Inside the Broken Heart: Grief Understanding for Widows and Widowers

I have to lather the soap to get that smell. The more I lather, the less soap remains. I hid the soap at the back of the tub, protected from water, and pulled it out on the worst sorts of days. We met skiing at Lake Louise in when Spencer was a medical student. He was skiing with a friend who knew the man I was dating at the time.

The four of us converged midway down a powdery run on a bluebird day that sparkled in the aftermath of a massive snowfall. We were introduced again several months later when we happened to be seated next to each other at a restaurant. By the end of that night, we knew we could make the other laugh in an extraordinary way. Later in the fall, when we were both single, Spencer invited me for coffee. From that first date, we forged speedily onward.

Within two months, as we drove from Calgary to his hometown of Fernie, B. He smiled like a little kid, employing every muscle in his face to express maximum delight. He loved camping, cycling, the Vancouver Canucks and buffalo mozzarella. He relished the cold of winter, and griped against two-faced politicians and ski hills that charge too much. He used to whip his nephews around in a speedy game of airplane that made me wince. He was razor-sharp, mischievous and observant.

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He once sent me a text message at a restaurant while seated beside me. She keeps straightening everything. I'm going to make our table crooked. He swore he'd never buy me a Valentine's gift, but proposed an idea in lieu. For a year, he'd find a new way to tell me he loved me every day. I'd discover "I love you" written on Post-it notes stuck to the fridge, documents left open on my computer, texts sent to me late at night. I still find notes at the bottom of old grocery lists in my iPhone: We married as Spencer started his third year of his orthopedic-surgery residency. He regularly worked 90 hours or more a week and went long stretches without a day off.

He left our bed for the hospital so often in the middle of the night that he claimed I could say goodbye in my sleep without realizing he'd gone. He missed ski trips, Saturday-morning sleep-ins, family dinners. He was working in Lethbridge, Alta. We once enjoyed the short bliss of a pregnancy followed by the devastation of an early miscarriage. I cried frequently during the second year of our marriage. I tried to hide my heartache by weeping in the bathtub. I wanted to try fertility treatment; he didn't.

He worried our problems with infertility initiated at his kidneys, malformed from birth due to a spontaneous mutation — a freak accident in his genes, a small blip in the assembly line during DNA replication that resulted in one tiny, atrophic kidney and another large kidney smothered in cysts. He didn't look as though he had anything wrong with him, blazing his way down a mountain in one ski-chattering rip. But his kidneys were concerning enough that we'd been turned down for life insurance.

Spence feared his kidney problems could be passed onto our children. In June, , we were supposed to be celebrating the end of residency over a bottle of wine. We were supposed to give our condo keys to a young Australian surgeon named Kate, who'd already wired us several thousand dollars in down payment for a year's accommodation. We were supposed to pack our most important belongings into our Toyota Rav 4 and drive off to California where Spencer was starting a fellowship.

We were supposed to cross the border into the United States on July 2, as per our visas from the U. Our visa categorized Spencer as "resident alien physician," and me, in the dehumanized lingo of the U. Citizenship and Immigration Service, his "complete dependent. We stood in a room of empty, open caskets. My friends, my siblings, Spencer's brother looked at me, waiting on an answer.

I wanted to say, "I don't want a casket. I just want Spencer to come home. I couldn't think coherently to make decisions so I grabbed answers at random. I chose a cherry wood casket with a white satin lining. I'd promised Spencer that I'd hike his ashes 1, metres up a mountain so windy and pebbly at the top that hiking poles are a must. I returned home to pick a suit for Spencer to wear at his funeral.

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I stood in our closet and considered the two options: On that night, as we'd watched television, he suddenly couldn't inhale without pain ripping up his side. To him, I kept saying, "Spencer, are you still with me? By the following morning, we knew Spencer was dying faster than we'd understood. We had barely grown accustomed to the phrase "a life-limiting disease" and now we were dealing with a life-ending disease.

He wore his navy blue exam suit to his funeral. I sprayed it with a perfume of mine that he loved, because I wanted something of me with his body that day. I added a pair of dress socks from the company Happy Socks and the fellowship tie the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons had given him a week before he died. I put his dress shoes inside our front door to remember them the next morning when I carried his suit to the funeral home.

That afternoon, I returned home after a run and saw his shoes there, just like he'd kicked them off after a day of work. I revelled in that split-second where I could pretend that he was around the corner, out of sight, studying at the dining-room table. But the silence that met my call destroyed me. I lay on the floor and cried there for a long time, an ugly, snotty, gasping cry. On the other side of the door, I heard the elevator ding, followed by the sound of my next-door neighbour pulling out her keys. She stopped at her door, less than a metre from mine. I covered my mouth to quiet the sobs and remained still.

She waited; I waited. Then she put her key in the lock and carried on. After that day, on the worst nights, I would take Spencer's pillow, the one he died on, and a blanket from our bed, and curl up on the hallway floor. I'd whimper there until sleep or morning came. The day of Spencer's funeral arrived sunny and record-breakingly hot. Seven hundred sweaty people crammed into a church. The heat caused the fire alarm to buzz, briefly, thrice during the funeral. This made me laugh out loud. Spencer would have relished it, these ridiculous blasts shattering the solemnity of his memorial.

Late in the evening, one of his friends said to me: I longed for traditions for mourning to give my private grief a public face. But there are no traditions for how a North American woman in the 21st century mourns her partner. For the grief-stricken, we've no identifying adornment to alert the world — no sad equivalent of a wedding ring.

My closest reference as a widow is my Greek grandmother, my Yiayia, widowed for the last quarter-century of her year life. She wore a black dress with black stockings on her bowlegs and, sometimes, a black kerchief around her hair. Unintentionally, I drifted to ensembles of black, grey and beige. I carried Spencer's wedding ring on a chain around my neck, and I wore his shirts with the sleeves rolled up. I blurted out my plight in conversations with strangers — the person beside me on a plane, a source I was interviewing for a story.

I felt a need to justify my thinness, my red eyes, my habit of staring straight ahead without seeing. A plea to the world: Go gentle with me, please. The first month, my days were filled with what I called "widow tasks. I grew accustomed to being called the executrix, a term not nearly as powerful as it sounds. The woman at the bank was stunned at Spencer's age; her husband, too, died at 36, many years before, she told me. I cancelled his credit cards and his membership in the Canadian Medical Association, and started his taxes. I was interviewed by a woman at the organ-transplant centre who asked me how many sexual partners Spencer had had.

As I looked through his e-mails for taxable receipts, I found the password for a lock he bought for his laptop: After a few hours of widow tasks, I sat, dumb, in front of the television. The Tour de France began a few days before his funeral. Spencer had bought me a road bike as a wedding present. We watched the tour together the year before he died. He explained to me how the peloton and domestiques and crosswinds worked.

After he died, I watched each day's stage once in the morning before I left our condo and the replay that night when I got home. Eventually, I brought my bike into the living room and practised clipping my feet in and out of the pedals in front of the television. I'd never been on my road bike without him. People asked, "How are you?

One night, my sister and I came up with a warped but useful method of answering this question. Every day, sometimes several times a day, I'd give her a number on a scale of 0 to , being as happy as I'd ever been; below seven possibly suicidal. I read a statistic that, on average, a widow loses 75 per cent of her support base after the loss of a spouse, including loss of support from family and friends. Many friends disappeared as grief set in. On the day of Spencer's funeral, I said a teary goodbye to eight of my closest friends who, like Spencer, had just finished residency and were moving around the world for fellowships.

But, while I cried from loneliness, I found consolation in isolation. This seems incongruent, I know. But home, alone, in our condo, I didn't have to pretend to anyone that I was okay. I didn't have to listen to anyone say time heals everything or that I am still young and other inanities. On my own, I could wear Spencer's dirty T-shirts around our house. That was a genuine solace.

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There is a term used in bereavement literature for a young death: I find it graceful and apt. When your spouse dies an off-time death, you, too, fall out of time. You drop out of sync with your contemporaries.

In the same summer I bought a casket, my sister, who is pregnant with twins, bought two cribs. I scrolled through my Facebook stream of people getting married, having babies, watching their kids ski their first black-diamond runs until I could no longer look. New parents grumbled about sleepless nights with crying babies.

I wrote imaginary responses in my head: I also woke up to someone crying loudly in my bedroom. A friend in Montreal, a mother of two, posted a Washington Post story about a study published in the journal Demography. The story was titled, "It turns out parenthood is worse than divorce, unemployment — even the death of a partner. I found the original study; I read their methods, reviewed their conclusions.

I needed to confirm that this story had it all wrong. The investigators looked at why birth rates are low in Germany, why some people don't have a second child after a first. Parents who are unhappy after a first child generally do not have a second. Those of us who have lost a spouse endure a particularly gutting kind of stress that eats away at our protective barriers.

In , two psychiatrists at the University of Washington set out to study stressful life events and the ways they contribute to illness. For 15 years, the duo studied 5, patients. At the end of the study period, death of a spouse topped their list of cataclysmic life events. The authors assigned it a value of Far behind in second place, with 73 points, was divorce.

Nearly 50 years have passed since they published that study, and the results still stand. The stress of losing a spouse permeates every part of one's body, affecting each cell and manifesting tremendous physiological changes. Cortisol levels rise, and sleep is disrupted. Heart rate and blood pressure increases. Your neutrophils — a white blood cell that fights infection — become less effective, particularly in the elderly.

My body began a revolt the moment we heard the words "suspicious for cancer. I couldn't keep food down. My menstrual cycle became erratic, arriving every few weeks and lasting for four to 17 days. Nearly a year after Spencer died, my family doctor suggested I take birth-control pills to control my period — a recommendation hard for her to make and for me to hear after years of doctors' visits to improve our fertility.

Even my blood cells, now strangely large and low in number, showed the effects of missing Spencer. An ultrasound revealed a small benign tumour on my right kidney — same as his. I am still keen to speak with Spencer about all this. I suspect he would say things like, "These tumours are common"; "It's no big deal. I didn't know the password to our computer backup system. One of his colleagues called me to say, hesitantly, that the department of surgery needed his pager for the incoming batch of residents.

I couldn't find it. My right Achilles tendon often aches from too much running and I know he'd say the same thing he said the last time this happened — "rest is the most undervalued aspect of training" — but I'd like to hear him say it anyway. I want to tell him our accountant, who has been very good to me, has Asperger's syndrome. I want to talk to Spencer about the medications in the bathroom, and how I have felt like I am dying too slowly from unhappiness and I don't know what to do.

I would like to point out to him that, based on my family history, I am probably going to survive another 65 years, barring an unnatural death, and that is very long time to be unhappy. He'd wrinkle up his face at that last one; he hated histrionics. Mostly, I need to speak with him about the day he died.

For the 42 days he had cancer, we were inseparable. We walked laps around the hospital floor, the nurses calling out, "Hey, lovebirds" every time we passed their station. When he couldn't walk any more, I sat beside him in a chair during the day and slept on a stretcher at his feet at night. We had what we called "milk picnics" in the middle of the night when we couldn't sleep. I'd get us two small cartons of milk from the hospital kitchen and I'd sit cross-legged on his bed while we talked. We dissected every step of our cancer adventure: I yearn for a milk picnic to ask Spencer what he felt and heard when he was dying.

The combination of medications, disease and exhaustion eroded his ability to think coherently in the last days. My husband, who had helped save the lives of patients in the same hospital where he lay dying, was confused by the remote control to operate his bed. Sometimes, he'd reach up and rub his head in thought, look up at me with complete trust, only to ask something bizarre: The worst, in a panic: He kept pressing the button on his morphine pump. The doctors believed it was delirium rather than pain, but I will always agonize over whether he was hurting.

In the last hours, when he could no longer speak, I kept telling him that I loved him, that he was very brave. I want to know if he could hear me and if it was annoying to hear the same things repeatedly. The desire to talk to your spouse after they've died is a recurring theme in studies in scientific journals and online support groups for the grief-stricken.

My brain has not yet caught up with the reality of my life. I am accustomed to reflecting on the world through the language of Chris and Spencer — what we find funny, sad, interesting. Our third wedding anniversary arrived while I was alone at my family's summer home on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. That morning, I listened to a voice message Spencer recorded three days before he died, speaking into the voice-memo app on my phone. Steroids have eroded his voice. He starts out by saying, "You are my favourite," because we always used to say that.

He pauses a long time. There is a crack as he inhales. No one warned me about the cognitive impairment that comes with grief. Tears, heartache, depression — these are expected, but the sustained diminishment of my thinking skills astonishes me. I lost my husband, and then I kept losing things: I regularly forget the keys in the front door of the condo. I woke up one morning to discover that I'd left it wide open through the night. More than once, I bought groceries and forgot them in the trunk of the car. I often think about older widows whose spouses die after many years of marriage.

How lost they must be. That's borne out in studies of elderly widows, which suggest bereavement can be a factor in the development and progression of Alzheimer's disease. In my year-old brain, I find myself unable to access the most rudimentary information. I couldn't read novels for many months after Spencer died.

My interest in the fantasies of someone else's imagination plummeted to nil. This, to me, indicated that I was truly broken. I felt some comfort when I read an interview with the poet Edward Hirsch.

Hirsch, who lost his son in to a drug-related accident, said he couldn't read in the aftermath of his son's death. I read Buddhism and found its concepts on death quite lovely, but I was too addled to embrace them. I read Marcus Aurelius's Meditations and came to rely on the pep talks from this old Roman emperor. Look well into thyself: There is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou will always look. But sometimes I lose patience with Aurelius's stoicism. Easy for you to say, dude, I'd tell him. I read the poet Rebecca Lindenberg, whose partner, the poet Craig Arnold, disappeared while hiking on a volcano in Japan in In the first fall after Spencer's death, I was invited on a date, the first time I was asked out as a widow.

We met the day before during a press conference. I asked him several questions; each time he answered, he opened his response by addressing me by my first name. He was handsome and dark-haired, charming and smart. He asked if I was married; and I told him that my husband had died days earlier. I have zero game when it comes to dating.

He put a hand on my arm and told me he was sorry. I looked down at his hand, back up at him, and down at my arm again. It was an uncomfortable thing. As journey through 'the valley of the shadow of death,' Inside the Broken Heart guides the way back to fullness of life. Through rediscovery of hope, pain and sorrow are vanquished, death is rendered powerless, and grief is no more. We are healed by God's triumphant adequacy, 'He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds' Psalm Read more Read less.

Kindle Cloud Reader Read instantly in your browser. Customers who bought this item also bought. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. Living for God after Losing Your Husband.

The widowhood effect: What it's like to lose a spouse in your 30s

How the Soul Grows through Loss. A Widow's Guide to Healing: Gentle Support and Advice for the First 5 Years. Finding Comfort as You Journey through Loss. Samuel J Hodges IV. When Your Soulmate Dies: Inspired by her personal experience after the death of her husband, Dr. Leighton Farrell, senior minister at Highland Park United Methodist Church for many years, Julie established a support group for widows and widowers and began writing articles and books for persons who are grieving.

She also is the author of Peace of Mind: Financial Management for Life , an estate planning guide. With over 30 years' experience in business management, Julie currently serves as president of Yarbrough Investments. Product details File Size: Abingdon Press April 1, Publication Date: April 1, Sold by: Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review.

Read reviews that mention highly recommend grieving church journey process helpful losing lost yarbrough. Showing of 17 reviews. Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

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I lost my husband in December of and was given this book. It opened my eyes and has comforted me. I carry it in my purse and have since purchased copies to give out to others. One person found this helpful. Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. An excellent, thorough look at the unique grieving process one goes through when one's spouse has died, from a Christian world view. It is clear and focused on grieving issues that help those in the grieving process to continue on the journey.

Highly recommend for church and personal use. This was the first book I read of Julie Yarbrough's resources on Grief. It gives a good general overview of the grief process based on the author's own painful journey, her biblical knowledge and understanding, and her own dependent relationship with Jesus, her Guide, Comforter and Constant Companion.

Beyond the Broken Heart | Bereavement and Grief Resources

This series is a totally new one written by the widow of a Methodist minister. It is poignant, well written, and offers the basis for an excellent Grief Recovery program any church wanting to help their members through the difficulty of losing a loved one. After losing my husband of 65 years three months ago, this little book has guided me through some pretty rough waters.

It has provided inspiration when I needed it most, guidance when the going got rough and solace when the days were dark. I highly recommend it. I am a pastor starting a widows and widowers group at the church. This book is going to be instrumental in bringing comfort and solace to grieving men and women. I have read it and find it informative, helpful and bringing healing to grieving hearts. It speaks to the needs of grieving people.