More than 1.2 million Australians share the profound grief of losing their significant other. How do you navigate life as a widow, and does the label define you? Watch Navigating Widowhood on .
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Navigating Widowhood
episode • Insight • News And Current Affairs • 51m
episode • Insight • News And Current Affairs • 51m
In the space of a week, I learned that my husband was both terminally ill and a serially unfaithful adulterer.
I was faced with an impossible choice: to leave my lying, dying, cheating husband — or to stay.
Four years earlier, Gianni — a vivacious, quirky Italian with sparkling bottle-green eyes — had turned my life into a champagne-coloured fairytale. I, the nerdy academic, was suddenly the lead in an Italian rom com.
After two blissful, action-packed years, we married. But less than a year after our wedding, Gianni found a suspicious lump behind his right ear.
Everything changed. Stage three melanoma turned into stage four when the cancer spread to his brain, and Gianni became a ticking time bomb.
Within a year of their wedding, Gianni (left) was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Source: Supplied
Accessing his laptop to find medical records, I found evidence of his lovers.
I had no idea what to do, whether to stay or go.
I turned first to wine, then to therapy before ending up in a Buddhist monastery in search of tools to help me keep my heart open when it was broken.
"Maybe you can find a new way of loving me," Gianni texted before I turned my phone off for 10 days.
My therapist didn’t think a 10-day silent Vipassana retreat was an appropriate response to an emotional emergency, but I needed a crash course in forgiveness.
Living with real monks seemed the best option. I learned that compassion, letting go and practising grace are forms of radical self-care.
On my last day, a monk shared the parable of the second arrow. Everyone will experience suffering — that’s the first arrow, and the first Noble Truth of Buddhism, he said.
The second arrow is optional. It is our choice how we react to our suffering. It was up to me; I could choose to open or close my heart.
Writing things down, letting my emotions spill out, raw and unfiltered, was therapeutic and helped me find clarity. I didn’t want to be the woman who left the man she loved when he was dying.
I needed to forgive my husband.
His lovers too had loved him
The doctors couldn’t heal Gianni’s cancer, but together we were able to heal what was broken between us.
Had Gianni not been ill, we would have divorced.
But in the face of death, we had a chance to cultivate a new form of love.
I’d been jealous of my husband’s lovers, but the intimacy of death belonged only to us.
Holding Gianni as he took his last breath, in his own bed, as the sun slipped over the horizon on the first day of a new year, was a privilege and a gift.
The night before his funeral, with red wine for courage, I rang several of his lovers.
They too had loved him, they too had shared his fear of death, and they too had a right to know he had died.
It turned out that they had needed to hear from me as much as I had needed to hear from them.
Connecting gave us all a sense of relief and, for them, forgiveness.
A grief-averse culture
After caring for my husband, watching cancer destroy his body and holding him in death, I’d assumed that the world would grant me a pause, allow me to grieve.
But my sadness overwhelmed everybody.
Some went silent, paralysed with the fear of saying the wrong thing; others minimised my grief.
My mother declared that six months was the expiry date of grief before it turned into self-pity, like milk that turns sour.
My father was disappointed that I wasn’t more resilient; he saw my vulnerability as a weakness.
He couldn’t see that it took courage to allow myself to feel the full weight of grief. Numbing myself to it, running from it, might have been easier. But you can’t outrun grief. It will catch up with you, eventually.
Some pointed out that Gianni and I had only been together a short time — not a lifetime — as if this disqualified me from the status of widowhood and forfeited my right to process the cataclysmic sadness that followed his death.
At 48, I didn’t think of myself as a widow. I saw myself as a woman struck down by catastrophic heartbreak, unexpectedly single, entitled to feel bereft, in whatever form that took, for as long as it took.
But as the first to become widowed in my circle of friends, I felt very alone.
I was shocked to discover that my secular, western culture was grief-averse, death our last taboo. We lack rituals and traditions to prepare for death and grief.
As the first to become widowed in my circle of friends, I felt very alone.Kerstin Pilz
In suffering comes a choice
I marked the first anniversary of my husband’s death with a visit to the cremation grounds of India, desperate for a culture where death and grief were acknowledged and honoured.
Standing amid mourners at the cremation grounds of Varanasi, watching corpses ablaze on the banks of the holy river Ganges, made death real.
These century-old sacred Hindu rituals validated my grief.
My guide motioned me to step back from a blazing funeral pyre. "Women are not allowed here", he said.
This is to discourage the ancient practice of pushing widows into their husband’s flames.
Family members and onlookers watch bodies burn on ghats by the Ganges River in Varanasi, India. Source: Getty / Andrew Holbrooke
Here, a widow is often seen as bringing shame on her family. Often, she hides away, unable to remarry or participate in religious life. She becomes very socially isolated.
It's a curse I couldn’t begin to imagine.
Being a widow in my culture still felt like a curse, albeit a lesser one. In both cultures you become excluded.
For Kerstin, travelling to India where death is "acknowledged and honoured" was a way to validate her grief. Source: Supplied
I could choose to grow from this experience or be crushed by it.
It was time to write the next chapter of my life.
After witnessing how quickly life can change, I needed to follow my childhood dream of becoming a writer.
So I left my academic career and began teaching the healing power of writing. I wrote my story as a memoir to heal myself.
And, by sharing my experiences, help others feel less alone in their grief.
Readers seeking support with mental health can contact Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636. More information is available at. supports people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.
And for more stories on sex, relationships, health, wealth, grief and more, head to hosted by Kumi Taguchi. Follow us on the , , , or wherever you get your podcasts.
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