Love After Death: Navigating a Relationship with a Widower

By Myra Brunton 

This should be a story of hope and regeneration; a story that celebrates new chapters. And it is. But it is also a story of honesty and complexity. 

Meet Girl and Boy. In a previous chapter, Boy was married – incredibly happily. But life is cruel, and cancer took Boy’s wife away from him and their children. Girl had also been married but was recently divorced.

Girl entered Boy’s life accidentally. An occasional conversation became a friendship. Friendship became fizzy with mutual attraction. Girl knew what Boy was emerging from. How fragile he still was. Perhaps she didn’t realise right then how fragile she was too. 

Divorce can replace your past, your foundations, with a dystopian reality in which your life can feel wasted through misguided choices. Your own self-worth becomes tied up purely in the act of forward-looking survival. Widowers, conversely, can survive by holding onto the past. Strength is found in the memory and celebration of happiness gone by. 

Girl had a home in which there had been a process of ‘starting anew’: a practical and emotional necessity. Boy had a home in which the past was remembered in every photograph, every piece of art, every hand-written label on a jar. Every decision that made the home as it was. Girl knew it would be like that. She thought her newfound indomitability would mean it was fine. It was, after all, Boy’s house. Boy was lovely. And his past was part of him. 

Nothing in her experience, lived or talked about or read in passing in a novel, had prepared Girl for how you really feel when the backdrop to your burgeoning relationship is photographs of Boy with another woman in his arms. Photographs of Boy’s wife in abundance. Necessary. Understandable. Heart-breaking. Initially, Girl really thought it had no right to bother her. She was, after all, new. Not Wife. Not (this) Mum. Just Girl. 

However falteringly things moved forward, move forward they did. The photos remained. So too did cards that people sent at key points to remember Boy’s Wife. So too did conversations about Boy’s Wife between him and others. Girl often felt invisible. 

The word ‘mistress’ started to invade her head. Isn’t that how we describe a situation where you have a relationship with someone when there is another more important partner in their life? Nothing individually could be called out as rationally wrong, unfair, or not understandable. Collectively, though, it was overwhelming. 

Everyone had said how lovely it would be for Boy to find a girlfriend. Girl wondered if the words ‘puppy’ and ‘girlfriend’ sometimes got muddled. A girlfriend, unlike a puppy, can have a nasty habit of becoming something actually quite important in a boy’s life, and it seemed that no one knew how to deal with this. Boy didn’t. Girl didn’t. Friends and family didn’t. 

The only option seemed to be for Girl to accept that her growth in the relationship was against a backdrop, a backing track of Wife. Girl also knew that under normal circumstances, trying to grow a relationship under the Mona Lisa eyes of a previous love would be an instant no. It would be called out. But these weren’t normal circumstances. 

This was love after death, and the rule book was flawed: no one had actually written any rules. No one even talked about it, this taboo situation. And there was fear, because how do you prove to yourself and your family that a life hasn’t been in vain, that someone hasn’t been forgotten if their presence is not visceral?

Girl became sensitive to the slightest nuance concerning Wife. Wife was a majestic, beautiful shadow in which Girl walked, small and apologetic. Boy said meaningful, reassuring things. But for Girl, the reprogramming of a lifetime of social conditioning was an impossibly big ask. The shadows never truly disappeared, even though the dance of the sun would diminish them at times. 

At what point would Boy stop being referred to by everyone as a widower? Girl began to feel deeply frustrated at a world in which both her and Boy were defined by their past. Widower and Divorcee.

Of course, Girl’s emotional dam would burst. Relationships without the capacity to hear each other say the difficult stuff have a short shelf life. But there was a mere tightrope of acceptable words between them. The crash mat bore their tumbling misunderstandings more than once. 

Things worked out, in the end. Boy and Girl now have a house of their own. They fit into something that the world can recognise and so the order is restored again. Wife is not forgotten, but the shadow has lightened. Or maybe Girl now feels bigger in the shadow.

Girl knows that hindsight is a room best only glanced into. She sees two protagonists, both making their way through their different bereavements, both doing their best in the silent world of life after death. So she closes the door and instead starts talking.