Let's Chat... Parenting as a widowed parent (with Jeanette Koncikowski)

#081. Let's Chat... how to find your way with parenting as a widow or widower.

In these Let’s Chat episodes, I (Claire Sandys) chat one-to-one with a guest who has lived experience or expertise in a particular area of grief.

Today I’m talking to Jeanette Koncikowski, a writer, consultant and grief advocate from Buffalo, New York.

In 2014, when she was just 36 years old, Jeanette's husband - Mark - died very suddenly, leaving her with a nine-year-old and a five-year-old to parent. In the four years before this tragedy, Jeanette had also lost a second-trimester pregnancy, her mother, her grandmother and her best friend.

Through her own experience of grief, Jeanette has become passionate about helping other widowed parents, launching the Widowed Parent Project in 2016 as an online resource and support group to connect other young widowed parents. She also has a background in child welfare and family counselling, she's studied trauma counselling and received a Masters degree in Education from Harvard. As well as providing life coaching to widowed people, she's written her forthcoming memoir; Shipwrecked. So she's super qualified for this conversation.

In this chat she honestly talks about the ups and downs of parenting through such a loss, but also shares heaps of practical and theoretical knowledge for those going through it. We also touch on meeting a new partner. In fact, this episode was so full of useful information I couldn’t bring myself to cut it down to the usual episode length! So enjoy all Jeanette has to offer - whether for yourself, or to help you draw alongside others going through this kind of traumatic loss.

This episode is a reminder of the importance of teaching any children about death and learning how to speak to them truthfully about this natural part of life, rather than living in fear of it.

For more about Jeanette you can visit her website: https://www.thrivecommunityconsulting.com/

Or her Widowed Parent Project Facebook group:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/580595715466580

Or find her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/widowedPP

The book Jeanette recommends, The Group by Justin Yopp: 

Transcript

Claire : 0:01

Hello there, and thanks for joining me for another episode of Let's Chat. I'm Claire Sandys, host of and blog writer for The Silent Why, a podcast exploring all things related to loss and grief. Now we've spoken to a few young widows on the podcast. And sometimes we've dug a little into what parenting was like after their partner died. But today, I'm going to open up that topic further and with someone who's not only passionate about it, but also sadly had first hand experience of it. In these Let's Chat episodes, I specifically chat to a guest who has a particular expertise or experience in an area of loss or grief. So whereas the 101 loss episodes chat to people who have been through specific losses, Let's Chat episodes are for me to talk to people on subjects that can help us navigate grief and loss. And through each episode, because I want to capture some useful magic, I'm building a garden toolkit metaphorically of tools that can help us face and get through loss. So at the end of each episode, I ask our guests what sort of tool they want to add, and then I place it in my evergrowing shed. So far, I've got secateurs, pruning shears, compost spades, a chair, a water irrigation system, gloves, a spirit level, baby bio, a Swiss army knife, and much more. In fact, now I list them I really do think I need to do an episode on how to use them all after the summer. On this episode of Let's Chat, I'm talking to Jeanette Koncikowski, a writer, consultant and grief advocate from Buffalo, New York. She launched the Widowed Parent Project in 2016 as an online resource and support group to connect other young widow parents after losing her husband at the age of 36. She has a background in child welfare, family counselling, studied trauma counselling and received a master's degree in education from Harvard University. I'd love to be able to say my degree was from Harvard. She provides life coaching to widowed people and her forthcoming memoir'Shipwrecked' details her and her children's voyage through grief and loss. It's safe to say that Jeanette is qualified for this chat in more ways than one. Jeanette went through a lot of loss in just a few years. And one of those was her husband who suddenly died in 2014. She shared with us how parenting is a widow through loss has given her a passion to help others understand the ways that children grieve, how adults grieve, and how these overlap and intersect his family dynamics during a shared loss. This is a great honest conversation about the ups and downs of parenting through loss. But it's also full of practical advice and empathy for those encountering it now. We even touch on meeting a new partner after loss. In fact, it was so full of useful information, that I couldn't cut it down to my usual length of episode. So grab a cup of tea or coffee or maybe a cold loganberry drink, (I have no idea what that is but I think they might have it near Buffalo) and relax with me and Jeanette as we chat, parenting as a widowed parent.

Jeanette: 2:43

My name is Jeanette Koncikowski. I am just south of Buffalo, New York, in the States. I am the founder of Thrive Community Consulting, and that just launched in January. So these days, I'm spending my time working with the community in different ways that I've done for most of my career. I've been a nonprofit professional for 25 years. And now I am a small business owner that is still embedded in communities but working with many agencies instead of just one nonprofit at a time. I am the founder of Widowed Parent Project, which is an online resource and support group that launched in 2016. And I am also the author of a forthcoming book on widow parenting.

Claire : 3:29

We're talking about a very sort of specific area of loss and how you've taken loss that you've gone through to sort of help other people with gaps that you felt along the way. But you've experienced quite a lot of different types of loss, not just the one we're going to be talking about. So why don't you tell me a little bit about your experience with loss and grief and what it is that you've you faced in your life so far?

Jeanette: 3:47

Sure. So I had a really bad period of my life from about 2010 until 2014-15. It started kind of in 2010 and everything went downhill from there. So in 2010, I lost a baby in my second trimester, my third pregnancy. And just as I was kind of starting to come out of my grief and depression around that, my mother was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. I spent the next 18 months caring for her, along with my dad until she until she passed away. The week my mother died in 2012, my husband was diagnosed with epilepsy, I kind of went immediately from caregiving for my mom to caregiving for my husband because he lost his driver's licence. The following summer, as we were still kind of coping with, with all of these changes in our life, one of my longest term friends of 20 years died suddenly of a heart attack at 37 in the summer of 2013. And then my husband died suddenly in 2014. And then my grandma, I lost my grandma too and it's always like an afterthought or like you know, my poor grandma like she was kind of a quote, natural expected death at her age but, you know, taken together in that four and a half years, it was transformative for me the amount of loss I went through, because I lost all of the people in some ways that were, you know, some of the most important people in my life that had shaped me that knew me, that knew my history. And so I struggled for a while to recover from like, just the, you know, clinical terms, we call it event compression, right? It was like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, one thing after the other happened before I could really get through one something else had happened that was catastrophic in my life. And so that period of time really sucked, it was a lot.

Claire : 5:35

I mean, how did you cope? did you cope? How do you look at that time? How do you describe it now?

Jeanette: 5:39

I think I did what a lot of people do, which is I did the best I could with what I had, you know, I think because it was crisis to crisis. There was just so much the day I lost my baby was my oldest child's first day of kindergarten. And so you know, it's like, dealing with a miscarriage while trying to get my child off to kindergarten, and, you know, dealing with my mother's pending death, while going through the stresses of, kind of psychologically recovering from the miscarriage and, and then it shifted right from my mother stuff, like literally that week to we have to reconvene, you know, a re readjust our life, again, to pivot to cope with my husband having seizures and epilepsy. And then, and then my friend died in the midst of that. And then a year later, my husband died. And so it was really just this time of turmoil. My husband and I also separated the year before his death, not just because of the amount of other stuff happening, we had some long standing issues that we were dealing with. But it was just another thing. So my life felt like it was in pretty constant crisis. And I think I did the best I could with what I had. And looking back on it. You know, I'm like, I don't know how I got through that time. It seemed more than most people could bear to just kind of survive all of that. You know, I think I spent years that followed, not dealing with the weight of it all. I dealt with each piece as it kind of happened. But like the sum total, of what I lost, it's really just been in the last year and a half that I've really done a lot of processing and growth in therapy around that.

Claire : 7:23

And there's so many areas there, of that have grief that you could have looked at specifically and focused on to try and help people. But you've chosen quite one specific area to try and reach out. So what tell us what it is that you've chosen to focus on how and why.

Jeanette: 7:44

Yeah, so after, after losing Mark my husband in in 2014. I was 36 years old. And I had a five year old and a nine year old. And we were devastated by this loss. They said we were separated, but we were still married, we were working on our marriage, we had plans to I think hopefully in the few months that followed, get back together and live together. And so things were healing in our relationship. And and then to kind of have the loss happen at that point in time, I think a loss happening at any point in time in a marriage is terrible, but to kind of be on this cusp of resetting ourselves and then to lose him then it really made me struggle, I had a terrible amount of guilt, I had a terrible amount of shame. And I also was very privileged, in some sense compared to most parents that go through such a loss, because I was working in the field of child welfare. So I knew professionally how to get help that I think a lot of widowed parents don't. And I still couldn't find really good resources. So even with all the information as a professional that I had, there just weren't good resources way back in 2014. For widowed parents, the podcasts that there are now didn't exist, the Instagram feeds didn't exist, the there was no book. I went to the to the bookstore a few days after Mark died when I kind of like surfaced and went out again for the first time. And I kept thinking like, there has to be a book that tells me how to get my kids to be okay, like I need, I need a manual, I need something that's gonna, you know, show me the way forward and it didn't exist. And I think that was you know, as I started to kind of cope with what we were going through, in my children's grief. It was really just kind of pulling from what I could find out there in in psychology, in the world of grief work, in other people's stories. And my first year of being widowed, I went to meet up support group for widowed people, everyone with the exception of two people, so maybe out of the group of 25, two we're closer in age to me. Everyone else was so much older, they didn't. We have very different struggles. So we have people in their 70s talking about, you know, who was who was going to take care of them as they age, my struggle was literally like, I can't go to this meeting if I can't get childcare. So our struggles were very different. And that was really what led me to decide in 2016, to start the Widowed Parent Project, which just began as a as an online Facebook support group for young widowed parents, because it just there was nowhere else to talk to people that also, you know, locally meeting up didn't work, because none of us had time, we were all single parents. And so the online group really provided that community that I needed, and then it's kind of built out from there.

Claire : 10:37

When you were looking to find help, what sort of aspects of that kind of loss and grief were you looking for help with? What were there certain aspects of day-to-day life? Or was it the overall grief? Or was it the specifically the

Jeanette: 10:48

A ll of that, and then also, the trauma piece. So when parenting? my husband died, as I said, we had, we had been living separately, but we were in close contact, and we spent still, three or four days a week together. And when he didn't come to pick the kids up for school that morning, I went to find, you know, to check on him. And I found him, I found his body and the children were were with me. And so for us, there was also this very traumatic piece that was added by that discovery. And so, in the beginning, what I really needed was, like a psychological first aid assessment for my kids, right, because they had, they had been on the scene when this happened. And even though they didn't see his body, they were witness to, you know, for a couple hours to I spent 45 minutes trying to revive him like it was, it was really difficult day. And so I wanted immediately to find some kind of mental health first aid for my children. And then as time progressed, it was finding them a community of other children. Because I think for kids that lose a parent, you immediately become an outsider from your kid community, right? Like, other kids don't go through this, other kids have a really hard time understanding it. Other kids are fearful of something happening to their parents, so they don't want to, you know, kind of be around you. And so it shifted over time from like an immediate mental health intervention and assessment to finding community. So we joined the support group, about six months after he died, and that was really helpful for my children to to find other kids that had lost a parent. And then from there, you know, over time, right, kids grief changes. And so my kids have had to go back, probably each three or four times to therapy over the last nine years, and their needs around their grief have changed each time. And so you know, part of what's hard about widow parenting, and parenting any child through loss is it doesn't go away, right? That's the myth like you, you get to acceptance and like, you're fine. And that's not what happens. You can integrate your experience, but the loss of their father will stay with them for their whole lives. And it will keep coming up at each new chronic developmental milestone that that they go through. And so I think, yeah, it shifted, it shifted from like, emergency first aid into community into this longer term support for them. For me, you know, I needed all of the help, I needed help with the day-to-day, I needed help with getting through the legal mess that was left, with our marriage situation, I needed help with selling the house. So my supportive in the beginning was much more like practical, like I need someone to help me make these really big decisions. And then, even though I was also going to therapy, I think the first year and a half after he died, like we all went to therapy every week, it was all we did was like go to school, come home, feed them, and somebody had a therapy appointment. And I made a decision like the first day after he died, that the most important thing to me, would be that my children got through this and got into adulthood with their mental health intact. And I prioritise that over everything over the cost of anything else. I was willing to pay for excellent mental health care. And so I have no regrets about that. I'm pleased to say my children are very happy and healthy and resilient. And I think, you know, I also have privilege that some parents don't have them being able to, financially prioritise that.

Claire : 14:22

Yeah, it's a travesty that things like therapy, and that sort of help actually cost money to a point that some people can't afford it. Because like you said, it's just is such an important aspect of getting through any loss or grief. I'm guessing that with a loss like this, whether it's being widowed or whether it's losing a parent, there's obviously a lot of different factors involved, like whether it's the mother or the father, the ages of the children, what aspects are similar and what are the aspects that differ?

Jeanette: 14:53

That's a great question. Similarly, I think... so all the widowed, you know, I have about 250 widowed parents in my online support group, some are more active than others. And I've also interviewed over three dozen widow parents for my book. And what I've heard from most of them, right, is the the kind of most immediate impact, besides the actual grief of the loss of their person is the role change. So whether that is for moms or dads it is having to go from, in that all the parents were living together, so it's not always a two family home, but from the two family parenting situation, right, where there's like, your parent and your co parent and your copilot, and you're doing your thing together, to have that immediately be removed and like by tomorrow, you have to figure out who's getting your child to wherever they have to be. And so that role shift of like, having to do something that the other parent maybe did, or did better, or had the time to do. You know, I had one dad I interviewed who had five children in the home. The youngest two were his biological children, the older three were stepchildren. And, you know, he had to tell all of them that their mother died, and that he had to immediately make decisions with the, with his dad children's parents about like, are these children's staying in this home tonight? Or are they going to go back and live with you now. And so he lost his his his role family, you know, the roles in his family changed overnight from where a family of seven to where a family of three, and it just ended up being that him and the biological children stayed in the home in the beginning. And you know, how quickly like your family dynamics could shift when something like this happens. So I think all widow parents kind of go through that, like, my family has changed overnight. I think other things that are the same are obviously just, you know, very shared experience, the day to day impact of solo parenting, so the the financial hit for women. So this is this is a difference. But everyone has to kind of go through the financial changes that come when you move from a two income household to a one. For women, widows get hit a lot harder than men do with this. Some of them have never worked before, some of them have not worked out of the home in a long time. So there has to be a shift in like, how am I going to afford to put food on the table? But it does impact everyone's finances in some ways. I had widow fathers that were used to not doing the day to day care for their kids. And suddenly, like, they're having to learn how to braid hair and make pancakes and, and still, you know, go out of the home and do the things that they were doing before if they had a more traditional kind of gender role structure. So there's some similarities and differences there. I think that most of the widow parents I talked to, you know, all of the kids struggled, like there's no one child that was not impacted severely by the loss. And so for most of the parents, it was that immediate struggle of is my kid going to be okay, how do I get them okay. And then I think for many families, there is an assumption that like, the first year is going to be the hardest. And if we just like get through the first year, right, and so everyone that's widowed and these children are going through these first there's the first birthdays without, the first holidays without, the first graduations without, you get through all of that that's similar, but the way each child processes it is different. Right. And I think that was one of the things that surprised me about my own children was how different their grief expressions where. And so there is there's a lot of similarities. And there's a lot of differences in the way that that grief presents and families.

Claire : 18:44

Can it be hard to spot in children as well, because with young children, you know, I've sadly watched online a couple of funerals over the last few years of parents with young children and the young children were in attendance at the funeral, seemingly looking like they were at any other event, not even really noticing the coffin in front of them of their parent. It must be hard to work out what grief looks like, especially in those younger ages. Is that something that you you need to be dealing with then? Or is it something you deal with later? What does that look like?

Jeanette: 19:14

It's a both and, right? So it's you both have to deal with it when it happens. And for parents that have very young children. I think the youngest, the youngest widowed person I interviewed at the time of the death was 27 and she was pregnant. And so her child was born without dad. You know, so she never knew her father growing up but that didn't mean that she didn't experience grief for her father, right? And didn't experience her mother having to be a solo parent that was not planned. I have a close friend that I met in the widow widow, Meetup group, who was kind of my life preserver when I was first widowed, and her person died, home alone with the baby. And so like, what is the developmental impact for that baby, like, having been home and dad passes away overnight. And you're there waiting to be picked up, you know. So I think like, we underestimate the impact on the very little ones. And then as those children age, they know they don't have that parent in their life, they know their parent has died. I've had a lot of work with parents when their children are four to five of like, how do you start explaining death? And some of the parents that did it have regrets about how they did it? That was some of the research and in the book that I wrote was like, parents felt a lot of regret that they didn't handle things well in the beginning. And I always try to remind parents, like, you have to give yourself so much grace, right? Because it's like, the worst days of your life. And so looking back, would you have done things differently? Probably, but you did the best you could with what you had. And I think for a lot of parents, it's a struggle, it's a struggle to explain to children, right, the physical body versus the spiritual self, and it's very hard for kids to grasp. And so that has been, that is definitely something that is different, depending on the age of the child, and then kind of go into the other side of it. You know, I've had a number of little parents who have had deaths occur when their children were teenagers. And they I think, sometimes assume that like, well, the kids, okay, right. Like, they seem okay, in the aftermath, until, until their teens spin out. And there's drug addiction, and there's, you know, community issues, or there's legal issues that the kid gets into, or they're dropping out of school. And it's, they don't maybe see that the child's grief is presented in very different ways that that age that maybe their younger children.

Claire : 22:09

some of us don't have a clue where to begin. We'd like the idea, but the reality is breaking down, it's just not something we know how to do. Well. So yeah, you can see what gets even more complicated in those years that a complicated for all of us anyway. Sounds like it's such an important thing to find your community as it were, with other people that are going through this so that you can bounce off each other a little bit with, you know, I'm trying this or I've done this, or my child seems to be doing this, is that normal? What would be some of the key things that you would want to help somebody with if they fairly new into this journey and thinking, okay, where where should my priority be?

Jeanette: 22:53

I always tell people to whittle down your life to the most essential elements for the first year, year and a half hour long, you need to kind of just have you and the kids be okay. So that often looks like, you know, parents that have to have kids that were doing four or five sports before maybe you got, you know, I tell my kids, like you get one thing. We are going to therapy three nights a week, you get one other thing that is all I can handle, and that's another loss, right? It's a secondary loss for kids. But I think the more you can whittle your life down to eating, sleeping, going to school, providing a normal routine, in the immediate aftermath is the most important thing. Getting kids mental health care if they need it. And not every family needs therapy. A lot of the clinicians I interviewed for the book talk about waiting at least a year for your kids to start therapy because they might need to just kind of process right. And the most important thing for children that have been through loss and trauma is establishing the normal routine in the after, right? What does our family look like now? And how are we going to function now as a family. And that's another piece of the loss because for my kids, at least, and I've heard this from a lot of other grieving children, they feel like their family is gone. When they lose one parent, it's like, my family as it existed before is gone. And that is true. They will never be that, you know, family they were before. And one of the other things I encourage parents to do in the beginning, is to help create a sense of family and a restructured family. Right? What is our family look like now? I really loved the idea of family in Lilo and Stitch right? We might be small and maybe broken, but we're still a family. And so that kind of became our mantra in the beginning with my kids was like we are still a family and that looked like you know, I spent money I probably didn't have spend on getting Christmas pictures done. One of the regrets I had with after the loss of my husband was that we never had since my kids were babies. I had not had professional portraits. don't have our family. And so it was like I had these beautiful photos when they were born and then nothing. And so after he died, it was really important to me to like, show my children like - there on the dining room wall, look at those beautiful pictures of us, the three of us, and our new dog - we're a family, right? And so like, being able to help your children readjust their lens of what family is, I think is really important in the beginning. And then the other pieces, as you mentioned, we talked about his community, finding your community, whatever that looks like to you. I lost, you know what these other losses I had lost the people that would have been the most important support for my children, I lost my friend, I lost my mother, I lost my grandmother. So the people that I would have gone to, were also gone for my kids. And so it was almost in some ways resetting our life, we had to find new community, I had to make new friends, which if you've ever had to make friends and adults, you know, kind of sucks, really hard to make new friends. And that's not to say I didn't have also great friends from before that I relied on, I did and those people stepped up. But they didn't understand what our family was going through. Because unless you've been in it, I don't think you can really understand. And so I became very close quickly with several of the people that I had met in the meetup group that were widowed, the ones that had younger kids. And then also, you know, the support group that we joined those people, the first two years were critical, they're not relationships I've maintained a lot, now nine years out, but in those first few years, those were the families we spend time with. Those were kind of the people that saw our grief and understood it in a way other people didn't.

Claire : 26:40

Are there things that you would say, either from your own experience or from listening to other people, things that you wouldn't do, or you wouldn't advise that people do, that maybe sometimes people do jump into quite quickly, but you're like actually, that's not the best plan?

Jeanette: 26:52

Yeah, that's a that's a good question. Um, one of the things that I think a lot of parents have struggled with, that I've talked to and I've interviewed is, and these are decisions that are usually made in the first few days, and then you have regrets about them, right? So do I let my child see the body? Do I let my child come to the memorial celebrations, or the funerals? Do I let my child see the body in the casket? So those kinds of like really critical pieces that your child will remember for the rest of their life about how their parent was mourned. That's where I've heard most regrets from people who either decided not to have their children participate and then as their children have aged, the children have been really upset about this. Or conversely, there's been a couple of parents I talked to where they kind of sugarcoated what happened, and they didn't tell the children the truth about what happened. And in that case, it's kind of come back to bite them and the children find out is they're older, and then it breaks down some trust. So, you know, one of my pieces of advice to parents in this, even from day one, is be honest with your children. Right? age appropriate. You don't need to, like inundate them with the horrible details, but you need to be honest. And I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Justin Yopp, for the book, and he is a researcher out of the University of North Carolina, I believe. And he started a group for widowed fathers after finding that no group like that existed at his oncology hospital where he had been treating these men's wives and they all happen to die right around the same time. And he has a book called The Group which I always recommend to dads, especially to read, but there was good stuff in there for widowed moms too. And he talks about the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, right? So you tell your children the truth. You tell your children, nothing but the truth, but the whole truth, the details of the truth and details of the death they don't necessarily need until they're old enough to handle it. So I think those are been the things that I've seen parents struggle with regrets. You know, in a case of someone that maybe died of a drug overdose, telling the children, you know, daddy just died in his sleep or daddy had a heart attack. And they'd later come to find out, you know, there was addiction issues. So those kinds of things like, and that's really hard, right? Because you're dealing with the shock of it. And now you're supposed to like figure out how to tell your children this terrible thing, where you're supposed to figure out what is your child's role at a funeral? And those are some of the things I put in my book, there's chapters on each around, how do you make those decisions when your brain isn't functioning, right? Because you're in shock. So you're going to make mistakes, or at least things that don't feel as good as they could have been. And that's where that grace has to come in. Because we're all moving through that period of time and a state of shock. It was interesting to me that like while I kind of emotionally shut down, my intellect didn't shut down, so I was able to be like, I know this therapist and I'm gonna go get this thing and I'm gonna read this article tonight. Emotionally, I was a hot mess, but like intellectually, that stayed so I was grateful that my brain continued to kind of like the clinical clinician and me continue to function and think about, like, you know, what are my kids need today? You know, you have to give yourself grace, because there are going to be things that you don't get quote,'right'. And I always tell parents, like there is no real right in this, all of it sucks. So it's just like, how do you lessen the damage of it.

Claire : 30:27

And I guess your gut reaction is to try and protect your children. But you have to be careful that you're not protecting them from stuff that you're finding hard yourself. It doesn't mean it's not truth they need to hear. I mean, it's so confusing. And I think of all the big questions that as an adult, you have, I mean, even things like you know, you lose somebody that close to you, a lot of people will be questioning things like afterlife, or faith, or all of these big things, what do I believe has happened to that person? and then you've got some tiny child next to you saying so what happens when someone dies? And if you haven't worked that out for yourself and what you feel? How on earth? Do you go about trying to describe it? So I can see why it's so complicated, because you want to give these truthful facts to help children, but the same time you want to protect them, at the same time you've haven't got a clue what you think yourself. It just, it doesn't like a minefield a lot?

Jeanette: 31:17

Yeah, it's a lot. And you know, I also and all the clinicians I spoke to, and quote unquote, 'the experts in trauma' that I had access to. I also consult with a National Child Trauma Institute here in the US. And I've been doing that for the last eight years. And so I've had access to like some of the top grief scholars in the United States. And I've interviewed them for the book. And, you know, I've heard this over and over again, right, which is like, 'you have to be able to tell children the truth about death'. So the event itself, but also like how the body dies. And when we we have this tendency to want to protect children, we also have a tendency to not be a culture that is good with grief, right? We want it kind of hidden away, we don't want to really talk about it. And that includes things like being able to say to children, you know, when someone dies, they don't come back, but like that means your body, you know, your body will go into the ground or be cremated, that means that your heart is stopped, that means your brain has stopped helping children very concretely understand what that means. I had one mom who told me that she told her two year old that 'daddy went to be with Jesus'. And then every year on Christmas, when they put the baby Jesus in the manger, the child would have this like terrible meltdown over this fear that like Jesus was going to come and take me now if we, you know, and so it's like she, she said, I, you know, I thought that was like the right way to frame it to my child. And then I had no idea that this is how, you know, as my child was growing up, they would interpret this. And so like, you know, we talked about like, even with very young children, finding that very concrete language, not using things like passed away, or lost or gone, or they're a star now, like, you have to be able to tell children the truth about what that is. e don't teach parents how to do that. That's not in the What to Expect When You're Expecting book, right? So like, how do you actually do that, and that's where a professional can come in and help. Usually those professionals aren't tapped into until six months to a year later. And then you're kind of just repairing some of that understanding. And I think the biggest takeaway around parenting in general and parenting through grief, is that you will make mistakes, and it's about the repair of the relationship, you are never going to get this right with your kids. This is a horrible thing to go through for any family. So there's not a right way to do it. If you miss step, if you do something that ends up causing harm, it's about the repair of the relationship to your child. One of the quote'mistakes' that I made, or regrets that I had, and this was not about the death itself, but it impacted my children. My husband, as I said, was having seizures, and we were living apart, we were told by his doctors, that he did not have the kind of epilepsy that would lead to sudden unexplained death in epilepsy, which is what he died from. And so we had told the children, Daddy was not going to die from this, like their grandmother had just died from cancer. They asked 'Is daddy going to die?' And I said,'No, Daddy's not going to die. We've been assured, you know, we have to take care of daddy, and we have to make sure daddy doesn't hit his head, or, you know, we have to call 911 if you're there and there's a seizure', but I had told the children he wouldn't die. And so then when he did die, which was obviously out of my control, it was 'you lied to us, Mom, you lied to us, you said this wouldn't happen'. And I had to hold their anger because what else could I do with that? And my husband also, you know, the epilepsy impacted his mental health, which had a huge impact on our marriage, which was part of why we were separating. And yet we were still a family and that was really important to me was as we were both together and apart, how do we co parent our children, so he only lived two blocks from us in an apartment and he was still coming over, we had Sunday Fun Days together every Sunday, as a family, we were still trying to you were kind of in this in between space, right. And for a while, I didn't even feel like I could claim the word widow because I was like, what people will judge me of like, you know, we didn't have this perfect marriage. And that was the other thing that I found with a lot of the families, right, we put people on a pedestal when they die, we tend to do that. One of the things that came back to kind of haunt us in a way was my, my daughter had put my husband on this pedestal when he died. And when she was 13, her therapist called me and said, 'You need to have a confrontation, in therapy with my help, but like, we need to talk about who her dad actually was, and the way he behaved with her versus who she thinks he is'. Because she has this fantasy version of him and then she's telling me these things, like how he had seizures and told her not to tell me how he had seizures, and not to call 911. And so she had to hold that, and I didn't know that. And so I had a lot of guilt. You know, I just, I grew up Catholic, so I think like, the guilt thing just was was gonna be there. But, you know, I felt like I failed her. I didn't protect her. And he didn't protect her. And then I had a lot of anger at him after he died. I'm like, why would you put that on her? Right? So you're never gonna get all this, right. It's difficult stuff to deal with. But the repair of going to therapy with her to be able to, you know, at five, she couldn't have understood this, at 13, to be able to say, your daddy was a complicated person, and in relationship to marriage are complicated. You know, without having to go into the details of our marriage problems. Here's what was happening when we separated and when he died. And this is not your fault. That was a really, really important message for my child to hear. And I think all children actually, regardless of how their parent dies, it is very common for them all to assume that something they did could have prevented it, right. So therefore, they must be the cause, or have played some role in their parents death. And so that was something I missed, it was kind of a blind spot for me, I thought I would, I thought I caught it all, I thought we had all the good therapy, and we did. And then this, you know, this still kind of came up for her. And we had to cut and deal with the reality of my husband's mental illness, and what that looked like and how he parented and what it looks like in my marriage. And for me to stop protecting her from that, and to say, this is his reality that we were going through at the time.

Claire : 37:39

I mean, normal parenting, you know, is something that, to my knowledge, I've never met anyone who said, They've nailed it, and they've got it all sorted. So that's hard enough as it is, let alone you throw in something like this. So I think you're right, just people giving themselves that grace. I think this is also really important information for parents of children who know the children that have lost a parent, because I've had those conversations with people as well. And obviously, the children go home, and they say to their parents, they've got questions, big questions about it. And I imagine a lot of the time the question comes up, what if you die? Are you going to die, especially with younger kids like that, or even older kids that fear of like, well, what if I have to go through that? And I can imagine, again, the same sort of things are important, because you could then very easily sort of glibly say, oh, no, don't worry, Mummy's not gonna die, which again, is not it's not a helpful statement, because at some point, mummy will die. It's just a case of kind of working out how to give that information. And was, is there aspects around that that you would want to help people on, on how to deal with that? Because, again, we hear about a lot of adults who have trouble speaking to other adults, when they're going through a bereavement, and they just avoid the situation. So if you've got parents avoiding it completely, because they don't want to deal with it, the knock on effect is, is going to have that effect on the kids. I guess they don't know what to do with the other children. What about that whole kind of messy area?

Jeanette: 38:56

Yeah, that's a that's a very present dynamic for for widowed families and for the people, you know, the other children impacted in that in that kid community, you know, my youngest child, so my kids were nine and five, the five year old. Their response was much more of a kind of typical post traumatic stress response. They developed severe separation anxiety for me after my husband died, right of like, from day one, like, what if something happens to you like, the little one was my shadow for years because it was a fear of like if I let you out of my sight, right, because I let daddy out of my sight and daddy died. So if I let you out of my sight, something terrible will happen to you. And one of the things that happened to me after he died about nine months after is I got very, very sick. I think the stress of it all took a toll on me. That is very common for for people that are going through bereavement, right you have very physical health impacts from the amount of stress and I have lived with chronic illness since his death. And so to explain to my child like, you know, when they have this in their head that like I lied to them about their dad's epilepsy and he died, right? So it's like, we had to do a therapy session on how arthritis is different than epilepsy. And, like, here's what it's like to live with arthritis. And yes, this was a risk in epilepsy. And yes, we didn't know how severe the risk was. And it was a one 250,000 chance, and we don't know why it happened. And I'm telling you, I'm going to be okay, and I'm here today with you. And so, you know, for my child, there was a nightly mantra, we are safe, we are safe, we are safe. And I would have to say that to my child. You know, he also my husband died in his sleep. So sleep became a horrible, traumatic thing every night to get these kids to go to sleep. And, and part of that was reestablishing the sense of safety. I think, again, being honest with your children about we will all die, it is a part of life. I hope that doesn't happen for a really, really long time. I can't wait to see you get married someday and become a parent someday. And I'm going to be here as long as I can be here. But we have to be honest with children that we don't get to control these things, right? We don't get to decide how long we're going to live. And none of us know that. And so I think the more open from a young age, you can be around death and dying and not see it as this horrible thing that we all fear. That then when it happens, it is so traumatic. I think the more that you can integrate it into a normal part of life in a family's life, right. And the way you teach children to make meaning of death and say goodbye to their loved one is really important. My child doesn't need to be told fluffy things about heaven and the stars, and, you know, someday we'll see them again. Okay, but also like, what is the immediate impact on that child and not have their parent here today. So to have those really hard conversations, in preparation, your children will go through death, whether it's the death of a parent, a grandparent, a pet, like all children, and all adults will deal with death. So I think the more as a culture, we can be welcoming of this idea and stop seeing it as something that we have to hide away, that's horrible, that's scary. But really get comfortable with death, I think is important. In some ways, I was glad that my mother had passed first, because my children had attended the service before they knew what the funeral home would be like, they were able to have some visual representation in their head of what that experience would be like, I know for people that have had that happen and the child has never lost even a pet. It's, it's harder, right? Because you don't have anything to kind of anchor that experience to.

Claire : 43:27

If you've got someone listening to this, they're in the early throes of it or they're in those moments where you just sit down at the end of the day, and it's just like, I can't do this.

Jeanette: 43:41

Yeah.

Claire : 43:42

What would you say to somebody sort of in those moments where they just cannot visualise how they're going to get through it.

Jeanette: 43:48

So part of grief in one of the newer grief models that a lot of parents don't know about, because also the researchers and the scholars haven't done a really good job taking their theories out of the ivory tower, and like making sure everyday people know about them, which is part of what I've been advocating for in my work is this idea right of, of kind of the pendulum swinging. There is the five stages of grief that people know that was actually never really intended for the bereaved it was intended for the die. And then one of the things that happens, I've seen happen is something called the Dual Process model of grief, where you're swinging from past to present, right? You have to, if you're a widow parent, you are constantly your day is full of, I have to attend to these present things, I have to attend to these future things like what am I doing with this house in this in his car and his life insurance policy. And at the same time you were dealing with emotionally the loss in the past and how that past goes into your present everyday. So you're constantly like moving from past to present to future, oftentimes on the same day. I'd have days where I felt like look at I accomplished these things, you know, we got a realtor and we're gonna sell the house and then I will come home and just be destroyed by the idea of selling my house which I just made happen. But emotionally I wasn't ready for it. And so I think, you know, in those periods of overwhelm, again, it is what is the minimal needs my my kids and I have right now, my kids ate box chicken nuggets a mac and cheese for like a year and a half and they loved it. And that was their childhood, right? So cooking went right out the door, all the extra sports and activities, like anything that could be again whittled down to like the very minimum we need to survive, to make that space and to give yourself that gift of time to heal, I think is the most critical thing and the beginning. And you don't get time, right. If you're a solo parent, there is no time for you, you have to find the time. One of the things that I think looking back I did well was I prioritise self care, I knew from these other losses and from my, my work in the field that like, if you don't put on your own oxygen mask first, you will go down and you will be able to save your children. Right. So I prioritise self care that meant every Saturday, I had a friend or my father, watch the children all day. And I took from 9am till 3pm Every Saturday for myself, sometimes, that meant I went out and did something physical I was, in the year before he died, I had started boxing and horseback riding, I continued to do those things for a while, until my health got to poor. Sometimes I went and did retail therapy, which you know, now I regret because I have a lot of credit card debt I'm still paying down from that time. But like, I you know, you're gonna die tomorrow, I want to go get that purse. I went and did that. Sometimes Saturdays were they go to a friend's house, and I'm gonna lay in bed and I'm going to cry all day. And, or I'm going to just veg out and watch TV all day, right. So like, it's really listening to what your body needs and what your spirit needs, and giving yourself permission to prioritise that in finding at least one other adult, somebody has to help fill those shoes, you cannot do it all you feel like you're going to have to and that there is no one else. But there are people we I think have to be open to looking for new relationships to support us. One of the things that I think is a very common occurrence is that the people that you expect to be there for you, the people that you assume when this happens are going to be the people that stay, that doesn't always happen. Sometimes they're so overwhelmed by your grief, and your change situations and their fear of like, 'what if this happened to me?' that they retreat from your life. And you know, everybody surrounds you in the beginning the first two weeks, but after that, like you still have the same level of need, but people go away. And so if you can ask for help, I think is a huge piece of this to say 'I can't do this all alone, I'm gonna need help, maybe help looks like I need the child's grandparent to step in, or maybe help looks like, I'm going to pay for childcare on a Saturday so that I can go take care of myself and go to therapy. So like whatever that is prioritising that. And you know, for me, one of the things that I had to change was how I worked, I was a supervisor and executive at a large nonprofit centre. And I had asked to work from home way back in 2015, when that was, you know, novel. And I had to be like, This is what I need, I cannot get to work in the city get my kids to two different schools that don't have buses, because we live in a district where they're expected to walk in two miles. So I asked to work from home three days a week. And that was incredibly life changing because it allowed me to be present for my children when they needed me and I didn't then have to pay for childcare everyday, which saved me the money so that I could pay for the therapy. It was like, really having to to restructure the way you live, the way you worked before is probably not going to be the way you work going forward. The way you spent money before is not going to be the way you spend money going forward. And so it really impacts every piece of your life for yourself and for your kids. And that just means making decisions quickly around what you prioritise differently.

Claire : 49:18

Just before I asked my final question, I want to ask you something. I've had a few conversations recently with people about hope. And it's something that we like to ask people about on the podcast because we want to see, you know what hope can be found through grief and loss. Is it possible? We want to give people hope, but there's I think there's some people who just think something's you go through I just too awful. It's just not possible. And I've tried to explain to quite a lot of people the difference between hoping something will happen that kind of fluffy, weird sort of a bit fragile, not quite, very strong hope. I hope this might go well. And then the hope that actually does get people through because they sort of choose to find it. I don't think it just arrives out of nowhere. And it's a very complicated area and lots of people see it in very different ways. So having gone through all of this, what would you say about it? Is there hope in a situation like this?

Jeanette: 50:13

There absolutely is. There is room for hope. And there's room for joy. And I think that is one thing that surprised me. You know, I was immersed in grief for those four years before my husband died. And then for years after, and that whole experience, all of these losses have transformed who I am, the person I am today is not the person I was 10 years ago. And that's a loss, right? Like I had to grieve the life I had before. But when I was able to reframe this as an opportunity for me to live the life I want to live now. And I think that's an important thing, that widowed people and people that are going through loss to deal with of like, right, you can't not lose your person and ask yourself, what is my mortality? What am I going to die? What am I going to do with the time I have left? And so part of it for me was really looking deeply into myself to say, how do I want to live my life now? What kind of relationships do I want going forward? What do I want my relationship with my children to look like? Now? What do I want a new partnership to look like? And being able to lean into that and be vulnerable in that and transform through that. I think a lot about what Mark would think of me now. And I think he wouldn't recognise me in some ways. And I don't think that that's a bad thing, I think he'd be very proud of who I've become, but I'm so different now than who I was when I was married to him and when he was alive. Because I had to go through this process, right, I had to do this really deep digging, that required me to grow, whether I want it to grow or not. And so the hope that comes with that is that when you go through deep, deep, deep pain, you can find if you allow it in, if you can allow that vulnerability and trust of things can still be good in your life, that you can transform and kind of transmute your pain, you can find a place where, yes, death happens and it can be horrible and there is trauma. But also I feel like I hold and see joy in a very different way. Now things that before when have they been that important to me who very important to me, you know, little things in my life, little things in my relationships with my children, that are very important to me now that that I didn't think about in the past. And I think that's where we have hope, right? When we allow ourselves to be to be broken down and be broken open, we can change. The book I wrote is called Shipwrecked. And it is the metaphor right of moving from being shipwrecked and you lose everything in the life you had, and you have to make a decision to drown there or to or to get to shore and you get your kids to shore. And then you find out that the shore is a deserted island and that there's not really other people to help you that you thought were going to help you and then you have to rebuild with the remnants of the life from before. And if you were brave enough, you have to decide to set sail again, you have to decide to risk love and loss again, in order to move forward with your life. You know, people will say to me, I've gotten remarried in the last three years. And they'll say to me, Well, you're not a widow anymore. And I'm like, No, I will always be Mark's widow, right? Like that is who I will always be it is my story but it is not all of who I am anymore. And I think that that is also part of allowing ourselves to move, move forward, I don't talk about moving on, I talk about moving forward. And when you can step into the life on the other side of your loss, you can find hope you can find joy of a beautiful life. Now 10 years ago, I couldn't have imagined the amount of grief I would go through and I couldn't imagine the beautiful life I would have on the other side of that grief. And I am glad I trusted myself through that process to get here, because I know it's hard. It's so hard. And a lot of people say, you know, you don't have to grow through your grief, you don't have to transform. It's just one more thing we're asking grieving people to do. And there is truth in that you don't have to do those things. But if you don't grow, you don't change then you're going to hold that pain forever. And I think that that is not the legacy they would want us to live with. I think we can get to a place where we move forward and we honour the legacy of the person that we lost and that we loved. And we pull their spirit in their their sense of who they were into our lives now. I feel closer to my husband now than I did when he died. He is such an important part of my life and the everyday he is still there and I talk about both of my husband's because I have one living and one dead. People say'your ex' and I'm like no he's my husband I have two, one living in one dead. And that has given me hope to be able to say like my life has gone on my relationships have gone on and marriage has gone in a different way, and my children have grown through this, and we have survived. And we are, we can also thrive. And that was why I made my company thrive. Because I really want people to know like, you can move through pain into growth into joy. It is difficult, and you need help along the way. But it is possible if you let yourself first feel that pain.

Claire : 55:24

And I'm going to add in one more question because it would be remiss of me to off the back of that to not just ask just briefly, what it's like when you find love again, because as a parent being widowed, especially widowed young, that is a very real thing that comes up again, for for a lot of people. And that must be another very difficult step. Yes. So just briefly, yeah, what would you say to people who are maybe at that point?

Jeanette: 55:51

So there's a lot of guilt and shame in the beginning, right? I met Brian, my, I hate using the word 'new', because, it's like, you know, I upgraded or something, my shiny new husband. I met Brian at the support group that I went to at the, at the meetup group, he was the only other person in his 30s. So we had kind of this immediate, like, 'I see you, like, you look about my age, and you know everyone else here is about 70'. So we formed a friendship. And, and within six months of Mark's passing, we started dating, and I had all this shame about it, because I thought people are gonna, you know, they're gonna judge my marriage because it was struggling, they're gonna think I never loved Mark, they're gonna think I moved on, they're... And I think every widow parent I've met, that starts dating, whether that's one year out, you know, six months out, three years out, they all start feeling this, like people are going to judge right? There's a lot of judgement for widows and widowers in our society about what you should and shouldn't do. And the expectations around that. And my kids didn't know about the relationship for the first year, because I was like, I don't know about you, I gotta kind of see how this feels. And, you know, I don't want you around my children if you're not going to be like permanently in their life. So you know, I had this kind of side relationship that my kids didn't know about. I didn't lie about they knew he was a friend. Again, they didn't need the whole truth, they got parts of the truth, I never lied, but I didn't tell them the whole truth of my involvement with him. And as we kind of move through our relationship, you know, especially the first few years, there were four people in our relationship, and two of them were dead. Because he was widowed, as well. And so to deal with, like, grief, and falling in love at the same time, I mean, in some ways, that's what gave me hope. Because, like, how can you hold all of this in your heart? And I think that's the assumption people think - 'I couldn't love Brian, if I was morning, Mark'. And it's like having two children. When I had my, when I got pregnant. With my second child, I thought I worried how could I will never love this baby. The way I love my first baby, like my first baby is, you know, that's my baby. And I worried like, what if I don't attach to the second baby, guess what I love both of my children with this immense big love, right. And I love both of these men with this immense big love. And so I think the human heart is capable of more, I think that we can choose to be in committed relationships, and we can choose, you know, who we prioritise in our life. But in terms of the emotion of love, we have room for a lot of love, we don't have to limit our love and so when I accepted that when I stopped seeing it as an either or and I started seeing it as a both/and. I got this from my therapist. Right that like I could both be with like I could have this maintain the spiritual connection to my late husband, and I could allow myself to love this man that was coming in my life. And one of the things that my therapist helped me with was reframing it as the 'Jeannette I am now' deserves love. The'Jeanette who has been through all this loss' doesn't deserve to be alone the rest of her life, she deserves to be loved and to have a great love. And when we got married, I thanked him for being the love of this life. Because Mark will always be the love of my first life I had. And you know, people talk in the widow community about your Chapter two. And I see it more as like, you know, we are each our own book, right? Like, these are not chapters of my story, these these men have their own stories, and, and I get to be a part of that. And I'm grateful for that. And so I think, you know, people will judge. Part of my transformation was being okay with being like, you know what, so what I used to care so much about what people thought about me before, and grief just made everything raw and made everything vulnerable. And I was like, You know what, I don't care. I don't care anymore. So you go ahead and have that judgement. I'm gonna go see my guy. Grief forces you to step fully into yourself if you allow it to. And if you can embrace all of you your wholeness you can find love Again, if that's something that you desire, and some people don't, I know a lot of people that you know, they're happy being single, and they want to stay single, and they want to focus on their children. And I know other people that are solo parents that desperately want to partner, I think everybody has to decide for themselves what they want. But I think you have to, again, even in that give yourself grace, I think a lot of the widow parents I speak with, particularly if they're with someone who was divorced. It's hard, right? It's hard not to see your late spouse is a competition or that your love is never going to be enough. We started couples counselling, the first year we were together, because you know, we had all this grief. And, you know, I don't think you go to couples counselling anymore. When your marriage is failing, I think you go to couples counselling to make your relationship strong. And like that buffered our relationship, and having that neutral person to talk to helped us get through some of that time that then allowed us here, you know, eight years later to be celebrating our 3rd wedding anniversary next week. So I think you have to be willing to do that work into into use your tools in ways that are different, you know, people would be like, you're going to couples therapy with your boyfriend. And I'm like, Yeah, this is really hard stuff we're dealing with. And he's willing to go. So like, Let's have someone weigh in and help us through making some of these painful decisions of like, whose house are we moving into? And, you know, all of that was hard.

Claire : 1:01:46

You just have to get to a point of like, you know, your journey, you know how hard it's been, you know, the decisions you've made, and all the pain it's taken to get there. And you have to just own it. Because if you don't, I think you can kind of drown with what you might think other people are thinking. But that's, that's great. I'm so glad I asked that. So overall, we've been talking about how helpful it can be to have this information and be armed with advice on how to parent if you've been widowed. So having all this information, if I was to go into my garden shed to kind of pull this out as a tool that would help people what kind of tools do you think it would be?

Jeanette: 1:02:17

My first thought was a chainsaw. Because, when I was really when I needed my chainsaw to take out all my anger. My Garden healed me was one of the things that heal me through through my grief. And my most trusty garden tool right now is the Hori Hori knife, which is a Japanese gardening tool. And it is multipurpose so I think you have to have something in your toolkit that can be used in multiple ways to meet whatever need right it has a inches on it so you can tell if you're digging your bald head, you know how deep down you gotta go. It's got a nice cutting blade for cutting weeds, you can use it to get down into those pesky dandelions and dig deep with it. It's great for for just clearing an area. So I like the Hori Hori knife because it's multi purpose. And I think this is the thing about grief right is multifaceted. And it's not just one thing. And there's not just one tool, it is finding something that you can use in multiple ways.

Claire : 1:03:14

A hori-hori. My husband, Chris, has one of those. So I know exactly what it is and just how useful it can be(although his doesn't have ruler measurements on it). Like Jeanette said, it has so many different uses and grief needs so many different tools so I can see why it came to mind. I'm excited to have one in my shed. They're a great looking tool, so if you're not familiar with them, look it up: hori-hori. So thank you, Jeanette for this valuable conversation and the hori-hori. If you want to find out more about Jeanette you can check out the website www.thrivecommunitycounselling.com. And she's on Twitter @WidowedPP, or her Facebook group is Widowed Parent Project. And I'll put links to all these in the show notes. We've also got an episode coming up where we talk to Jeanette in more detail about all the losses she faced and what it's like to go through cumulative grief or event compression so keep an eye out for that one soon. Thanks for listening to The Silent Why podcast. If you've got a subject you'd like me to chat to an expert about, please get in touch via social media or the website or via my email thesilentwhy@gmail.com And let's chat...