Nothing can prepare you for the death of a partner – but no one has the right to judge you for moving on

From the Metro (UK):

It was about two months after I lost my first wife Krista to suicide that I felt like I wanted to date again.

I was 26 at the time and I thought there was something wrong with me – maybe I was just feeling this way because of how my wife had died? – so I fought it off. But I did start dating again a few months later and, just over a year after Krista passed away, I remarried.

Now I work as a relationship coach for widowers and women who date widowers, and I don’t think most people really understand what we experience.

***

Seven months after Krista died, I met Julianna at church and I couldn’t stop thinking about her. She’d recently won a local marathon and her picture had been in the paper, so I asked her out by congratulating her and asking if she wanted to go for a run.

We had an awful first date – Julianna didn’t know I was a widower and when I blurted it out, it threw her completely off and she had a hard time wrapping her mind around it. But she agreed to go on a second date and it was then that I realised we could be serious. It was weird.

There weren’t any doubts or worries that I was doing something wrong – it was the exact same feeling that I had with Krista. And it got stronger and stronger the more time we spent together.

Part of that feeling was a motivation to move past my grief. I couldn’t keep both the emotions of grieving for Krista and loving Julianna in me at the same time, so it was a battle before I eventually let love overwhelm it.

Read the rest at Metro.

Goal: Overcome the Death of a Spouse and Find Love Again

Marathon Girl and I got a write-up in Utah Valley Magazine. The article (and others in the magazine) focuses on achieving goals. My section is about how I made goals to rebuild my life after the death of my late wife. Marathon Girl's section focus on running. If you don't want to read, I at least encourage you to check out the beautiful pictures of Marathon Girl (just ignore the ugly guy next to her). From the article:

Abel Keogh is as uncomfortable with change as the next 6-foot-3 guy. But after becoming a widower in 2001 when his pregnant wife took her life, Abel realized if he didn’t embrace change he also wouldn’t embrace happiness.

Over the next several weeks, Abel forced himself to go through a mental exercise of deciding where he wanted to be in five years. He made a list of 30 or 40 things he really wanted to do, and every day he lived his life as if enacting all of the changes he envisioned.

One if his primary goal was to marry again and have a family. Fifteen months after burying his wife, he married Julie—who he calls “Marathon Girl” on his blog. They quickly added five children, who are ages 7, 6, 5, 2, and 5 months.

***

Many in the widow/widower world get comfortable in their grief and self-pity. Abel knows there is a powerful stage in the next process.

“When I chose to change, I realized I had a chance to create a new life and do things I couldn’t have done before,” he says. “You have to figure out how to adjust or you can get smashed by it.”

On Nov. 10, 2011, Abel marked the 10^th anniversary of his first’ wife’s death with a thoughtful and upbeat post about moving on. He had crossed everything off the list he had made previously.

“We can make the life we want to make,” he says. “We’re the ones who hold ourselves back.”

Abel held himself back by not initially forgiving his first wife for taking her life.

“Once I stopped being angry and blaming her, everything else fell into place,” he says. “For others, this might be losing their job or having their spouse walk out on them. Part of the healing process is moving on and getting past the victim mentality.”

Read the entire article or check out the awesome photos of Marathon Girl.

Up with Grief

Note: This post was written for and posted on the Open to Hope site. You can see the original post here.

It's hard to find movies for adults that adequately deal with the death of a spouse and putting one's life back together. Fortunately, one of the movies nominated for the Best Picture Oscar does a great job of dealing with the subjects of death, grief, and moving on better than any other film in recent memory—and it's target audience is kids.

The movie? Up.

In the first 20 minutes of the film we see Carl Fredricksen as a boy meeting his future wife, Ellie. When they grow up, they both want to become explorers and journey to faraway lands. Ellie shows Carl her adventure book that contains a few notes and drawings of things she's done. Most of the pages in the book are blank, and Ellie tells Carl that she's going to fill the rest of book with photos and of all the exciting things she's going to do.

Then the audience is taken on a short silent movie journey of their life. They get married and start careers. They decide to have a family only to find out she's infertile. Though the news is tough to swallw, they both decide to keep working and save their pennies for a trip to Paradise Falls in South America. But as the years pass, they keep raiding their savings to pay for car repairs and other life emergencies. They grow old, and one day Carl realizes that they've never taken the trip they dreamed about. He throws caution to the wind and buys tickets to Paradise Falls. Only they never make the trip. As he's about to surprise his wife with the plane tickets, she falls ill and dies.

The next time we see Carl he's a grumpy widower. Fed up with life and facing a court-ordered placement in a retirement home, he decides he's had enough. As a former balloon salesman, he rigs his Victorian house with thousands of balloons and launches it into the sky, determined to finally visit Paradise Falls. The only complication to his trip is that Russell, a neighborhood kid and wilderness explorer, has unwittingly come along for the ride too.

During the journey to the falls, the Victorian house becomes the symbol for Ellie. Not only does the house contain photographs and other reminders of Ellie and Carl's life together but, at various points in the journey, Carl looks up at the house talks to it, wondering what Ellie would say if only she were there with him.

As he travels with Russell, the house becomes more of a hindrance than a help. Carl's so determined to take the house to Paradise Falls that he's unable to form a relationship with Russell or even think about getting them both home safely. At times Carl seems more concerned about damage the house receives than the danger Russell and himself find themselves in.

Carl doesn't realize how much the house is holding him back until he finds himself browsing through Ellie's adventure book. As he turns the pages, he's surprised to discover that the blank pages she showed him years ago are filled with pictures of his and Ellie's life together. Suddenly Carl realizes that even though he and Ellie were never able to visit the Paradise Falls together, they did have a wonderful, fulfilling life as husband and wife. It doesn't matter that they never got to visit the falls together—the real adventure in life was the years spent with Ellie.

Armed with this new insight Carl is able to literally let go of the house in order to get he and Russell home safely. As a result, he's able to move on with his life and start a new and fulfilling chapter as a father for Russell. It's a message that anyone who's struggling to move on after the death of a spouse could use.

Don't let this beautifully animated film trick you into thinking it's for kids only. There's plenty in Up to keep kids entertained but with its unique plot and adept handling of more “grown up” issues, this life-affirming film deserves the Best Picture of the year award and is the new high water mark in movies that deal with grief and the loss of a spouse.

The Other Love of His Life

Amy Paturel has the My Turn column in the latest issue of Newsweek which, interestingly, deals with her fiancé and herself having to make peace with the dead wife before they could move on. A lot of her emotions echo what women who are dating widowers have emailed me over the years. Writes Patruel:

I pored over her pictures trying to learn everything I could about the woman who came before me. She would always hold a place in Brandon's heart, so I needed to know who she was.

A chill came over me when I visited her memorial page and read through the online guest book: "No one could ever fill her shoes," someone wrote. That launched me into my next search: "dating a widower." Every site I visited warned of men who disappear after a few months out of guilt, those who constantly draw comparisons to their late spouse and those who live in the tragic state of "what if?" Brandon hadn't done any of those things.

But then I read this: "If he has pictures of her on the walls, clothes of hers in the closet and trinkets of their life together on display, he is not ready."

Brandon insisted he wanted to move on, that she was dead and he was not. He even avoided the red flags I had read about. About a month into the relationship, the ring came off. Pictures were tucked away and replaced. Slowly, her clothes began to disappear from the closet.

Yet I still grappled with the feeling that I might never measure up to what he lost. In his mind, she will always be 33 and beautiful. Me? I'll get gray hair, wrinkled skin and flabby thighs. What's more, their relationship will remain perfect, frozen forever in newlywed bliss. In six short months, they didn't weather the storms that come with age and time: sleepless nights caring for newborns, arguments over money, in-law drama.

Her essay is a good vignette on what it takes for both people to find peace and start a new life together.

You can read Paturel’s essay here.

(Thanks for the link, Erin!)

My Life: Seven Years Later

My latest post on the OpentoHope site was posted today.

November tenth is a day that creeps up on me now.

It wasn’t always this way.

In past years it was a day heavy with memories, emotions, and unanswered questions.

Now it’s a day just like any other.

This year it wasn’t until after lunch that I looked at the calendar in my office and noted the date. Suddenly, I realized what day it was. I pushed my laptop to the side and looked out the window at the green grass and sunshine. In seconds the memory of hearing a gunshot from our bedroom and finding my late wife’s lifeless body flashed through my mind followed by a tinge of the raw terror that flowed through my body that afternoon.

You can read it in its entirity here.

Blogging for the Open to Hope Foundation

A couple months ago I was approached by the Open to Hope Foundation about writing a blog for those who had lost a spouse. (I was a guest on the foundation’s radio show last November. You can download the MP3 of the program by right-clicking here.) I was hesitant to accept. Between my widower blog (no longer updated) and Room for Two I didn’t think I had anything left to say on the matter. Besides, I’ve been happily married to Marathon Girl for five and a half years. I haven’t thought of myself as widower since the day she agreed to marry me. In a lot of ways, I’ve put that sad chapter of my behind me. Thought thoughts of the late wife and daughter occasionally enter my mind, 99.9% of my thoughts are on making a better life for me and the family I have now.

I also have a novel and other writing projects that take up most of my free time. Even if I had something to say, I was unsure I’d have the time to write regular blog posts.

Then I checked my email.

There were three new emails in my inbox. Two were from women dating widowers. One thanked me for writing an essay that helped her see that her widower boyfriend wasn’t ready to commit to a serious relationship and she was going to finally end it. The other was from a woman asking for advice about her widower boyfriend’s behavior and whether or not she should be concerned about it. The third was from a young widower who thanked me for my website and telling me it had given him hope that he could one day again be happy.

These kinds of emails flood my inbox every day. (I’m not complaining about them – just stating a fact. If you have something to say, you can contact me here.) In the back of my mind, I thought the number of widower related emails would stop after my book came out and this blog focused on other things than widower related issues. But every day there are new emails in my inbox similar to the ones above and I realized there are a lot of people that are hurting out there.

And I thought back to a wintry afternoon six years ago. I had just spent most of my Saturday afternoon searching for something – anything! – online that would make me feel that I wasn’t the only young widower in the world. Something that would give me hope that tomorrow would be a better day and if I just put one foot in front of the other and stuck with it.

I found nothing.

And in that brief moment of grief and anguish I vowed if there was some way I could help someone else from feeling the pain and loneliness I felt at that exact moment, I’d do it.

So I called to the foundation’s director and expressed my concerns about writing a blog and we came to mutual agreement. I will write an occasional blog post (three or four times a month as time allows). And instead of making it a traditional grief blog, I’m going to focus on putting your life back together and moving on instead of becoming bogged down with self pity and the “woe is me” attitude that infects so much of grief literature and makes it completely worthless – often hindering people from putting their lives back together.

It’s going to be very different from typical grief blogs. It’s going to have an attitude.

So be warned.

If you’re content wallowing in grief and self pity then the blog’s not for you.

If you don't want to think of yourself as anything other than a widow or widower, then find another grief blog to read.

If you don’t want straight up advice about learning to put your grief aside, making the most of your life, and becoming happy again, then do not read it because I’m not going to mince words.

Finally, though I have permission to do so, I won’t be reposting the content on this blog. However, I will post the first paragraph or two and link to the latest entry for those who are interest in reading it. (As soon as I complete some other projects, I will create a URL on this website for them, however.)

Also, I have about 30,000 words of material that I cut from Room for Two before it was published. Some that content will probably find a home there – in a slightly modified form. (My first entry is a part from my book that was cut from the book and tweaked for the blog.) For those who have read the book and want to read vignettes that were cut between the first draft and the published manuscript, I’ll let you know when those are posted too.

The website I'll be writing for can be found here.

You can read my first entry here and my second one here.

I’ll let you know when the third one is up.