How Do Widowed People Move on To Love New Spouses?
Have you wondered how someone could remarry and love their new partner so much, when you knew them when they completely loved another partner?
Here’s insight to help you understand how someone you know, who was married to their best friend and “lived” for their spouse, could possibly survive the death of that spouse.
We think they stopped being who we knew but they’re in there. We’re thrown off by the new packaging and rebranding. They had to make those changes because the old package and brand stopped working.
Here’s insight about what happened.
We didn’t ask for this
One day, I didn’t need to make two cups of coffee in the morning or ask which bill we should pay first. I was suddenly widowed the night before and I found myself forced out of my own life. My husband died but the life I knew ended too, and I didn’t initially realize how much.
Anyone who finds themselves putting different things in their shopping cart or broadly changing their routine knows its best when changes are borne of purposeful action and worst when they’re foisted upon victims of circumstance.
We think that if we just hold onto what we had and who we were, and how we spent our free time, we can manage the loss. But nothing was as it was and when we try to return to our lives as we knew it, we’re made miserable because things are not the same.
You Can’t Stay Here
The pain of loss includes letting go, not only of the life of the person who died, but of one’s OWN life — because we have sudden, intense changes to our routines and identity.
When people get stuck in loss they are wounded and are walking around with a partially dangling bandage on their wound. Most people think that it would be too painful to rip off the bandage but the pull of the bandage, or “gravity of the situation”, constantly reminds us of our loss. When we rip the bandage off, we stop the emotional pull that brings us down every day.
Ripping the bandage off doesn’t mean forgetting the life and love that we shared. It means accepting that that phase of life has ended and has forever altered our life paths.
The Work Is Done for Us
The changes to our lives are done. We are now just acquainting with what is, and how we go forward. We can’t stay where we were because there’s nothing there. We are walking in the darkness because life’s landmarks have been replaced by huge voids. So, we come to realize that we HAVE to move on.
I had to lose me to move on. Maybe that’s why people don’t talk about dealing with loss. Even if we have seen other people cope with death, we really don’t have any idea of the scope of change to our lives when our loved ones die. The truth is, at some point we have to give up who we were, because the life we lived changed and that’s forced us to change, whether we do so willingly or not.
They Died and We Change
Why do their deaths creep into every bit of our lives? Because we built a life with them — they were our loved ones. Our life journey continues, despite how much we want our old lives back.
Even though huge changes to our lives already happened, we experience a psychic shift when we stop struggling.
THIS is where grieving people divide. Some who suffered loss start to manifest their “next chapter”. Some will confuse moving on to the next chapter with not loving the person who died so they’ll choose to just marinate in pain — that’s a mistake.
Moving on is a necessity because we no longer go to restaurants and ask for a table big enough to include our loved one. Moving on is pulling away from paired off friends when you’re no longer a pair. Moving on is changing what groceries to buy because no one eats that now. We can’t hold onto what we had. It’s blown up. We must move on.
A Legacy of Love or Hurt
The night my husband died, a cop told me that when he dies, he wants his wife to wear black for a year and a day. He wants her to mourn for him all that time. I’ve mourned my husband and I can’t imagine how someone can love another and wish them that much pain. So, I’m hoping his wife goes first — let’s see how long he can bear the mourning.
My loved ones’ legacies were love. My late husband and I had a pact that whoever was widowed had the responsibility to be loved. If we couldn’t love each other, we wanted someone else (or many people) to do it.
My legacy is that those I care about live every day looking forward — literally and figuratively. I want to be celebrated, not mourned. I want people to remember a kindness, laugh, tender moment, and fun time with me. I want them to live a happy life and find joy in each day.
Hey. Every living thing dies. We morph by the experience. It changes our lives. When we recognize and learn about the life stage of death, we fare better. As my current husband puts it, we are like trees struck by lightning. While we continue to branch and push out leaves, there remains a deep cut where the lightning struck the tree.
