10 Things I Wish I Knew As A New Widow | 5 Years Later, What Actually Helps| BW: 205

[TRANSCRIPT BELOW]

If you’ve ever wondered what your future self would say to you 5 years after losing your spouse, this episode is for you. July 17 marked 5 years since my husband Nathan died, and I sat down with our Momentum Monday community to share the 10 things I wish I had known as a brand‑new widow.

 

Brave Widow Resources  

• Brave Widow Academy (apply or book a call): https://bravewidow.com/academy
• Learn more about Brave Widow Foundations (gentle, faith‑based support for the first seasons of grief):👉 bravewidow.com/foundations
• Join the free Brave Widow Community: https://bravewidow.com/free

 

We talk about feeling like a zombie, wondering if you’ll ever laugh and mean it again, how unprocessed grief can show up in your body, why “bad days” don’t mean you’re going backwards, and the brutal belief that moving forward means leaving your person behind. I also share how my faith shaped the way I think about time, legacy, and building a life Nathan would be proud of.

 

You will hear live reactions and questions from other widows who joined this Momentum Monday call, so you can imagine your future self and your widow friends sitting with you as you listen.

 

Chapters

0:00 Five Years Out: A Message From Your Future Widow Self
2:00 1 - You Really Can Feel Like A “Normal” Human Again
4:00 2 - When Unprocessed Grief Shows Up In Your Body
7:30 3 - You’re Not Going Backwards In Your Grief
11:30 4 - Moving Forward Is Not Leaving Them Behind
16:00 5 - Healing Comes From Action, Not Just Time
21:30 6 - Expanding Your Capacity For Grief And Joy
25:30 7 - Your Life Grows Where Your Attention Goes
30:00 8 - You Don’t Have To “Find Yourself” – You Decide Who You’ll Be
36:00 9 - The Story You Tell Matters More Than What Happened
39:00 10 - Not Everyone Will Understand (And That’s Okay)
43:00 Bonus - You Were Never Meant To Do This Alone
46:00 How To Get Support Inside The Brave Widow Community

 

 

Subscribe for more faith‑based, hopeful grief support for widows:
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💬 If this episode helped you, please: 

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• Share this with a friend who’s facing grief or the holidays without their person

 

If you’re new here, my name is Emily Tanner. I’m the founder of Brave Widow and Brave Widow Academy.

 

I help widows move from barely surviving their loss… to rebuilding a life they can actually love again without feeling like they’re betraying their person.

 

By day (and for 20+ years), I’ve led large teams and complex operations in the corporate world. 

 

After my husband Nathan died in 2021, just shy of our 20-year anniversary, I took everything I knew about leadership, systems, and change — and started applying it to grief.

 

Since then, I’ve:

Shared my story publicly to make widows feel less alone.

Launched the Brave Widow podcast, now with 180+ episodes and listeners around the world.

Coached hundreds of widows 1:1 and in groups, and talked with thousands more through the podcast, communities, and events.

Built Brave Widow Academy, a 6-month coaching program with a clear framework for moving from deep grief to rebuilding a life you can love again.

 

I don’t teach “just think positive” grief tips.

 

I teach widows how to:

Heal their heart.

Stop waiting on “time” to fix everything.

Take small, brave steps toward a life that feels meaningful again.

 

How I Got Here…

 

2021: My husband Nathan dies unexpectedly. I’m 4 kids in, overwhelmed, and drowning in paperwork, decisions, and pain. Therapy helps, but I still feel stuck with no roadmap.

 

2021–2022: I start devouring books, interviewing widows, trying grief groups, and studying coaching — desperate to find something that actually helps me feel different.

 

2022: I start the Brave Widow podcast, recording episodes while terrified and crying between takes — but determined that no widow should feel as alone as I did.

 

Year 1: I begin coaching widows 1:1. Word spreads quietly. The same patterns and problems keep showing up, so I start building frameworks instead of one-off advice.

 

Year 2: I launch Brave Widow Academy — a structured, 6-month coaching program with a step-by-step path: from deep grief, to stability, to rebuilding.

 

Year 3: Brave Widow has listeners around the world. I’ve personally coached hundreds of widows and spoken with thousands more through consults, lives, emails, and DMs. 

 

Today: My work is simple:

 

Help widows stop surviving each day… and start rebuilding a life that makes them genuinely glad to be alive again.

---

TRANSCRIPT:

 

Speaker 2: [00:00:00] If you've ever wondered what you would say to yourself five years from being widowed, this episode is for you. This is episode 205 of The Brave Widow Show. July 17th made five years from the date that my late husband, Nathan, died. Five years. It feels crazy to say, and even crazier some days to live.

So it really got me thinking, what are the top things that I wish I knew five years ago? There's so many conflicting messages out there. There's so many fears and questions and just wondering, "Am I normal? Will I ever feel normal again? What is life gonna look like in the future?" And so if I could travel back in time, I would speak these top 10 things to myself.

I can't do that, so instead, I'm gonna speak into each one of you [00:01:00] who are earlier on in your widowhood journey. And if this resonates with you, you can just imagine that this is your future self coming back to speak these words into you. Today's also special because every Monday in our free community, we have what we call Momentum Monday calls.

So for our Momentum Monday call, because this was a special episode, they actually got to participate in the podcast. And I told them not to worry. They weren't gonna be on camera. I wasn't gonna share their full names. I wasn't gonna put them on the spot. I was just gonna read their first name and their comments in the chat.

So you'll be able to see or at least hear from them what their perspective was as I was sharing my top 10 things, and what other things they would add, too. Let's dive in.

Speaker: Okay, so 10 things I wish I knew as a widow five years ago. The first thing that [00:02:00] I wish I knew was that you can feel like a normal human again. When I was first widowed, I felt like a zombie. I felt like hollow on the inside and just, like, I was kind of floating through life. I felt somewhat like when you have a newborn and you're just sleeping for an hour every two or three hours, and so you don't ever feel rested.

You don't feel like you can do things or think clearly. You just feel like you're kinda going through the motions and barely holding it together. That's how I felt for a long time. I even had insomnia. Most nights I could sleep for two or three hours, but then I would wake up and not be able to go back to sleep.

So there's a lot of furniture that got put together in those first few months 'cause I felt super wired and awake and productive. But ultimately, I felt very empty on the inside. And one of the things that I struggled [00:03:00] with was I didn't know. Is it gonna be like this forever? Am I ever gonna have moments where I can laugh and actually feel it on the inside?

Will I ever have anything that I can feel excited about again? Will it always just feel like I'm frozen in time, and everyone else and time are just marching past me, and I'm just stuck here? Like, is this just how it's going to be? And so what I wish I would've known, this first one here, is that, yes, you can feel like a normal human again.

And in the beginning, it comes like little glimmers, like little sprinkles of moments that maybe last for a few seconds, but you can have those moments where you laugh and you feel it in your soul. Or you experience something and you light up, and you're like, "Whoa, I didn't even know that was possible." Or you have something that you're actually [00:04:00] excited about, and then maybe you go, "Ooh, but should I?

Is that wrong? Ugh how can I say I'm excited about something when I'm still grieving my spouse? That's probably wrong." It's not Okay? So you can feel like a normal human again. Karen says, "I also went into overdrive during these moments." Yes. Yes. Okay. The second thing I wish I knew is that unprocessed grief will manifest in the body.

So there are some people who take a proactive approach to grief, and that would be everyone here. You're here. You're learning. You're talking with other people, so you are processing grief. You're taking a, a proactive forward movement in grief. But there are many people who push grief down into the body, and we're often tempted to distract ourselves.

In grief recovery method, we call these things [00:05:00] STERBs, or short, short-term energy relieving behaviors. Say that 10 times fast. But these are things that we often turn to to numb ourself, to zone out, to focus on something else. You may have heard the expression retail therapy. So I was a retail putter of items in the shopping cart online.

I didn't actually buy a lot of things, but I would spend a lot of time just looking at things and putting them in the cart, and then being like, "Okay, I'm good," and clicking off of the website or whatever it was. But these are things that we do to just kind of distract ourselves from grief, but we can do them to an extent that becomes the thing that we're turning to.

People may turn to alcohol, or people may turn to drugs or other things to numb out, to distract ourselves, to suppress the emotion. You may have heard the term, like when people say they just swallowed their feelings. "Oh, I have something I want to say, and I'm [00:06:00] gonna shove it back down. I'm gonna be strong.

I'm gonna get through this. It's gonna be okay." But at the end of the day, unprocessed emotion, unprocessed hurt and pain pushed down into the body long term show back up in the body. And so this may be chronic illness, it may be physical injuries, it may be a chronic pain that you develop over time. It might be stomach ulcers.

It might be back pain. It might be all kinds of things. There are some studies out there that even provide body charts for where unprocessed emotion shows up in the body. And I remember when I first looked at one I've always, as long as I can remember, even as a teenager, I've always had, like, back pain in, in my upper back, like between my shoulder blades.

And I just, I don't know, I just always thought I was weird and I had back pain, [00:07:00] even at 16 or 17 years old. And I looked at this chart and it was like, oh, if you have chronic pain in this part of your body, that means you've never felt emotionally supported. And I was like, whoa, this book is calling me out.

What's going on with this? And so it's not just grief, but unprocessed grief will show up in your body. So even though talking about what you've experienced is hard, unpacking what you lived through can feel really heavy. If you don't allow yourself that opportunity, you shove it down into your body, it will come back up out of your body.

Oh, this is a great question from Donna. On the opposite end, how much crying is too much crying? I think there's a lot we could dig into with that question. I think where I would want to [00:08:00] dig a little deeper with someone, or where I would want to have some awareness, is if I'm struggling to function. I'm crying all the time and I can't get out of bed, or I can't eat, or I don't wanna take a shower for days on end, where I'm really struggling to just function day to day, that may be a great indicator that I want to find a really great therapist, or I wanna find someone that I'm privately working with to really process those types of things.

That's the first thing there that comes to mind All right. Number three, you aren't going backwards. So how many of you have ever felt like you're going backwards in your grief? Or like, "I was doing better, I was doing better, I was doing better, and then all of a sudden, boom. I had a really hard day," or a big grief wave that hit or something that happened, and now I feel like I'm starting over at square one.

All the [00:09:00] hard work I've done, all the processing, all... everything I've done has just unraveled and I've started over Okay? What I would want, what I wish I would've known five years ago is that this is actually normal. We think that with grief, it's like very linear, right? Oh, I'm getting better, I'm getting better, I'm getting better, and it's just this straight line that goes upwards.

And the reality is that there are lots of ups and downs along the way. It's kind of like the S&P 500 of the stock market. There are ups and there are downs, but if you look at it over time, the general trending line is upwards, but it's not perfectly straight. There are a lot of ups and downs along the way.

And so how I think about it is that as we have these waves of grief, that we're learning the tools that are [00:10:00] helpful. We're learning the things that we can do that are helpful when these waves of grief come up. So we're like learning how to ride the waves of grief. We're learning how to surf. And in the beginning, we don't have the skills.

We don't have the tools. We don't have the knowledge. Like, we just have nothing, so it's like a wipeout, right? I know nothing about surfing, but that's just how I visualize it in my head is like, well, of course I can't ride this wave of grief. Of course it's like slammed me down and overwhelmed me, and I feel incredibly lost, and I don't even know which way is up because I don't have any of the skills.

I d- I don't know anything that will help me. Grief is just really overwhelming. And so over time, I get better at riding those waves. Over time, those waves aren't intimidating, or they really don't control me and own me the way that they did, and they even change over time. But I still have the skills and the tools and the ability to know how to ride those waves and what best helps me when those [00:11:00] things come up.

A lot of times, what I notice is that it may be a time of year that was important emotionally to me. It may be a milestone. It may be a holiday or a birthday or something like that's just pulling up those feelings. July 17th, just a few days ago, it was the fifth year anniversary, if you will, of Nathan's, the day that Nathan died.

And so even though it's been five years, it's still just this weird like reckoning of, wow, it's been five years. Like, man, look how much life has changed. Look how different life is. Like, I'm actually older than Nathan now. That's really weird. Our daughter is turning 16 this week, and her 11th birthday was the day after Nathan's funeral, and so like all of that's weird.

And then my birthday is coming up, and [00:12:00] then Nathan and I, our anniversary is August 11th. And so it's all kind of like packed in there around the same time of year, and then we start to move into the big holidays here at the end of the year. And so of course there are gonna be those things that come up or that bring memories or that carry reminders of, oh yeah, this happened at that time of year.

And so that might make grief feel more real and in front of us. But as my coach, Dr. Betsy, taught me, we can't unheal what we've healed. We're not really going backwards. We're not going back to square one. We're just facing a wave of grief, or we're just facing a time of year or something that's difficult.

So if you experience that, it's not that you're broken. It's not that there's anything wrong with you. And what I have learned to do over time is just to [00:13:00] give myself so much grace and compassion and to start to do the things that allow me to feel supported, allow me to feel like it's okay if I need to just slow down for a little bit and start to just give myself some time here

Karen says, "I wish others would have understood the waves. Now it doesn't matter so much because I've learned to go through it and let it go. Self-coaching." I love that. Yeah. Yeah. That's, I think, one of the hardest things too is that so many people just don't understand or haven't gone through it, which maybe is on my list.

We'll see. Okay, number four. Every day that passes or our ability to move forward does not mean we're leaving our person behind. And I'm gonna pause on this one 'cause I think it's a belief that so many of us have in the beginning. Well, if I move forward, I'm leaving my person behind. [00:14:00] If I build a new life, that means I don't care about my old one.

It's very all or nothing. Okay? You might have heard of all or nothing thinking. This is a great illustration of that. But then one day someone explained it to me in a little bit of a different way, and they said, "Do you believe that you're gonna see Nathan again?" I said, "Well, yeah. I'm gonna see him in heaven.

Like, I believe that. I do believe I'll see him again." And they said, "Okay. So then every day that passes isn't a day you're moving further away from him. It's actually a day closer to the time that you'll see him again." And I thought that was such a beautiful way to think about it like, oh, wow, every day that I'm stepping forward is another day that I'll get to see him again.

And another thought that I had here is that I didn't want his legacy to be that I died with him. I didn't want him to [00:15:00] see, or I didn't wanna see, that his death also wa- his, the end of his life was also the end of mine. And that was a really hard point. This was about a year and a half after he died that I came to this realization, if you will, and some of you have heard me talk about that moment on the bench where I was like, "This is gonna be the end of me if I keep living like this.

Th- this is like my body, my heart, my chest cannot take this. And so I have a decision that I have to make." And it didn't seem possible, and it didn't seem right, and it didn't seem fair. But also, I was like, "I want him to be proud. I wanna be proud of what I do with what's rest- the rest of my life, and I don't know if I'll ever enjoy it again, but I don't want it to be over at the age..."

At the time, I was 38. I was like, "At 38, my life peaked, and now it's just all downhill." Like, that sounded awful. [00:16:00] And so we have a choice to step forward and to build a new life, not to leave them behind, but in a way where we're weaving them into this new life and we're honoring the love that we shared between us.

We're honoring who they were as a person and who they inspired us to be. Nathan was always my biggest cheerleader and my l- biggest advocate, and any time I was frustrated or overwhelmed with work or something that was going on, he was always my biggest encourager. So I wanted that to continue, that he would be proud and he would be encouraging me along the way Patty, that was one of the things that helped me when I started to coach with you.

Yeah. So we can have so much guilt about building up this new life as if it's... People think about it like, oh and sometimes people will say that, like, "Oh, you're just out there living your best life." And it's like it's not like I'm just so happy that I was put in these circumstances, but at the same time, [00:17:00] that doesn't mean that I'm a prisoner of it.

I'm not subject to living a dismal, sad life for the rest of it because of w- my circumstances of what I've experienced Okay, number five. One of my favorite quotes from the Grief Recovery Institute was and is, "The key to recovery in grief is action, not time." A life that you can enjoy and love again one day comes from building it intentionally, not giving it time.

Time passes. Time is neutral So is time an ingredient in the recipe? Yeah. It's like losing weight. It's like learning to play the piano. It's like learning a new language. Those things take time, but not just time. Time plus consistent action. Time only gives you more of what you're doing and [00:18:00] experiencing now.

If I want my investment in the stock market to grow, it does take time, but time's only gonna give me more of what I invest. So if I only invest a dollar, time only gives me more of my $1. If I invest $500, time compounds and interest compounds on that $500. It's the same with healing and grief. It's the same with building a life that feels full and vibrant, not one that feels empty.

Time gives you more of what you're doing, of what you're investing, of what you're focusing on. So time is required, yes. We can't magically have a amazing new life tomorrow. But if we continue doing what we're doing today, we're going to have more of what we have today So I know that is no one in the room that's here with me because you're [00:19:00] doing today what is gonna serve you, what is gonna help you long-term in the future.

Time is gonna give you more possibility, hope, healing, belief, outcome. It's going to give you more of that

Karen, "Continuing in music is also Ben's legacy." Yes. Donna says, "I'm finding it's exhausting taking action. I know I'm early in grief, but I've been trying to action, accepting invitations, meeting new people, et cetera." Yeah, and, and I would say, Donna, that sometimes, especially early in grief, our action is to heal, to process, to rest.

I think about it a lot and, and what we talk about in grief recovery method is just, like, if you broke your arm, okay? If you broke your arm and you just gave it time to heal, could your arm heal? Sure. [00:20:00] Bones can fuse back together. Sure. Is it gonna heal in a, a way that allows you to, to function and to use it the way you've used it in the past, or is it gonna heal the best way?

Maybe, maybe not, depending on how you broke it. In fact, if you don't seek medical care for your broken arm, a, an orthopedic surgeon may have to re-break your arm to set it correctly, to put it in a cast to allow it to heal. So the action is rest and recovery and healing. So that's how I would maybe even encourage you to think about that, is not action doesn't always mean I'm doing more, I'm giving more, I'm pushing, I'm putting myself in uncomfortable situations.

Action can also be I'm gonna be intentional about doing things that heal my heart, that heal my nervous system, that allow me to connect with other people Maybe I'm trying to do too much right now. I think it's definitely worth us [00:21:00] exploring, and it's something that we could talk through. 'Cause I think in the beginning in the beginning, it's helpful to get our feet underneath us and to...

I think about it as inviting people in. So inviting someone to come and sit on my couch while we watch Netflix and chit-chat and have ice cream. Okay, maybe that's your thing, maybe it's not. But less of a pressure of like, oh, I have to go meet new people, and I have to try new activities, and I have to do these things.

Like, there is a period of time where we just need to allow our heart to heal, and it can be super overwhelming and over-stimulating to try to push and push ourselves to do a lot when what we need is just some recovery time. So I can kind of, I can help you kind of sort out what feels the most supportive to you, but I would take some of that pressure off of your shoulder.

And how I think about it with time and with healing is that [00:22:00] my role as a coach is to push people just outside the comfort zone, but not over the cliff. And so there's somewhere in the middle there where I want you to do things that are uncomfortable, but not to the point of your own detriment, not to the point where you shame yourself because it's overwhelming to go to a concert or to the mall or to go to a place that's new.

I didn't start doing that till a year and a half out. Of course, I also felt extremely lost and wasn't sure if I was doing things " the right way." So we can definitely help you with that. Sue says, "I felt like I had to learn to sit, crawl, and stand before I could walk again with support from others." Oh, I love that.

I love that analogy, and I think it's incredibly helpful to not be isolated. So I think that's why it helps to invite someone, like, into our space or to sit with us in the awkwardness and the uncomfortable just season of life that we're [00:23:00] in. And then when you're ready to say, "Okay, I'm ready to go out. I'm ready to make new friends.

Like, I feel like this is the right time," then we can do those things. But we could definitely help you decide what's gonna be the right, right action to help you right now. But that was a great point. Either way- Whether we're in a season of deep grief and we're a season of healing and recovery and restoration, that comes from intention.

Or we're in a season of rebuilding, of expanding, of adding more and creating this very vibrant life, that comes from intention. Either way, living with the belief that I just need to give it time is, and time alone, let me save you many years of your life. It's not time alone. Okay, number six You can expand your capacity for more Okay?

I, this is something I wish that I knew. [00:24:00] Uh, this is something that would have saved me a lot of guilt. And so in the beginning, we don't have much capacity for more, right? And we just talked about this on our foundation's call of in the beginning, our brain isn't even working the way it normally works.

Our nervous system is all dysregulated. Life is super overwhelming and chaotic, and we've taken on all these additional responsibilities and tasks that we didn't used to have to do, and we feel like we have no more capacity than what's right in front of us. It's like I have me, I have my grief, I have this giant list of things that I need to do, and I have no ability to hold anything else.

And so over time, what we can do is we can learn to hold grief and gratitude

Sorrow and joy. Both at the same time together. Okay? In the beginning, you don't have that capacity. In the beginning, it's like, no, I'm supposed to be sad, [00:25:00] and I've gotta hide in my grief, and I can only be sad. I'm not allowed to laugh. I'm not allowed to experience anything good. It's only bad. It's only bad for me.

It's like we're, again, a prisoner. We're, like, paying for our sins of, like, of being in grief, right? If I'm gonna be a good widow, only sadness. That's it. Only grief, only sadness. That's all I can feel. That's all I'm gonna allow myself to feel. That's all I'm capable of. And so sometimes for people, not everyone, but for sometimes we'll catch ourselves laughing at a movie or forgetting for, like, 30 seconds about our situation, or maybe we work up the courage to go be with friends or to go to an event, and we feel like we had a, a decent time.

And then people are like, "Oh, look at you. You're, you're better now." And we're like, "No, no, no, no, no. I'm only in my grief. That's it. I can't even let them see me. Can't even let them think that I'm beyond that." We feel it's [00:26:00] one or the other, but you can expand your capacity to hold two emotions or two concepts that feel opposite but both are true.

Okay? So you can hold grief and you can hold joy You can love the life that you had, and you can love your person, and you can love the life that you have now And for a lot of people, it's really hard to wrap your mind around, especially if you're in the early stages of grief and you're like, "I- how would that even be possible?

I don't even know When you have those thoughts, just reflect on, "I don't have... Maybe I just don't have the capacity. I haven't grown the capacity for that. I don't even see how I could have the capacity for that." And sometimes I get hate-erade in the comments, right? Where people are like, "Oh, well, because you're remarried, your grief is healed, and you forgot about Nathan, and, you know, you're not worried about your old life anymore.

You're focused on bigger and better things. You're focused on living your best life out there." And it's like, what? [00:27:00] No. In fact, dating or remarrying can open up a whole nother can of worms, not to mention blending a family. Lots of challenges. We have five teenagers and young adults between us, and it's a challenge, okay?

But I've learned how to stretch and to grow my capacity. And so in the beginning, it feels like a rubber band that's being stretched really, really, really, really tight, and it gets so tight that you're like, "If I have one more thing, it's just, the whole thing's just gonna snap and I'm gonna fall apart."

And then you will experience growth, and there will be this release, and now you can stretch your capacity for more

I was on a flight one time for maybe five hours. I'm like, "Wow, that's a really long flight. Ugh, I can't do it. How do people fly for, like, 20 hours? How do they do it? I just, I can't do it. It's just too much." And I thought, like, "That's just too much," until I was on a flight for 15 hours. And I was on a [00:28:00] middle seat in a section of six seats, and I had two of my kids on either side wallowing all over me trying to sleep.

My knees were jammed into the back of the seat in front of me, and, like, no space at all, for 15 hours. I wanted to crawl out of my skin. I'm, like, pacing by the bathroom because I did not wanna go back to my seat and sit there. We ended up traveling for 48 hours straight Through LAX, through Australia, through New Zealand.

Like, it was a crazy long trip. But guess what? My capacity for long flights, how big do you think it is now Yeah. I've been on a 15-hour flight. Like, a five-hour flight, that's nothing. An eight-hour flight, we just went to Italy, it was almost a nine-hour flight, and I'm like, "Yeah, I got it. No problem. I can handle it," because I grew my capacity.

I was, grew what I was capable of, and you can too. It is possible to hold multiple emotions, multiple [00:29:00] concepts at the same time Okay. Karen says, "Grief and gratitude. Praise God he gave me this insight early rather early on." Yes. Yeah. Because to me it also felt like you could only experience one or the other.

But let's be honest, how much of our life is just one emotion? How much of our life is just we're happy all the time, even before we became widows? Like, life is complicated, and some of my best days have also had some of my hardest moments. So we do this more often than we even realize. All right. Number seven, your life becomes more of what you focus on.

Where you place your inte- attention, your future is going to grow. If you wanna find joy again, you have to choose to f- look for joy to find it. And this is more of a life coaching thing than necessarily just a [00:30:00] grief related thing. But there are so many things in our life that we can choose to look for and we can choose to focus on, and this is not a way of diminishing grief or saying, "Well, you wouldn't be so sad if you would focus on things that make you happy."

No, not at all But I can choose in my healing journey what I focus on. Am I gonna focus on the people that tell me it never gets better, and life is always hard, and your grief never goes away, and life's just gonna be difficult, and your best days are behind you, and now it's all just hopeless and pointless?

If I focus on that, my brain's gonna look for all the ways that's true. It's gonna look for every time I have to call the plumber, and every time I have to fix a tire, and every time something goes wrong, my brain goes, "See? Your life is just gonna be awful now. It's just gonna be awful." Versus I could choose to give attention and to focus on the people that say it [00:31:00] is possible to enjoy life again.

Yeah, grief is hard, and you lear- you can heal your heart. You can learn to find hope. It... There is a roadmap. There is a way it can get better. And so when those things happen, I can look at those situations, and I can decide, like, "Oh, man, just another thing that I have to deal with that my, you know, my person used to handle, and now I'm handling it.

This is really hard right now, but I'm gonna believe that it could be better." When I was sharing the story of the day before I was leaving for the retreat, and we were having all of these issues with the internet out at our Airbnb, our cabin, it was the second or third time that I drove an hour and a half one way to go out there, where I was just scratching and clawing for any sort of joy because I was very not joyous on that day.

It was really tough. Like, 48-hour period of time. Plus, I was nervous about the retreat, I [00:32:00] was dropping stuff left and right like I already shared. Like, it was just, um, a little chaotic there for a couple of days. And I just remember, like, "No I'm not going to focus on all the misery that I've experienced, all the hours on the phone with service people who are not giving you any level of service except frustration.

All the 'Ah, if, if it would've just been this one little thing, it would've been so much better.' I'm not gonna focus on that. I'm gonna focus what can I control in this situation? Right now it doesn't feel like a lot, but I can choose to focus on the things I can control. Okay? I can control what car I choose to drive down there, so I'm gonna get out of my Tahoe, I'm gonna go get in my old Camaro, put the top down, blast some music, and try to enjoy the ride down there, even though I didn't wanna go.

I'm gonna choose what I listen to on the way down there. I'm gonna choose who I respond to via text message or who I'm like, 'I'm not even worried about that right now.'" Like, I can't [00:33:00] control everything, but I can control a few little things, and that's what I'm gonna focus on, and I'm gonna just search and claw and scratch and fight for anything positive in what felt like very difficult days Okay, number eight.

You are not lost. You don't have to find yourself. You get to decide now who you want to be. And one of the things that made the most sense was the harsh truth that I share with you guys I'd heard on Dr. John Delony's podcast, and he was talking about grief, and he was talking about the death of a loved one.

And he just said that when you experience something like that, the loss of your spouse, your old life is over. It's an ash, and you can't go back. You can't go back to the past. You can't go back to the person you were. You can't go back to the relationship that you [00:34:00] have, but you can decide to build something new And at first I thought, "Wow, that's just really mean."

W- wow, I can't believe you just said that. That's harsh. But then I was like, okay, that makes sense. Like, we are already in our new life, and it's very disorienting because since we lost our person and since we became one with that person, it's like half of us is gone now. And so much of our identity was in the both of us and we, and now my identity is me, but I don't, I don't know who I am without my person.

I remember just thinking, like, all my plans, my hopes, my dreams for the future just shattered. Like, they were just gone. I didn't wanna do any of that stuff now. I didn't wanna do that stuff on my own. We wanted to live on this huge ranch and have horses and, like, do all this stuff out in Wyoming where no one would bother us, and, like, just have, like, an [00:35:00] introvert haven and do all these things.

And I'm like, gosh, that sounds pretty awful, just me with no one to help. I, I don't wanna do that. But what does that mean now? Like, what kind of life am I gonna have now? What do I... I don't even know what I like anymore because I'm doing some of the things I used to do, and I just don't enjoy them at all, or I feel a lot of apathy.

I don't even know who I am. I felt so untethered, unanchored, like a tiny little boat just floating around in the ocean. No direction, nothing tying me to this world, just drifting. Untethered. That's exactly how I feel now. Yeah And so what I wanna encourage you, what I wish I knew was not was not like, "Oh, I feel so lost.

I have to find myself. Where am I? Where did I go? Who... What if I never find myself? What if that never happens?" Like, I wanna take that pressure off. You don't have to go find yourself. It's about deciding who you want to be. Who's the kind of [00:36:00] person that you wanna be in the future? And this does take some time, it takes some clarity, it takes some in- experiments, and a little bit of ad- venturing, and figuring out, like, what that really looks like, and what kind of boundaries you're gonna have, and what kind of qualities that you want to be known for.

But you get to decide, " This is who I wanna be. This is the kind of person that I wanna be." And that's gonna require some change, and that's gonna require maybe some uncomfortable conversations with family or friends, but I get to decide who I want to be now, and I get to try different things to, like, figure it out.

Who is God calling me to be in this next season? What does that look like? But ultimately, you get to decide. Okay, number nine. What you make something mean often has more impact than what actually happened. So when [00:37:00] an event or a circumstance happens to us, we can tell ourselves a story about that. We can make it mean something that maybe it doesn't mean.

We can take it as a sign. "Oh, this is a sign that this is supposed to happen, or this is not supposed to happen." Or it's kinda like ha- if anyone, If you've ever had the wrong first impression about somebody, right? So sometimes when I worked in the hospital when I was a manager for the first time, we worked, uh, I managed a team of registrations.

Like, they'd register the patients in the lobby and check people in. And we had lots of meetings, and because we managed in the hospital, I was, like, on the go a lot. And I would walk through the lobby a lot of times, like, focused just on where I needed to go, trying to get there in a hurry, um, deep in thought about, like, what I needed to prepare, what, what schedules had to be updated.

Like, just [00:38:00] kinda juggling a lot mentally. And so I would, like, walk through that lobby really quickly. And I started hearing from a lot of the employees that worked for me like, "Oh, you're really nice. I used to not like you." And I was like, " Me?" Like, "Yeah, I used to think you were, like, really stuck-up and thought you were better than everybody."

Me? What? Why did you think that? What? They're like, "Oh, yeah, 'cause you would walk through and you would never, like, smile at people. You were just, like, walking through and, like, on a mission. So we just kinda thought that you were, like, stuck up and stuff." And it was always just, like, shocking, right?

But then I would explain, like, "Oh, no, like, I'm just... You know, I'm in my head a lot. I'm just in another world. I'm, like, thinking about something else." I was like, "Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. I, like, totally did not mean to come across that way." But the story they were telling themselves, right? Is, "Oh, she doesn't like us.

Oh, she doesn't wanna talk to us." Like, "Oh, she's... Look at her, she's so busy. She's so stuck up. She won't even, like, smile at us. How rude is [00:39:00] that?" And so because I had that feedback, you know, I could change how I interacted with them. But a lot of times we can tell ourselves a story or we can give something meaning, and that carries more weight than the actual thing that happened.

So then I would tell them, like, "Hey, call me out. If I just look like I'm in a hurry or something, just call my name or wave at me or do something silly, like, break me out of it," and they would. But that was because they then told themselves a different story than about what was actually happening All right, number 10.

People don't have to understand. And this is one that's come up quite a bit frequently. Um, we did, I think, a Momentum Monday on this one. And this, I wish I would've known this because it would've saved me a lot of bitterness and resentment and expectations that I had of other people. I felt like people needed to know.

They needed to [00:40:00] know how grief was impacting me, and they needed to know what they need to do to show up better, to support better, to truly get it. They were like the muggles of the Harry Potter world. Like, they were the outsiders, the normies, as some of our folks call them, right? Like, but they needed to be different.

They needed to be educated. Like, they needed to do better is kind of the vibe, right, if you can imagine, of how people felt, um, about supporting someone in grief. And I wrestled with this a lot. I wrestled with this for probably almost two years, even in my own, with my own extended family, with family friends, with people I was working with, with just people in my sphere of, you know, they need to, like, they need to be doing better.

They need to be reaching out. They should be checking up. They should be offering. They should be... Like how dare they ask me how I'm doing today? Well, how do you think I'm doing? That's so tone deaf. [00:41:00] And I was just really critical mentally of people around me, and I just had to start realizing and, and giving people grace when I would reflect and be like before it happened to me, did I understand it?

Did I show up for people the way I wished they showed up for me?" No I thought about people who... I thought about my own employees who would have a family member die. I thought about a mom of an adult child and her adult child died, and the manager tried to make that person work through the next couple days.

I'm like, "No, let this person have some time off." But then after three days, it was like, okay, they need to come back at work and be able to work. And I was really like, wow, I had no idea. Like, of course there's gonna be sadness, of course it's gonna be hard, but it's all kinda like superficial knowledge, right?

I'm like, oh my gosh, I did not show up for that person at all the way [00:42:00] I wish I would have. The way that I know now is really meaningful. I remember when I had an employee who lost, uh, a person of their family and I asked, um, a fellow... Uh, another widow. Before I became a widow, I asked someone, I was like, "Well, what did people get you that was helpful, for the funeral?

Like, I don't just wanna send flowers, like, I wanna give something helpful." And she said, "Toilet paper and paper towels." I was like, "What?" I was like, "So when someone dies, I'm supposed to give their family member toilet paper and paper towels? Well, what if I pick the kind they don't like?" I'm like that is so weird."

I remember telling her that, like, "That is so weird. Why would you ever give anyone that?" And she just explained, like, when you're struggling with grief you want things you can throw away. You don't wanna have to wash dishes. You don't wanna... you can't even think about going out and buying things."

And so I did that because I trusted her. But to me, I was like, "That is so weird. Oh, sorry your family member died. Here's some toilet [00:43:00] paper." What? That's so strange. But I did it. But I just didn't know, and so how can I expect that other people would know if I didn't know? And how can I resolve this, like, wrestling of if they're close to me, they have to understand, they have to get it, versus accepting and being at peace with it's okay, people don't have to understand.

It- it's okay. People don't have to get it. People don't people don't understand what I do with this Brave Widow thing. I love all the different facial expressions that people give me when they're like, "Oh, what do you do?" I'm like, "Oh, I, I work with widows, and, this is what I help them with."

And they're like, "Huh. Okay, well this is what I do." I'm like, it's fine. They don't have to understand. But if I could have found peace with that sooner, that would've been very helpful. And then I'm gonna give you a bonus one. So I know I said 10. I have one little bonus for you You aren't meant to do [00:44:00] this alone And as someone who's an introvert, as someone who tends to be avoidant, as someone who tends to be highly independent and strong and, like, all of that stuff, right?

As someone who hibernates in the cave People aren't meant to go through this alone. That's why community is so important. That's why talking with other people who are on a similar journey of you, as you is so helpful. Because when we're lonely, and we're isolated, and we have no one, and we're in our heads all the time, life starts to feel Desperate.

It starts to feel pointless. It starts to feel... We question ourselves, like, "Eh, is this normal? Am I broken? What's going on here?" Like, "Oh, this is really hard, and, and my family and friends, they just don't get it, and I try to bring it up with them, and they just, tell me to just give it time, it's gonna get better, but it's not getting any better.

Like, it's just not helping me." And so [00:45:00] we need a community of people that we can talk with, that we can share with, who they're not gonna judge us, they're not going to be just giving us advice all the time, but they can look at us and say, "Yeah, this is really hard. It is really hard." And it's not an immediate like, "But it's gonna be better, so don't be sad."

Or like, "Just tough it out, like you'll get through it." It's just like, yeah, yeah, ugh, my heart goes out to you. This is just really hard And suddenly you don't feel so alone

And it doesn't feel like just nobody gets it. And so one of the ways we find peace in that not everyone has to understand is that we have a select few who do or who are curious, who ask questions so that they can better understand, and who wanna support us and show up for us. Okay. That's my top 10 for today for Momentum Monday.

So I'm curious, what would you guys add? [00:46:00] What would be something in your top 10 list of things that you wish you knew when you were first widowed? I hope that these top 10 things were helpful to you and brought you just a tiny bit of more hope, or a tiny bit of different perspective as you think about your own widowhood journey. All right, alumni, I will see you right after this.

Bye.

Speaker 13: Hey, thanks for spending this time with me today. If you're listening and thinking, "I don't wanna do this widow thing by myself," I'd love to invite you into the free Brave Widow community. It's a private, faith-based space where you can connect with other widows who really get it, join gentle live calls, and get resources to help you take the next small step forward.

To join us, just go to bravewidow.com/free or click the link in the show notes. You don't [00:47:00] have to walk this road alone. I'll see you inside