Before We Begin
If you are reading this companion because someone you love has died, I’m sorry. There are no clever words capable of containing what has happened. We reach for phrases like I’m sorry for your loss because ordinary language can feel painfully inadequate beside death. Perhaps that is because grief is never only about loss. It is also about love.
This companion grew from my own journey through widowhood. Twice. The first time I was in my twenties. The second time I was in my fifties. I had hoped experience might prepare me for the second loss. It didn’t. Every love is different. Every loss is different. And the person who enters grief is not standing still.
We bring to grief a soul in flux.
Those words became increasingly important to me. Not even my own first grief could become a template for my second. I was not the same woman, the love was not the same love, and the life surrounding the loss was not the same life. You’ve probably seen some version of the stages of grief. They can give us useful language for experiences that can otherwise be difficult to name. But language that helps us recognize an experience can become something else when we begin to believe it describes the path we are supposed to follow.
That was one of my difficulties with the stages. For a soul already in flux, they could become one more way to wonder whether I was doing this correctly. The problem wasn’t that someone had given names to experiences of grief. The problem was the judgment I could attach to them.
The lower half of this picture isn’t another model for grief. It is a reminder that grief moves inside a life already in motion. Age, history, relationship, circumstances, other losses, health, work, faith, personality—and what happened yesterday—can all be part of what we bring to grief. So my story cannot tell you what your grief will be. It can only tell you what happened to me, what I could see while I was living it, and some things I can see from here that I could not see from there.
That is the work of this companion. The memoir bears witness to my life. These pages create room for you to notice your own. You may have arrived asking, Who am I now? That question may stay with you for a long time. You do not have to answer it here. For a long time I thought I needed to write myself back to myself. Instead, I scribbled myself forward. I do not mean that you should journal, or that writing is the way through grief. A scribble simply became useful language for me: a mark can be made without knowing the finished picture.
The picture is not already drawn. The scribble is yours.
Throughout these pages you will find stories, research, questions, Quiet Truths, and a handful of practices you can reach for when they fit the moment. None of them is a test. You may use one repeatedly, ignore another, leave a question blank, close the book, or return later. Something may open. Nothing may. Both belong here. My story cannot tell you what your grief will be. The picture is not already drawn. The scribble is yours.
The Widow Brain
Your Mind in Enormous Loss
Something enormous has happened. The person you loved is gone. And you may have noticed something else almost immediately: your mind doesn't seem to work the way it used to. Mine didn't either. I could be remarkably capable in one part of my life and then unable to do something ordinary in another. I forgot things. I lost track of time. I stared into space. My thoughts circled back to the same places. Sometimes I could make complicated decisions because life required them of me, and sometimes a small decision felt enormous.
I didn't always understand what was happening. I only knew that I didn't feel like myself.
What You May Notice
People who are grieving often describe experiences like these. You may walk into a room and forget why you are there. Read the same sentence several times. Lose track of hours or days. You may feel nothing when you think you should be devastated, then suddenly feel everything at once. You may find yourself staring, disconnecting from what is happening around you, or replaying events and conversations. A thought may circle again and again. A moment may replay even though you desperately want your mind to go somewhere else.
Decisions that once required almost no thought may suddenly feel impossible. And you may still expect him to be there. Perhaps you look toward his chair. Listen for a familiar sound. Reach for him in bed. Think for an instant that you need to tell him something before remembering that you cannot. Your mind may know that he died while some other part of you still expects to find him where he has always been.
There Is a Name for It
Eventually I learned that some of what I was experiencing had a name: widow brain. The name didn't explain everything. It wasn't a diagnosis, and it didn't make the experiences disappear. But naming what was happening helped me stop treating every forgotten word, blank stare, strange thought, or impossible decision as evidence that something else was terribly wrong with me. Grief can affect attention, memory, decision-making, and our experience of time. It can make the familiar feel unfamiliar—including our own minds.
Knowing that didn't fix mine. It did give me another way to look at what was happening.
When Your Mind Doesn't Feel Like Yours
There is something particularly unsettling about not being able to depend upon the mind you have always depended upon. I knew myself as capable. I could solve problems. I could make decisions. I could take risks. Then there were times when I couldn't summon those parts of myself in the ways I expected. Other people sometimes had expectations too. They could see what I had been capable of before and wonder why I couldn't simply do those things now. Sometimes I wondered the same thing.
But what I eventually began to understand was much simpler. Something enormous had happened to me. Of course it affected me. I didn't need every strange experience to become evidence about my character, my strength, or how well I was grieving.
For Now, Notice
If some of this sounds familiar, you don't have to decide exactly what is causing every experience. You don't have to determine whether something is shock, exhaustion, grief, stress, your nervous system, or simply a terrible day. Some things may need attention or help, especially if something concerns you. But you don't have to solve the whole mystery of your mind in order to notice: Something has changed. Perhaps that is enough for this moment.
Noticing doesn't require you to do anything about what you find. It doesn't mean tomorrow will look the same. And it doesn't tell us where grief is taking you. It simply gives you somewhere to begin.