My Grief Care

Widow Grief

12 Episodes

Episode 8 : A Widow’s Guide to the Stages of Grief

A Widow's Guide to the Stages of Grief

As grief counselors, Anne-Marie and I are very familiar with various theories about how grief works. Most people are familiar with the Stages of Grief by Elizabeth Kubler Ross.  Society has taught us that these are the stages one goes through after someone dies.  But Kubler-Ross was writing about stages one goes through when they find out they have a terminal illness.  She never planned for these stages to be associated with death.   So, these stages have been wrongfully presented for years.  And if you are a grieving person, you can feel like there is something wrong with you if you don’t go through all these stages.  We wish there were predictable stages we could go through, but grief is anything but predictable.

In our experience as grievers and in working with countless grieving clients, we have found that the theorist we agree with the most is J. W. Worden. Dr. Worden is perhaps best known for his “4 Tasks of Mourning.” Mourning is the processing of a loss. Grief is the emotional pain that you feel after loss. For this, I will specifically speak of loss as the death of your husband. 

First, it is important to realize the “tasks” that you, as a widow, need to experience to help you heal or recover after the death of your husband. These are tasks that require your attention and participation.  Like Dr. Worden, we don’t like to call these steps because no distinct and ordered steps take you through grief. 

I will walk you through Worden’s four tasks and explain just a bit about what they mean. The first task is “To accept the reality of the loss.” Accepting the reality of the loss of your husband means much more than admitting that he died. Acceptance is a gradual process that begins with the willingness to face and ultimately to fully accept the hard truth of the loss and its impact on you. 

The beginning of accepting the reality is to be able to say aloud, “My husband has died, and he cannot come back to me in this life.” If you think, “This still doesn’t seem real to me,” be kind to yourself. Healing from loss is not a race. You may wish to kindly say to yourself, “It still breaks my heart that my husband has died, and he won’t be coming back to me.”

The second task is “To process the pain of grief.” You have, without a doubt, felt a lot of emotional pain following the loss of your husband. Healing means you need to thoroughly identify, explore, and express these difficult feelings so they can be released. Unprocessed feelings will stay with you indefinitely. And those feelings demand recognition before they will fade and are felt less and less.

The third task for you is “To adjust to a world without the deceased.” When your husband died, your way of interacting with the world changed dramatically. Widows suffer many secondary losses. This means that you will need to make a lot of adjustments, from sleeping alone, to taking over his responsibilities to changing relationships with friends and family, and the list goes on.

Your fourth task is ” to find an enduring connection with the deceased in the midst of embarking on a new life.” Every couple develops its own unique relationship, which includes the ways in which it connects. Healthy mourning never includes forgetting your husband. Creating and maintaining ways to remember, honor, and remain emotionally connected to your husband will help remove barriers to learning what it means to start really living again. 

Again, these are not ordered and distinct tasks. These tasks, as described by Worden, overlap and are interdependent. In other words, you may not fully accept the reality of your husband’s death until you have processed your pain, made some of your key adjustments to life, and determined how you will retain an emotional connection with your husband. In fact, you can’t really complete tasks 2, 3, and 4 without truly accepting the reality of your husband’s death.
Perhaps the main message is that successfully mourning a loss is a multifaceted process and a journey that will double back on itself many times and has no perfect map to guide you through. We recommend that you read this now and again. If you do, you’ll be able to get a sense of your journey and where you are now. Remember—it’s a process unique to each person and isn’t a race.

When you are ready, if you want some help with healing and hope, please check out our unique Next Chapter Widow Retreats. We work with only four widows, and they are incredible.