‘It takes two years to rewire the brain’: Remaking life as a widow

This story is part of the May 20 Edition of Good Weekend.See all 17 stories.

At the time we say it, “forsaking all others till death do us part”, the vow seems more about faithfulness than fate. We’re young and in love, the future stretching ahead, and it strikes us as a (possibly taxing) commitment to monogamy, not a prediction of sorrow in store. There it is, foreshadowed right from the start, like a curse from a wicked fairy godmother, but no one really believes death will step in and do the parting.

And so it was that Lucy Chambers* wasn’t unduly worried when she couldn’t reach her husband over the course of a crisp, autumn day in May 2014. She had come to Sydney for work and was staying with a friend. Her husband, Simon, was back home in Melbourne. Her calls had rung out but she knew he was “hopeless with his mobile”. By 10pm that night, when she still hadn’t heard back and he wasn’t answering the landline, she phoned and asked a neighbour to go around.

Whatever explanation she had turned over in her mind, it wasn’t this. The neighbour, a GP, rang soon after and broke the news that he’d found Simon dead. At the time, he thought Simon had had a heart attack; the cause of death would turn out to be a brain haemorrhage. Simon, fit and well, had just turned 70. Chambers was 55. Just like that, the man she’d spent 27 years with, the man she’d waved goodbye to at the airport with a “see you soon”, had disappeared.

However it happens – accident, long illness, stroke – that kind of unfathomable departure marks the beginning of a radical journey: from wife or partner, with so much of life’s meaning invested in the “other half”, to widow, whose task is first to survive the blow and then to reinvent herself.

The painful loss of a partner happens to men, too, of course – Julian Barnes, for one, wrote eloquently about the loss of his wife of almost 30 years in his book Levels of Life, and what is the story of Orpheus and Eurydice but the tale of a man’s grief? Overwhelmingly, however, it is women who are more likely to go through this life-shattering experience, mostly because they live longer. In the 2021 census, just over one million Australians identified as widowed; eight out of 10 of those were women.

It is a stage in life, a rite of passage, but no easier for its inevitability, no matter how old you are. Yet we tend to underestimate its significance, especially when it hasn’t happened to us. “Her husband died” or “his
partner died”; “to be expected”, we say sympathetically but matter-of-factly, not wishing to view the abyss.

“People would say to me, ‘Don’t say widow. Don’t call yourself a widow.’ It was almost as if I was saying something shameful about myself.”

Lucy Chambers

Widows and widowers used to be marked out. In Western societies, they put on black for a time, a tradition that has largely faded out. Queen Victoria wore her “widow’s weeds” for the rest of her long life after her consort Prince Albert died, to show she was still mourning. Those signifiers let others know to treat that person with care. On the other hand, they also removed women – men to a lesser degree – from the stream of life, and reduced their status.

Lucy Chambers finds the term “widow” still has negative connotations. “It’s hidden. We don’t want to talk about it,” says Chambers, now nine years on from Simon’s death and established in a new life. “People would say to me, ‘Don’t say widow. Don’t call yourself a widow.’ It was almost as if I was saying something shameful about myself. The word has got a real sting around it.”

It’s not the same for men, she says. Men become a prospect. “My brother was widowed four years before I was and no one ever called him a widower. He also became a valuable commodity. He was invited to everything. It got to a point where he felt he had to say, ‘My wife died eight months ago. I’m still grieving.’ ”

This idea that a widow is somehow “lesser” remains active in many parts of the world. It’s a state that can leave women destitute, abused, invisible. Some traditions still demand that widows shave their heads, wear white for life, eat from broken crockery or sleep on the floor, stay celibate, marry their polygamous brothers-in-law, or – as is still the case in parts of Nigeria, for example – see them blamed for their husband’s death and made to “prove their innocence” by drinking or washing in the water his corpse was bathed in. For the men, mourning is optional.

In the West, today’s widowed can feel invisible in a different way. A grief counsellor of some 40 years and the author of a 1990s book on grief, therapist Aurora Hammond suspects widows commanded more respect and understanding in the past. “Forty or 50 years ago, if a woman was single or a younger mother single with children, you knew it was probably because they were widowed. Now, so many women are separated or have never been in a long relationship that widows get lost in the mix somehow, as if they’re just another woman out there who is single, perhaps by choice, and yet it’s such a different experience.

“A lot of widows feel they should be coping like someone who has chosen to have a separation and is ready to move on, but it’s quite a different grief process, requiring a very different rearrangement of your identity, your self-concept.”

There is no way to be prepared for the wrench, say the bereaved, no matter how many times you might rehearse scenarios of “life without X”, as if to ward it off. The loss is not only of that person, more familiar than your own reflection. It’s also the loss of a partnered way of life, with all its small intimacies, jokes, shorthand, shared memories, protections, domestic rhythms.

in her memoir, novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote of how widowhood gave her a sense of feeling unmoored or even deranged: “I know that I am here but have a very vague idea of what here is.”Credit: Shutterstock

“Widowhood is the punishment for a being a wife,” writes novelist Joyce Carol Oates in her 2011 memoir, A Widow’s Story, detailing the first, anguished six months after her husband of 47 years died. It’s a very particular grief that dismantles lives. Sometimes it rewrites relationships – even the sourest or unsatisfying unions have been known to take on a golden glow after a partner dies. Longing, regret, a loss of direction, are some of the legacies.

Says Lucy Chambers: “It’s different to any other loss because it’s the dailiness. For me, the house was dead the minute I walked back in.”

A friend I talk to about widowhood is blunt: “People say, ‘Oh, he was the love of my life.’ No, he enabled you to be in a long, happy marriage. It’s the long, happy marriage that you want.” If so, it might explain why some people seek out a new partner with what can look like unseemly haste. It’s not that they don’t miss the person they loved, and go on missing them, but they can’t manage without that shared, supportive life. One Canadian study, published in the Journals of Gerontology in 2015, found that 29 per cent of men had repartnered within 10 years, compared with only about 7 per cent of women.

A man I know surprised us all by pairing up with another woman four weeks after his much-loved wife died. And Joyce Carol Oates herself, who seriously contemplated suicide for months after her husband’s death, met someone else six months later and married him within the year.

“Finding that intimacy again, that warm body, feels to me like the only way I can recover,” a widowed friend, five years in, tells me. “My daughter says to me, ‘Love yourself. Have a love affair with yourself!’ How do you do that?”

Another, in her 70s, found herself envying, if that’s the right word, young widows. “At least they have possibilities ahead,” she says, “not just a lonely old age.”

In fact, there’s never a good age to be widowed (nor is a lonely old age the only prospect). Brisbane woman Rebecca Adams, now 42, was 33 when her first husband died, unexpectedly, six weeks after they had married. She prefers not to discuss the details of his death but she has thought a lot about the experience of being a young widow.

“You need to learn who you are without that person. You feel very out of control because nobody chooses to be widowed and nobody wants it.”

Rebecca Adams

“I had the same thing said to me and I felt quite hurt by that, because on the flipside, I felt jealous that an older widowed person got to spend so much time with their loved one and I’d missed out on so much. I felt pretty ripped off that we had just started on this journey and hadn’t had the chance to make the memories together.

“And yes, while I have remarried, the pain around losing my first husband, the sadness, doesn’t go away. Whenever it happens, it’s difficult for everyone, so there’s no point in saying, ‘You’ve got it easier than me.’ ”

At any age, widowhood is an isolating experience. Adams found herself surrounded by peers enjoying married life and having children. The only people who really understood were other young widows. It prompted her to form a not-for-profit charity called First Light, based in Brisbane but operating nationally for younger widowed people. It offers support and resources to people of all genders and backgrounds, widowed in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s.

“Losing a spouse changes every single aspect of your life,” says Adams, “from basic things like where you sleep and what you eat, to who you call when you’re scared or happy or excited. You need to learn who you are without that person. You feel very out of control because nobody chooses to be widowed and nobody wants it.”

Rebecca Adams and her late first husband Daniel Collins. “I felt pretty ripped off that we … hadn’t had the chance to make the memories together.”Credit: Courtesy of Rebecca Adams

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On a rainy day in March, I visit another young widow. In late 2021, Naomi Tosic and her husband Boris featured in a Two of Us column in this magazine. Boris, then 56, had been diagnosed with motor neurone disease and the couple talked about facing the disease as courageously as they could. With help and a fierce love, Naomi cared for him at home until the very last. In January this year, Boris died, leaving behind Naomi, then 44, their two sons, 16 and 10, and three adult stepsons. Only nine weeks have passed when we meet but Naomi has bravely agreed to talk about these raw, early days.

She answers the door wearing a long, soft, grey cotton dress and black loafers, her bare face and loose hair making her look younger and more vulnerable than she had in photos. At any other time, I might be here to write about the Tosics’ extraordinary house in inner-city Sydney. Boris, originally Croatian, was a builder and designer with a big, charismatic and “emotionally complicated” personality – “my Picasso, a genius who can also be a bit of an arsehole”, Naomi will say later, fondly. Boris once described the house as “a love letter to my wife”. It’s a converted warehouse on five levels, with a dazzling art collection, long stretches of walnut cabinetry made by Boris, a black marble dining table that seats 12, and an enviable amount of designer furniture. In the kitchen, watery light streams through a glass-bottomed rooftop swimming pool. Everything about it speaks of an anticipated shared future.

Naomi is holding herself together as best she can. She’s both articulate and weepy, and seems to have set herself the task of doing grief well. So there’s strength and spiritedness, as well as something broken. It’s like watching steel bump into glass. When I apologise for intruding so early in her grief, she shakes her head.

“To me it feels like an eternity. Every moment you’re holding your grief and also trying to live your life,” she says. One of her “processes” has been momentum. A few weeks before we meet, she’d completed a 10-kilometre marathon in bushland in Gippsland, with no training. “I could feel Boris in the mountain air, in the trees. On the downhills, I was just bawling and running.”

She took up surfing when Boris was ill, at his urging, and still goes most days with a group of other women, even though it terrifies her. She has cried her way through that, too. “A little while ago, we were sitting waiting for waves and I overheard one of the women talking about a place Boris and I used to go on holidays. I thought, ‘Oh, I’m fine with that,’ and then I could just feel my grief coming up. I started paddling for the shore. About halfway in, I put my head on the board and just sobbed and sobbed. The girls came and got me and brought me in.”

“When your friends pass, or people you know, it’s a shock and there’s grief, but when it’s someone that is you, in a way, it’s so devastating. You become a unit and then that unit is broken.”

Naomi Tosic

Many widowed, including Naomi, speak of feeling unmoored, or floating above life, or living in a parallel universe, often for years. “Deranged” is the word Oates often invokes in her memoir: “I have become a sort of wraith, or zombie – I know that I am here but have a very vague idea of what here is.”

Says Naomi: “That constancy is so hard to lose. When your friends pass, or people you know, it’s a shock and there’s grief, but when it’s someone that is you, in a way, it’s so devastating. You become a unit and then that unit is broken. Our lives were completely enmeshed, in business, in family. At his 55th birthday, I gave a speech saying, ‘Boris is the sun we all orbit around.’ It’s like when a star dies. What happens to all the other elements? But we have to keep moving.”

The moment of his death is very fresh for Naomi, but many longer-term widows also hold intense feelings around that precise turning point. For Lucy Chambers, it took years to shake off her regret and guilt that she wasn’t with Simon when he died and never saw his body. “I kept feeling that somehow I could have rescued him if I’d been there, even though all the doctors kept telling me there was nothing I could have done.” A friend who lost her husband to dementia remains tortured by the notion she could have done more to ease his last terrible few weeks. Another can’t help reliving her husband’s final days with cancer, furious with the medical profession. It’s as if by going over that closing chapter, they might be able to change the ending.

Naomi Tosic with Boris, who died in January. Credit: Louise Kennerley

Boris Tosic’s two-and-a-half-year decline wasn’t easy on anyone. “He was like a wounded lion,” Naomi remembers. “It was rage born of terror and it was often directed at me. It was like walking through the valley of the shadow of death with him. An awful task but an unbelievable privilege, too.” Motor neurone disease is terrible and terminal. Naomi knew death was coming, yet it still stunned her when it happened, with family gathered around his hospice bed. “That moment was so bad, so horrible, so shocking. You have seen it coming but suddenly he’s not there, he has left us, and the horror of that, the howling grief. Everything falls away and you just have despair.”

The tears well up and we sit in silence for a moment before moving on. She agrees it’s hard for other people to know how to help. She found hand-written condolence letters a comfort but not texts, which demand an answer she hasn’t the strength to give. “Someone said to me, ‘Grief is love with nowhere to go’ and that’s it. Don’t tell me, ‘Time heals everything.’ Do not tell anyone time heals everything. That is a temporal distance from what’s happened but I’m still not with my husband. Sometimes time can make things worse.”

Right about now, a story like this is supposed to strike an uplifting and positive note. Something about, well, time healing everything, or widows discovering inner resources or even unanticipated pleasures and freedoms in the new life. (That happens, but not to a timetable.) We live in a death-denying culture where abiding sadness and sorrow is discouraged. At funerals, we prefer to talk of “celebrating” rather than “mourning”, as if changing the word will remove the sting. All in all, it’s seen as a bit of a moral failing to stay wretched for long.

But as both the widowed and therapists will tell you, there is no right way to behave, no “decent interval” in which to be “over it”. Many find the second year harder than the first. It’s we, the onlookers, who are in a hurry to paper over the pain. We do it from love, but also, frankly, out of our own discomfort. Or even for social reasons. As one widow said, “No one wants a widow weeping at their dinner party six months down the track. So it’s like, ‘Snap out of it!’ ”

Sympathy can be intense but limited. “At first you get all this attention and people’s understanding and being considerate, the calls and the casseroles,” says therapist Aurora Hammond, “and then you start to get people’s judgment. ‘She should be getting out and about by now’. Or ‘Surely you want to get on with life?’ ” Says Rebecca Adams: “Talking about grief is something people get very uncomfortable about. There’s that pressure: ‘I don’t know what to say’ or ‘What if I say the wrong thing?’. When my husband died, I even had friends who would send me a message after I’d seen them, saying, ‘I’m so sorry I didn’t ask you how you were doing. I didn’t want to bring it up and remind you.’ I would have been sitting there the whole time putting on a brave face, trying not to bring the mood down, but it’s not like I had forgotten my husband had died. It’s a kindness, people wanting you to be okay, but it also puts more pressure on you to bottle it up for their sakes.”

The widowed are already dealing with sleeplessness, exhaustion (perhaps after years of nursing care), trouble eating, and the unseasonable demands of legal and financial matters. That’s on top of the sadness and, for some, the seductive, though fortunately passing, idea of suicide.

“A lot of widows feel they should be coping like someone who has chosen to have a separation and is ready to move on, but it’s quite a different grief process, requiring a very different rearrangement of your identity, your self-concept.”

Aurora Hammond

It’s not just the heart that suffers, says Hammond, but also the body and the brain. “The thinking in therapy used to be, ‘It takes as long as it takes’ and ‘It’s different for everyone,’ ” she says, “but actually, the new brain research gives us much better parameters. So I say to people, look, your whole brain has to rewire itself now. If you’ve been married to someone a long time, everything in your life is geared around thinking, ‘Where is he?’ or ‘What’s she doing?’ or ‘He’s part of that’ or ‘We’re doing it together’. In other words, ‘we’ language, the household, everything. So every time you do that [after the person has died], your brain goes, ‘No, hang on, that’s a mistake, that’s wrong.’ And it’s exhausting, making that switch all the time.

“Now we know it takes about two years to rewire a brain. It’s a huge job, particularly for older women whose whole adult life has been being part of that marriage. The body feels it, too. If you’ve slept with somebody for 50 years and you’ve walked along holding hands or whatever, and suddenly that’s gone, it’s an enormous physical change.”

The month has been rain-soaked and the skies are still weeping when I visit writer Mary Moody in her house in Blackheath. As I pull up, I see her wandering down through the drizzle to advise about parking. On this drab day, the exuberant 72-year-old is dressed in a jumble of denim, colour and sparkle that ends in a pair of life-affirming orange shoes.

Moody, writer, long-time presenter on Gardening Australia and then tour guide, met her husband, David Hannay, a film and TV producer, when she was 21. The partnership lasted 43 years, surviving Hannay’s long absences for work and Moody’s best-selling book about living in France and having an affair there. But then in 2014, Hannay died, two years after a diagnosis of advanced oesophageal cancer.

David Hannay and Mary Moody. After he died, she realised the sense of courage their marriage had given her: “I’d felt I was brave … marching people up the Himalayas, racing around France behaving badly in my 50s.”Credit: Courtesy of Mary Moody

“At first it’s like part of you has been cut off,” Moody remembers now, “like a whole bit of me had gone. I felt unsafe. I was far from alone, with four children and 11 grandchildren, but there’s something about being in that one-on-one relationship, when it’s good. You feel cared for and loved. I had felt I was brave. I was marching people up the Himalayas and racing around France behaving badly in my 50s and I felt intrepid. But I realised I was actually incredibly dependent on David for that feeling of safety. That’s the rock, the foundation of your life.” Hannay also managed the day-to-day running of their lives. “I’m ashamed to say I’d never paid a bill in my life,” Moody admits.

Despite this and other painful losses since – including the death of a granddaughter and the suicide of one of her sons three years ago – Moody has not gone under. “My view now is that life throws a lot of tough things at you and you just have to accept that that’s its nature,” she says. Brave words although not quite accurate: she has been diagnosed with PTSD.

Hannay’s death made her realise you don’t truly understand the depth of such a loss until it happens to you. “I’d had about three or four friends who’d lost their husbands and I called them after David died and I said, ‘I’m just apologising for when your husband died, because even though I was very sympathetic and trying to be supportive, I didn’t have any idea of how you could have been feeling but now I do.’ I realised the awful place they had been in when I was trying to be ‘helpful’.”

Moody took up the offer of grief counselling. Most people do these days, not because the counsellor can make the pain go away but because, as Hammond says, “hopefully they’ll listen without trying to jolly you out of it or cheer you up, or remind you that you should be resilient”.

“I’m just apologising for when your husband died, because even though I was very sympathetic and trying to be supportive, I didn’t have any idea of how you could have been feeling but now I do.”

Mary Moody

It is difficult for friends to know the right thing to say or do. Even the grieving aren’t sure what that would be. Most agree it’s better for people to say something rather than nothing, but preferably not, “Let me know if there’s anything I can do” (no one ever does), or “How are you?” , especially in social situations. “It’s the worst thing you can say,” says Hammond, “because the other person is not allowed to say, ‘Actually, I’m crap, devastated, can’t get out of bed.’ They feel they have to hide their symptoms. It’s better to think about what might be soothing, or be specific in an offer of help, such as, ‘Will we just go for a quiet walk together?’, ‘Do you feel up to a coffee?’, ‘Will I just come round?’ ‘Do you want some company?’. ”

Another question widowed people are often asked is where they plan to live. “It’s quite insensitive,” one widow of eight years remembers thinking. “This is home. Some of his ashes are in the garden.”

Still, it’s complicated. For the grieving, the house turns into both a refuge and a rebuke. Oates writes that when she was out, she longed to be home. Once there, however, she was reminded that “home”, like life, had been drained of meaning. To stay or to move? To keep familiar possessions, laced with the beloved’s scent, their touch, or be rid of constant reminders? One widow says she couldn’t bring herself to wash the clothes in her husband’s laundry basket for three years.

Lucy Chambers couldn’t wait to move to a new place that didn’t constantly remind her of an absence. She never again slept in the marital bed Simon had died in, and threw herself into sorting out the house.

“I made lists. I was so ordered and rigid. I had to know where everything was. It was so out of my control that he went – I’d taken my eyes off him and he’d disappeared – and now I was trying to control everything.” Before long, she started looking for a new home interstate. “I went into this block and this young real estate agent said, ‘So, what are you looking for?’ And I said, ‘I’m not really sure, I don’t even know if I want to live in Sydney. And anyway, my husband has just died.’ And he said, ‘Okay, stop. You have no idea who you are then, do you?’ And I said, ‘No, I suppose I don’t.’ And he said, ‘Well, then you cannot buy a place in Sydney in that state.’ He stopped me making all sorts of mistakes. He was so wonderful.”

Even if they don’t sell the house, the newly widowed often feel restless. Many go travelling or seek out significant figures from their past. An older woman I know went to Greece after her husband died and had a furious love affair, proving lust and grief can go hand in hand. (There’s even a name for this unexpected burning desire for sex that can follow bereavement: widow’s fire.) Naomi Tosic went with her boys and her brother’s family to Disneyland the day after her husband’s funeral on January 14. “I had booked it eight months before, because his prognosis was that he wouldn’t be here by August, let alone January. It was crazy but it was locked in and I wanted our little one, who’s 10 and has autism, to know that life would go on and there were things to look forward to,” she says. “So it’s like, when you feel the worst, go to the happiest place on earth. I was happy on that trip, but it’s the bit on top when everything is terrible underneath. You can have those moments.”

Mary Moody feels it took her four years to feel grounded again. As she said in her book The Accidental Tour Guide, the book she wrote about that time: “The ‘old’ me needed to stand aside and allow the remade version of myself to emerge.” To her surprise, she found herself in a new relationship five years after Hannay’s death, with a widower.

Lucy Chambers has never wanted a new relationship and is living a fulfilling and creative life in her light-filled apartment in Sydney’s east, waking to swaying trees and birdsong. Rebecca Adams has remarried and had children, and found purpose in running First Light. Naomi Tosic, still deep in her grief, is focused on looking after her boys as well as giving herself time to be confused and sad.

She texts me one evening after she has been out to the cemetery to sit by Boris’s grave. I try to think of something comforting in reply that isn’t an empty platitude. In the end, I send her a paraphrased line from writer Samuel Beckett that seems true of how we survive suffering: “I must go on. I can’t go on. I go on.”

She says it’s going to become her mantra. Perhaps it’s enough for her now, in these bleak early days. A widow who is eight years on and has learnt to live again says this: “People expect it to go away but you never get over it, it never goes away. It just changes. Someone gave me a poem that said this sort of loss finds its place in the shape of things, and as life continues, the shape of things changes and the place it occupies changes. And that’s what happens.”

* Name has been changed.

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