The loss of a life partner can catapult us into a world of unrelenting pain and enormous uncertainty. As we’re forced to navigate this new and intensely overwhelming chapter of our lives, just surviving can feel impossible let alone the idea of embracing hope and healing in widowhood. But as difficult as healing, indeed surviving can feel, it’s our responsibility - and ours alone. No-one else is going to do it for us. And so no matter how fractured and devastated we feel, at some point we need to confront our grief and work through it. 

Although grief is a uniquely personal experience and everyone navigates it differently, there are things we can do as widows that will accelerate our journey towards hope, healing and happiness. In this blog, I’ll identify four of these strategies and explore how they can help us to ease our grief and re-engage with life once more.

Taking charge of our grief is not easy. It requires immense strength, resilience and courage. But if we choose to tackle ...

Christmas can be an exceptionally difficult time of year for widows. Being surrounded by families celebrating the festive season can inflame our grief and re-awaken painful memories of happier times that we used to spend with our partners. Receiving cards from others filled with their highlights of the year just gone, or social media notifications of people’s plans for the future can simply reinforce our loss and remind us of the future with our loved one that we had mapped but will never now enjoy. It’s therefore common for many of us to take a few steps back in our grief journey over the Christmas period, as we become overwhelmed by the acuteness of our loss. 

So with this tricky holiday season fast approaching, I wanted to give you a little pep talk - a few short words of encouragement that will help you realise how courageous, inspiring and incredible you are. I want us to be able to reframe Christmas so that it becomes a time of positive reflection, an opportunity for us to celeb...

When we lose a loved one, our world goes into a tailspin. We lose our sense of reality and purpose and often struggle just to exist day-to-day.  During this phase of raw grief, it’s natural to lean on those around you, to rely on friends, family and colleagues for emotional and practical support. However, navigating relationships with others after loss can become challenging because as our world shifts, our perspective on life changes and this can alter the dynamics of our relationships with others. 

Some people -  perhaps those we least expect to - will step up. Others however may withdraw, or not show up in the way we expect or need them to. This can feel earth-shattering and compound our existing grief, as we’re left to process this loss as well as the passing of our loved one. It can leave us feeling rejected, angry - even betrayed and it can profoundly alter our ability to trust and invest in others.

This blog will explore why our relationships with others can feel different whe...

As the clock ticks down to midnight on New Year’s Eve, people across the world are filled with a sense of anticipation and excitement. For them, the beginning of a new year marks a fresh start, a chance to celebrate with loved ones and look forward to the future with renewed optimism. However, for widows, the new year can be a really difficult time. It brings into sharp focus all that we’ve lost, reminds us of the future we’ve been robbed of and can accentuate the pain, despair and loneliness we’ve spent the year battling through.

In this blog, I’ll provide widows with a few practical tips on how they can navigate those tricky last few days of December and step into the new year with more confidence, purpose and a greater sense of peace.

#1 Lean into your emotions 

When we lose a life partner, the new year can set us apart from others. As they look forward to the coming year and all the hope, opportunity and excitement that it brings, we are weighed down by the heaviness of our grie...

 In many ways, guilt is grief’s unwanted companion and it shows up for so many of us, in so many ways. We feel guilty for what we did or didn’t do, for what we said or didn’t say, for not being enough, for surviving, for carving out a new life for ourselves, or for finding some joy in the midst of our grief. And we feel guilty for feeling guilty. It’s relentless. This blog will try to explain why we feel so guilty and explore some of the ways in which we can manage this guilt, for although it is natural to feel guilty during grief, it doesn’t have to be a constant reality. We don’t need to continually beat ourselves up. We can find our way through it and give ourselves permission to live a fulfilling life again.

Why do we feel guilty when we grieve?

Irrational guilt - the ‘shoulda, woulda, couldas’

Guilt during grief is so common and more often than not it stems from what we perceive to be our own inadequacy. When our loved one passes, we can start to fixate on the things we could h...