‘A uniform feeling’: The grief and loneliness of losing a spouse

It was one minute past seven in the evening when Vera Kemp died.

The enormity of the moment for her husband of 37 years, Ian, was juxtaposed with the mundanity of it. Listening to ABC News, Ian sat by Vera’s bedside, and looked up as she took a final breath. She was 60 years old.

Ian Kemp describes his life with wife Vera as “idyllic”. Credit: Justin McManus

His grief had begun 17 months earlier, when Vera was diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma, but despair is a haphazard thing.

When the couple met in their 20s, Ian didn’t think he stood a chance with the strong-willed young schoolteacher from Serbia. Still, he tried his luck and proposed within six weeks. She said yes.

“We had a really good life,” says Ian. “I loved her dearly.”

Together, they had two sons and bought 13 acres just out of town in Maryborough, north of Ballarat, where they grew and made their own shiraz. Ian, then principal at the local high school, tended the orchard while Vera looked after the garden.

They didn’t always agree, but they were able to find mutual ground to base their life decisions on. They went without little luxuries to save money, buying a small investment property and dreaming of going to Paris when they retired.

Much of their final year together was spent talking about what life would be like for Ian once Vera was gone, but in May 2010, when Vera died, he was now alone. The grief wasn’t just for the loss of his love and their life together, there was now a lonely void where a shared identity once existed between them.

An unavoidable loneliness

A new study suggests the loneliness Ian felt within his grief is both a common and potentially unavoidable part of losing a spouse.

For the study, researchers from Monash University assessed the loneliness of 749 widowed participants for three years before to three years after their spouse died. They compared their findings against 8418 married individuals.

Ian Kemp and his wife, Vera.

They found that when someone’s spouse dies, their loneliness and grief persist regardless of their gender, whether they are isolated or have strong social support, are self-reliant, wealthy or healthy.

“What stood out is that it is a uniform feeling,” says lead author Dr Rosanne Freak-Poli. “It doesn’t really matter what your circumstances are. Everyone experiences grief and loneliness when they lose their spouse.”

Dr Rajna Ogrin, a senior research fellow at the Bolton Clarke Research Institute, is not surprised that those with good social support have a similar profile of loneliness as those who do not: “There are different types of loneliness: emotional loneliness is the loneliness related to emotional and intimate attachment and is less able to be alleviated from social support or social networks.”

Along with our individual identities, couples tend to form a joint identity with shared dreams for the future, as well as shared rituals and modes of supporting one another.

“When you lose that, you’ve lost a big part of your identity,” says Dan Auerbach, chief executive of Associated Counsellors and Psychologists Sydney. “You are now, in a sense, holding the dreams you once shared with someone else on your own and I think that can lead to a deep loneliness.”

According to Freak-Poli, loneliness isn’t always bad. “It is a human condition, a bit like being thirsty or hungry,” she says. “It’s saying we need something, or that we need to make changes.”

Prolonged grief and personalised support

When loneliness becomes long-term and persistent, however, it has serious consequences for our mental, physical and emotional health.

An Australian study from 2023 found that 21 per cent of bereaved adults over the age of 65 met the criteria for prolonged grief. Their quality of life was significantly lower and their loneliness was significantly higher compared to older people in the general population.

Auerbach says there isn’t a fixed time for how long grief lasts, but that if the intensity of it doesn’t start to shift within a year, there may be a need for some support to process it.

As for the loneliness component, Freak-Poli’s research suggests that, for most people, it starts to lift after about three years.

While loved ones may not be able to relieve the loneliness, they can listen, provide space for the person grieving to talk and check in regularly.

“Some of the most intense loneliness is felt in the evenings, when normally they would stay at home together,” says Ogrin. “Addressing this could involve planning doing something at this time, say going to visit a neighbour to watch TV together, so they aren’t alone.”

Beyond this, Freak-Poli says one-size-fits-all interventions to increase social interaction and support, such as exercise groups or buddy and mentorship programs, are unlikely to help: “What is needed is personalised help with a focus on creating new social connections and routines to form a sense of identity as an individual rather than as a couple.”

Depending on a person’s preferences, they might try book clubs, gardening workshops, or cooking classes, arts or hobby-based groups, volunteer programs or shared meals initiatives.

Ian accepted that even with social support, there would be no immediate relief from the pain or loneliness of his grief. Allowing himself to feel the fullness of his grief was the hardest part, and it “radically” changed him.

In the aftermath of Vera’s death, a friend said he had an opportunity to create a new self.

“I was really angry when he said that because I didn’t want that,” Ian says. “I wanted what I had before. But he was right.”

At the end of 2010, Ian, then 62, took the trip to Paris that he and Vera had dreamed of taking together.

He didn’t know if he could travel alone. And he didn’t know if he was emotionally ready.

“But I wanted to see if I could do it because the transition from first-person plural to first-person singular is really a difficult one, particularly when you’re used to making decisions jointly,” he says. “It was either stay in Maryborough where I was or venture out.”

There were times he wanted to wrap himself up in a ball in a corner somewhere and times when the loneliness felt severe.

But over time, he pushed himself to keep venturing out. He joined a camera club and took up tennis; he moved to Ballarat and became a mature-aged student studying an advanced diploma of photography. Ian travelled to Argentina to photograph the Andes on one side and, on the other, vast plateaus many millions of years old. It reminded him of the insignificance of his own life.

One of Ian Kemp’s photographs of an iris flower in his garden. Credit: Ian Kemp

“The other side of that is that I have irises in the backyard that grow and they flower for a week. Humanity has gone on for a long time, and we’re like the iris flower.”

Life’s transience became a theme of his photography, which he has now exhibited in multiple group and solo shows. It’s not the life he expected, but he has found a new identity and a life that feels fulfilling.

“When she died, it came upon me that life is finite in a way I hadn’t thought of before,” he says. “For me, it’s like, ‘well, if you only get one shot at it, you’d better make the best of your life and not waste it’.”

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