Decisions

Now that I have a little distance from the earliest days of extreme grief, I find popular beliefs around it to be really curious. People rush in with advice, even if they've never experienced the loss of their partner. And of course they mean well but some of the common beliefs are woefully misguided.

One of the common beliefs is that we shouldn't make any major decisions for a year. On the surface, this makes sense: we shouldn't make decisions out of extreme emotion or out of desperation to escape our grief. But I felt that the biggest decision in the world had been made for me. I had no say in losing Bill. From there, though, I felt it was both a duty and a gift to shape this unasked-for life in the ways I wanted to. To have made no further decisions would have left me powerless.

Something that was also interesting about this concept was that when I said it to a grief counselor, she replied "You know they don't say that to men, right?" While I don't believe that all men are exempt from this ill-formed belief, I do think that she had a point. Women are often seen as relying on their husbands and therefore we're thought to be lost or to completely crumble without them. And while I was lost without Bill, it wasn't because I didn't know who I was. I was lost because it was impossible to wrap my head around all of our hopes and plans just being gone with no warning. But to crumble was a disservice to both of us, and so continuing to live meant making difficult decisions.

Now that I'm coaching other widows, I've heard several times that they feel guilty making decisions without their husbands. It's not that they feel they need his permission, but they feel like they're almost betraying him by choosing things that might make them happy. It may not seem logical unless you understand it. For me, it felt like it was evidence that I could move on and that felt awful. But the reality is, we don't move on. We move with. Grief is in us. The key is to not let it control us and to understand that building the best possible life for ourselves is doing our partners the ultimate honor.