying, and trying to talk my own self through it, and the complete mental and physical exhaustion I felt after it, I wondered if it was all worth it.
Except it was.
I won't need to go to a Camp Widow again. Plenty of people go to all of them, or multiple ones. I don't think I need to put myself through it again, for want of a better turn of phrase.
It's not that it wasn't helpful.
It actually really was. Maybe one of the most helpful things I’ve done m.
It let me to know that I'm ok.
That what I have experienced and am experiencing, is normal.
Whatever 'normal' looks like with widowing.
HINT: there is no 'normal'
When this all started, I was so desperate to try and find something that explained what it should be like, and tick off the checklist of what would happen and how it would be. How to cope with it all. How to do it right.
I still struggle there isn't that. But what Camp Widow did teach me, is that the way I'm doing it, is normal.
After a lot of criticism about HOW I did widowing early on, it turns out, that when you put a whole lot of widows together, lots of them are doing it exactly like, or very similar to the way you are.
Which means, it's actually the people who are NOT a widow, who think the way you are doing widowing is not normal.
So the upside of the falling apart after Camp Widow downside, is the realisation that I am, after all, not a failing widow.
Thank you for sharing ❤️