Dear Reader,

You are about to enter the part of this companion that travels alongside the fourteen chapters of Twice Widowed. Before you do, I want to tell you something about how I hope you will read my story.

More than a few times, someone has told me about something painful in her own life and then said, “But this is nothing like what you experienced.” Of course it wasn't. Her circumstances were hers, and mine were mine. I can make the same distinction when I hear about what someone else has endured. There are losses and circumstances far different from anything I have known.

But over the years, I have noticed something else. Context can be very different while something in the human experience is deeply familiar.

We lose people, but we also lose relationships, health, work, homes, certainty, belonging, dreams, identities, and futures we thought we were going to have. Those losses are not interchangeable, and I don't think they need to be. Still, human beings can respond in remarkably familiar ways when something important is taken from us or when the world we knew is suddenly not the world we are living in.

Even while writing this companion, I sometimes found myself thinking, This isn't only about widowhood. I could see parts of what I had learned in other kinds of loss and difficult circumstances too.

So as you read, there may be moments when something in my experience causes you to notice your own. That's what I want you to do. You may recognize a feeling. You may think, That isn't anything like me. You may wonder why I did what I did. You may know immediately that you would have chosen differently. Something I experienced may bring to mind something that happened years ago or something you had never connected with grief at all.

That is part of what a story can do. I don't want you to follow my story. I want you to bring your story with you while you read mine.

You are going to meet many versions of me in these pages. Sometimes I could do remarkable things. Sometimes something quite ordinary was beyond me. I could be capable in one part of my life and completely undone in another. I made choices I still understand, and others I can look back on differently now. What I had available to me changed. Yours may too.

That is what I mean when I talk about capacity in this companion. Not how much grief you can handle, how strong you are, or where you are in some process. Simply what is available to you in the life you are actually living today.

There were times when even a very small decision felt enormous to me. At other times, I could manage complicated work, travel, family needs, or decisions that surprised me with their size. Neither told me how well I was grieving. Neither told me who I was. What was available to me was information, not a verdict.

And when I had room for choice, I could make it from there. Sometimes there wasn't room. Life still made demands. Things happened that couldn't wait. There were days when what was required of me and what I felt able to give were nowhere near the same size. Capacity didn't give me control over that.

But when there was room for choice, I could ask a simpler question: What is actually available to me today?

My answer could change tomorrow. It could change this afternoon. I didn't need to make either answer mean more than it did.

As you read the chapters ahead, you will see what I did with what was available to me. You will see what I reached for, what I resisted, what I couldn't do, what I tried anyway, what surprised me, and what I came to understand differently. None of it is instruction. My choices belonged to the woman I was, in the circumstances I was living, with what was available to me then. Yours belong to you.

So bring your agreements and your disagreements. Bring the places where you recognize yourself and the places where you don't. Bring the memories my story unexpectedly calls up. Bring the questions it leaves you with.

My story does not have to be similar to yours to help you see your own.

Thank you for joining me on this journey—and for bringing your story along with mine. You have my wholehearted welcome here.

-Lorrie

Before Next Week

From here, each companion chapter corresponds to a chapter in Twice Widowed. Read the memoir chapter first, then come here for the companion chapter that goes with it.

Before the first companion chapter arrives next week, read the Introduction and Note to the Reader in Twice Widowed. There is no companion chapter for those pages. They are simply where our journey through the memoir begins.