A shared universe › Blog › When your partner dies · Español
You put out two cups without thinking. You turn to comment on something in the news and there is nobody on the sofa. For years, so many things in the day were done as two, and now each of them reminds you that someone is missing.
When your partner goes, so does the person who shared your home, your bed and your timetable, and also the witness to your life: the person who remembered the same things you did. Gone are the plans you had for a few years ahead, the division of chores that had grown up without anyone discussing it, the way other people saw the two of you. Even the word people use for you changes.
The writer C. S. Lewis, who lost his wife, Joy Davidman, in 1960, began the notebook in which he recorded his grief by saying that nobody had told him that grief felt so like fear: the restlessness, the knot in the stomach, the sense that something invisible stood between him and the world. He published those notes the following year, under another name, in a short book called “A Grief Observed”.
For many people, the worst times are the afternoons, the nights and the weekends, when there are no formalities and no visitors. Some find it hard to go into the house; others, to leave it.
The writer Joan Didion lost her husband suddenly at the end of 2003 and told the story of that year in “The Year of Magical Thinking”. She explained, for example, that she could not give away his shoes because part of her thought he would need them when he came back. She had not lost her reason: the mind takes far longer than the eyes to accept an absence. That is why there is no hurry to decide what to do with their things, and why so many people go on feeling close to someone who has gone.
Just in the weeks when it is hard to concentrate, the formalities arrive: the death certificate, the bank, the widow’s pension, the inheritance, the bills that were in their name. If your partner was the one who dealt with those things, the feeling of not knowing where to start is added to the grief.
The US National Institute on Aging advises, if you can choose, putting off big decisions, such as selling the house or leaving your job, until you feel better. In the first months of grief it is hard to think clearly, and a rushed change can add one more loss.
Studies of widowhood have long observed that the health of the person widowed suffers in the following years. In 2008, the sociologist Felix Elwert, of the University of Wisconsin, and the physician and sociologist Nicholas Christakis, of Harvard University, studied it using data from 373,189 American couples aged between 67 and 98, followed from 1993 to 2002. After the death of a spouse, the risk of dying in the following years was somewhat higher than for those who remained married: 18% higher in men and 16% higher in women.
It is worth understanding exactly what this means. It is an average across hundreds of thousands of people, not a forecast about you. The authors themselves link it in part to the loss of support and companionship, and the increase was greater in deaths from illnesses that need daily care, such as diabetes. When a partner goes, it is often the person who reminded you about your pills, cooked, insisted on going to the doctor or gave you a reason to get up at the same time.
That is why looking after yourself now makes so much sense. Going to your check-ups, eating at regular times, going out for a walk and letting others keep an eye on you is a way of looking after yourself as perhaps the person who is gone used to look after you.
In the first weeks there are usually people around: phone calls, visits, food in the fridge. Then everyone goes back to their own life, and that is when loneliness is really felt. Sometimes couple friends are lost too, along with dinners for four and invitations that used to arrive for both of you.
If loneliness is moving in to stay, Unwanted loneliness has more ideas.
There is no right moment to start going out again, to travel, to change the furniture or to meet someone. In 2004, the sociologist Deborah Carr studied older widows and widowers in the United States and found that, six months on, men showed more interest than women in marrying again one day, but only those whose friends gave them low or average support; those who felt very well supported by their friends did not differ from the women. The wish for a new relationship had a great deal to do with the company that was missing, and said nothing about how much the person who died had been loved.
Some people find another partner and some never look for one, and both are legitimate ways of going on. The same is true of small gestures: whether or not to take off your wedding ring, sleeping on their side of the bed, learning to do what the other used to do. What matters is that you decide, at your own pace.
If, as the months go by, the pain does not ease and does not let you live, mention it to your GP. And if at any point you think you do not want to go on without that person, talk to someone today. In Spain you can talk to a person at the Teléfono de la Esperanza, 717 003 717, at any time. If you are thinking of ending your life, call 024: it is free and answered 24 hours a day. If you are in another country, call your local emergency number or a helpline there.
There are things you would tell the person who shared your life at the end of the day. You can write them in A shared universe, on a “For someone who is gone” star, with neither their name nor yours. There will be no answer, but there can be company: a touch, a comfort from someone you don’t know.