In this solo episode of The Widow Podcast, I explore what it really means when our relationships change after the loss of a life partner.

I recorded this in the middle of Awakening Hope, my free week-long online event for people grieving the loss of a life partner, and the same questions kept coming up all week. Why have my friends disappeared. Why have people stopped checking in. Why do the people who love me most not understand. And underneath all of it, what do I say when somebody rings and asks if there's anything I need.

I'm honest about both sides of this. I talk about my very good friend from junior school. Her mum died and it put a real strain on our relationship. I did keep showing up, but everything I was doing wasn't hitting the mark, but my God, I was trying. I talk about the fortieth birthday trip I wasn't invited on after Simon died, and the conversation months later when my friend told me they just hadn't thought I'd want to come. I talk about the mask we get so good at wearing, and why the people around us take what they can see as the truth.

I talk about:

• Why "if there's anything you need, let me know" so often leaves the griever with nothing to say
• The anger, resentment and jealousy we can feel towards the people we love, and the shame that comes with it
• Why it is not easy to show up for somebody who is grieving
• Why no one person can meet every practical and emotional need we have
• Debbie's Wonder Woman pants, and giving people a way to ask how you are
• Checking in on a scale of one to ten instead of saying "I'm fine"
• Being left off the invite list for a friend's fortieth after Simon died
• Asking for one thing, even when you don't know what you need
• Building new community when the people around you aren't your people

You don't have to know everything you need. You only have to know one thing, and ask for that.

For More Support:

The Widows Membership: karensutton.co.uk/the-widow-membership

Coaching and retreats: karensutton.co.uk

In this episode of The Widow Podcast, I'm joined by Rosie Moss, host of the Widowed AF podcast and author of Widowed AF: A Guidebook for Grieving Your Partner.

Rosie's husband Ben died in a diving accident in 2018, when she was 37 and their three children were very young. His body was never found. Rosie talks about the day he went out to dive, the knock at the door that evening, and the decision she made that first night to tell her children he had died, rather than that he was missing.

What followed was a grief with no body and no certainty: a funeral without a coffin, the practical fallout of a sudden death, and the long process of having Ben legally declared dead.

We discuss:

• Choosing the word died from the very beginning, and why it mattered for her children

• What it is to grieve without a body or any answers

• Keeping Ben present in family life in small, everyday ways

• Finding love again in early grief, and what losing that stirred up

• What changed when she got sober, and the grief that was still waiting

• What she has learned from nearly 200 conversations about loss

Rosie tells a very hard story with enormous warmth and honesty. If your person died without warning, I think this one will steady you.

For More Support:

The Widows Membership: karensutton.co.uk/the-widow-membership

Coaching and retreats: karensutton.co.uk

It's just me again, following on from my last episode where I shared what I've learnt about grief. There was so much that I tried to cram it all into that one episode, and realised that I couldn't. And as I tried to separate it out, what came to me was that a lot of it wasn't about grief at all. It was about life.

Some of the things I want to share with you might feel a little bit uncomfortable, especially if you are in the very early raw days of your grief, and I say that with so much love. You don't have to think the way I think. My way is not the right way, this is just my way, this is just where I've got to, and if yours is different, I love that for you.

I talk about:

• Simon died and it was horrendous. I did not. I was still alive, and I didn't want two people's lives to end because one person died

• Believing at 39 that I was too old to start a new career or make anything of myself, and why I'm determined to make my 50s the best decade of my life

• Nobody is coming to save us, and there is no white shining knight on a horse who is going to make everything magically better

• Why having to do it for yourself does not mean that you have to do it by yourself

• You have so much more within you than you could ever dream possible

• Our lives will be as good as we allow them to be, and the ceiling we put on them without realising

• Love is not finite, and your heart will expand to the depth that you allow it to expand

• Don't compare the life that you have now with an imaginary future

• The thing I find most difficult to say out loud: that I have stopped wishing my life were different

For More Support:

The Widows Membership: karensutton.co.uk/the-widow-membership

Coaching and retreats: karensutton.co.uk