Ever hear of widow’s fog? It’s a thing, and honestly presently at 4 years in, it’s still a thing. I sometimes think I irritate people by forgetting what they just told me. It’s not intentional, sometimes I’m just in a lost cloudy space even when I seemed to be just very present. You might notice that my eyes drift mid-conversation, or I forget what I’m saying halfway through a sentence. If you notice this when conversing with a person who just lost her husband, don’t take it personally. We’re not trying to be rude or scattered. We’re living in widows fog.
Widow’s fog is a real, heavy, disorienting haze that settles in after the person you built a life with is suddenly gone. You’re mentally numb, essentially detached. I find it quite interesting. I guess it’s kind of a blessing in the beginning because the inability to think rationally probably protects our brain from the overwhelming grief that would make us want to otherwise hurl ourselves over a cliff. It’s almost as if the world is broken. Actually, the world is broken. It’s so odd how it keeps spinning and seems normal to everyone else. Anything that requires a coherent thought, is virtually doomed to be missed, forgotten.
Sorry…Can You Repeat That?
Imagine waking up one morning and every familiar thing- your home, your routines, your memories, looks the same but doesn’t feel the same. It’s like someone tilted your world just a few degrees off-center. You try to walk straight, but everything wobbles. You reach for words that used to come easily, but your brain feels underwater. Some days, just remembering to eat or pay a bill feels like advanced math. Days get blurred, appointments get missed, thoughts that should be second nature just can’t come to the surface. My guess is because if someone so major is gone, why does all the rest still exist? People matter, not all of the other stuff.
It’s not just grief. It’s biology. It’s trauma. It’s exhaustion. It’s love with nowhere to go
That’s widow’s fog.
Eventually you realize, that against everything your being is experiencing, you are in fact and unfortunately still existing. I say unfortunately because sometimes in the beginning, you don’t want to be. Then you have to do the things. All of them. Or none of them, and your life quickly begins falling apart. It may look like idleness or laziness, but we’re not lazy. We’re not losing our minds. We’re surviving something enormous.
Sorry, I Zoned Out…Please Forgive Me
When you lose a person, you go into crisis mode. The stress hormones surge, sleep vanishes, and your nervous system scrambles to protect you from total collapse. You’re grieving, but you’re also in physical shock. Widow’s fog varies from person to person. The depth of the bond you shared can cause it to last many months and many years. Your brain needs to reorganize itself to recognize the hole that loss carved into your life and that life’s rhythms have changed completely. That is not a quick process. widow fog is your minds way of cushioning the blow. It gives you distance so that you can keep breathing when everything hurts too much to process at once.
However, eventually you begin to recognize some of the world around you. It’s not the same world, but a semblance thereof. You see yourself again, not the same version, but in my case an exhausted more haggard version. That word haggard might seem harsh, but I’m truly a worse version of what I was prior to this. The instant life change and the stress thereafter took a toll.
Then, you just take the next step in front of you. You wake up (if the Lord allows). You raise your children who you thankfully see very clearly, then immediately feel a ton of pressure and angst that their lives will be doomed, having to be solely parented by a parent on the edge. Then you also recognize that on occasion you’ll still forget and be in the fog, to the annoyance of others.
It’s just what it is.
Just Be There. Don’t Overwhelm Her
So, if you know a widow who seems to just not be all there, remember she isn’t. Don’t ask if she’s OK, because she isn’t. Don’t ask what she’s thinking, she’s trying to not think because she doesn’t want to visualize the trauma, she doesn’t want to face whatever foreign inevitability that are about to befall her.
She’s just there. Just let her be there. Maybe say, “we’ve got you”. And then HAVE HER!! Those words just might make her exhale even a little bit. Feel a tiny ounce of hope again.
You’ll never know how much of a weight that singular exhale, that resulted from you saying “we’ve got you” truly means.
JUST A WIDOW BIT DAZED