I have walked in your Hoka’s - offerings to a young widow with children

Have you forgot how to make toast, pick your children up from school, want to buy thong underwear? I have been exactly where you have been. That may sound odd – we are all different, have different experiences, but as a young widow, yeah, I have walked in your Hoka’s.

Have you looked down at your feet in a work meeting and seen mismatching black shoes? Have you avoided a grocery store aisle because you heard a familiar voice and can’t handle another, “how are you doing?”, while the “W” for widow is blinking on your forehead. Yeah, I’ve been in your Birkenstocks.

Hopefully you have a found other widows or a bereavement counselling. There is nothing like sharing your frustration, sleepless nights, fear about money, a love life and normal child development with others wounded parents.

I remember a friendly debate in my young widow group. Who had it worse, “chronic illness or sudden death?”

Of course, both types of death suck.

“Who got to say goodbye?”

“At least you didn’t have the pain my partner and I lived with for months.”

“We were going to get a divorce, and now I feel guilty,” one participant offered.

But where else can you share these sentiments? Certainly not around the family dinner table or watching your kid’s soccer practice. It sounds so morbid, but to unpack the pros and cons with people who have lived both, allows you to breathe deeply for at least one breath.

If you are lucky, you will be invited to fellow school parents or friends’ homes for dinner. Don’t worry about arriving late. (I was consistently late for every social gathering for at least a year.) The nice ones understand and if they don’t, you won’t get a repeat invite. Yes, I have walked in your dollar store flip flops.

Have you gone to your kindergartener’s moving up school celebration? You see parents, grandparents videoing a child with slick backed hair and a mini bow tie and another child proudly wearing rainbow colors. It feels like all eyes are sorrowfully on you. They aren’t. There are plenty of single (not sole) parents in the room. But you feel deprived, sorry for your partner’s missing out on this wee but powerful ceremony. You think of all the other rites of passage they will miss. High school graduation, college graduation, marriages, grandchildren. Stop me if it hurts.

I have walked in your Sketcher slip ons.

It has been 23 years since I kissed my late husband. He died late at night in an instant as we discussed our workday on our overstuffed plaid velour couch while sipping tea. He had a congenital birth defect and open-heart corrective surgery at age seven. But at age 39, after marriage, graduate degree, two healthy children and building a tree house for the kids, he died from an arrythmia on the surgery scar tissue.

I could share with you the drama, the heroics, the pre-cell phone frantic search for my parents travelling in Switzerland, the funeral, the weeklong ritual mourning while my three and six year olds played hide and seek under that dining room table laden with bagels and schmeer.

Maybe you haven’t been through that exact experience, but you no doubt had to quickly pivot from shock to finding clean underwear, and cheerios or frozen waffles for breakfast. Here’s some things I put in place to help make order from chaos. I hope, dear friend, it helps you.

Allow your children choice when they didn’t have any when their parent died.

Which park to play in, which mismatched shirts and bottoms to wear, which food for dinner will give some semblance of play and choice.

Let them see you cry or be sad.

My tears dried up, but I told them I missed Daddy every day. Talk to your kids about sadness, being grateful and being angry that he is gone.

Seek out a children’s bereavement group. Yes, it is hard to travel in the dark winter after school and finding some sort of dinner. But this is a group where my six year old, excitedly ran out after and said, “Mommy, mommy, Liam’s daddy died too.”Being normal for an hour a week is a good thing.

The Mommy or Daddy Box. My kids’ bereavement group created these wonderful shoe boxes to decorate, and put in photos, school art and sympathy cards. My daughter had a diary that she stored in there. One entry, “My brother is so mean to me! I wish you were here Daddy.”

Remember to live. While our hearts are crushed for our children, embrace life. That may mean a half hour work out before they wake up, a coffee with a friend or a 15 minute cry on the toilet seat. My kids knew that Wednesday was yoga night for Mom. It got me through the rest of week.

I’ll leave you with this story. It is sad, but real. I know you can relate as you walk barefoot to give you kids a good night kiss and change a peed in bed –that happens with bereaved children. They do grow out of it.

"Nine months after Jonathan died, I called my children into my bedroom. It was my bedroom now, and I had done some redecorating. I moved the centre piece of the room, our bed, over to the side. Recently, I bought an original oil painting of a three-headed woman. Well at least it looked like a three-headed woman. The title was Triplets, but their long lean oval faces were to be my past, present and future. Where was I now? The eyes of the women were closed slits. But it was their Mona Lisa smile that sold me on the picture. A gentle all-knowing quality was behind those lips, a look that said, “I have seen much and I am still here and will continue to be here in the future.” I wanted to be Mona.

“OK guys, let’s sit in a circle,” I said to my young children, Noah and Maya. I plopped down in front of my grandfather’s highboy that now housed my husband’s underwear and other personal belongings. Instead of going through this painful process alone, I enlisted his progeny.

“What do you guys think about going through Daddy’s clothes? We can make three piles: one pile for things you want to keep for yourselves, one for the charity box and one for garbage.”

After a slight hesitation, Noah said sure, and Maya shouted, “I want Daddy’s underwear!”

I sighed and suggested that underwear should probably go in the garbage pile.

Maya picked up a pair of underwear and in defiance put them on her head, beret-style. She started bouncing around triumphantly in her creativity. “Oh God,” I said, placing a hand to my head. Noah and I looked at each other and burst out laughing.

In disbelief, I sat there looking at the utter absurdity of the moment. Young widow, sorting through dead husband’s clothes with their four-year-old and seven-year-old. “What the hell,” I thought. “This is our life, and if Jonathan were here, he would have thrown a pair on his head and led the parade.”

I opened the top draw and reached in.

Do you know what Daddy left in his drawer?” The underwear came off Maya’s head and all attention focused on my hand that held two brightly-wrapped candy bars. “Can you believe Daddy kept these from us?”

“Let’s share one,” I offered. So, we sat on the floor in my bedroom, munching on a Kit Kat surrounded by three piles of clothes ¾ one for us, one for the charity box and one for the garbage.

After that I asked, what did they want to do now. In unison, they screamed, “let’s go to the park!” And with that we stepped into the sunshine and ran, not walked, to the park in our running shoes. "