Letters from a Season of Grieving

A multi-part series in epistolic form

Dear Jaye T.,

The day you showed up at my house unannounced is the day the waves had gotten the best of me. I can only assume you got an out-of-office message, dropped everything, and headed my way. This was the stage of grief when most people had moved on and folks are kind of watching you with some distance, not knowing what to say. It is annoyingly quiet. I had figured out how to function like a person who was okay. Smile, engage people, tell stories, work. The dramatic end to a 15 year conversation with him was the loudest silence occupying my head. I kept a bottle of bourbon next to my bed to turn myself off at the end of the day. I slept. I worked. I parented (??). But that day the waves came crashing down and I could not do any of it.

In the early stages it was hard to deal with people being near me. I was so sensitive to anyone getting within a conference round table distance of me. It felt like a breach of my perimeter. You must have known this because I remember you sitting on the edge of the couch and telling me a story. By then, we had worked with each other for years, we talked regularly, and I did not know you were a widow. It never dawned on me to ask why you were raising three amazing teenagers alone. I just accepted that you were.

I was actively rejecting widow as an identity, but you recognized that I was drowning, my stage of grieving and spoke to the inside me.

You told me how you felt at this stage.

You told me what you did to move through it.

You forecasted what might happen next.

You agreed to walk through it with me, as I needed you.

You were like a midwife, helping me to birth the possibility of new life.

I was blessed to have a universe full of long-time friends and family who supported me and my son unconditionally. My father had been a widower in his 30’s and my mother was recently widowed. A circle of aunties parented until I could get my only-parent wings. My boss and close co-workers gave me cover until I got my legs under me. It was a wholly embodied process learning to be an uncoupled, only decision-maker due to unexpected tragedy. These people held me up until I could do it on my own. However, there are some specific words and supports that can only come from someone who knows what it feels like, intimately.

I remember years later we had dinner, I had left or was preparing to leave Atlanta (grieving impacts memory) to force myself out of autopilot. You told me the story of how you and your late husband made a life together. I learned so much about you and all the life that you lived that gets easily flattened in the word and identity widow.

Because of you, Jaye T., I know “widow” is not a passive term. As a Black widow, you showed me that it can be an active role that we choose, supporting others while also healing our own dissonance. Last year a good friend died suddenly, and I grieved very hard. I also recognized that I might have something to offer his wife and so I tried to do what you modeled. Show up, give space, sit with, listen to, offer to be present as needed, check-in from time to time.

No one wants to be a widow/er. I rejected the term for years. That day when you knocked on my door, I needed a widow to grab my hand so the waves did not wash me away.

Thank You,

SD

This is the first letter in a series focused on grief and the grieving process. Around the world so many of us are experiencing trauma and tragedy in unique and similar ways, no matter. I want to use this series to name experiences and to appreciate some of the beauty in the journey to becoming whole. My hope is that these posts will speak to the inside you, if you need it.