The Current - Widows work through their grief at Camp Widow

Episode Date: December 11, 2024

After Jessica Waite told Matt Galloway about her memoir A Widow’s Guide to Dead Bastards, our listeners shared their own experiences with grief. We hear some listener mail about coping with the loss of a partner — and more from producer Alison Masemann’s trip to Camp Widow.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. I can remember Sean fondly now for the parts of him that I loved and admired, I don't feel triggered by the things that used to be upsetting for me. And so, yeah, I feel like we're on good terms. If we meet sometime in the afterlife, I won't punch you in the face, which wasn't always guaranteed. But yeah, now I feel a sense of peace. That's Jessica Waite in our conversation last week about her new memoir, A Widow's Guide to Dead Bastards.

Jessica's husband, Sean, died suddenly of a heart attack. And that is when she discovered he had a whole secret life, a life that included infidelity and a stash of pornography. Jessica talked about those secrets, but also how she navigates grief and anger at the same time. And how talking to other people who had been widowed helped her move through those different emotions. After that conversation, we heard from many of you and our producer, Alison Maisman, is here to sift through some of your mail. Alison, good morning. Morning, Matt. Yeah, our listeners were very generous in sharing some of their stories about loss and grief. And for some of them, Jessica's story resonated very directly. This is from Lorraine Zettler. I was suddenly widowed at 49, heart attack, and discovered that my person gambled our life savings away. It was not long

after the funeral that the bailiff came to take anything of value, including my car, which I needed to get to work. I had two young teens at home to support. It was four years before I even had time to grieve because I'd been too busy salvaging our lives. I still feel anger that he had kept a huge secret. Communicate with your loved ones, people. If you have a problem, they will help. Don't ruin innocent lives. Lynn Parker writes, my husband and I met in high school, love at pretty well first sight, married young, age 19, went through university together, had two beautiful kids. He completed his PhD, landed a job in Edmonton. He had one more trip to Calgary for his oral presentation.

I remember getting up very early that morning with him, hugging him, wishing him well, watching his taillights as he drove away. And that was unknowingly the end of my life as I had known it. He came home that night, a completely changed person. Over the next three years, there was confusion, chaos, tears, fear. I had to take the kids and go into hiding. There were restraining orders, police and arrests, and a time spent in a psychiatric hospital. My good and dear husband, the guy that I'd planned to live my life with, had schizophrenia. The details of those three years are just too many to write here.

Let me just say it was bad. Lynn then writes that they went to divorce court. And then shortly after that, he died by suicide. And she goes on to say, I have to admit that my first reaction to the news was absolute and profound relief. I didn't have to be scared anymore. I was angry at him for years. I'm not angry anymore. I have forgiven him or life or whatever it was that threw such a curveball my way. I've made sure to share good stories about their dad with my kids and now grandkids. I am grateful for all the good memories of our sweet years together. Deborah McClellan also wrote to us

about her complicated mix of emotions. I lost my partner almost four years ago. He died of cancer during COVID times, and I cared for him at home. My partner was witty, loving, creative, and energetic. He was a force. He was also addicted to alcohol, which makes any relationship more fraught.

I still feel a mix of loss, sadness, anger, and resentment and guilt. Another widow said to me that the biggest loss is not having that one person always in your corner, the one you can reach out to in the middle of the night when you're ill, complain to about the slights and annoyances of daily life, share your enthusiasm for your favorite music, tell you which earrings look best on you, and tell you you're beautiful when you're really an average-looking woman. How do you replace that? We also heard from people who talked about what it means to keep going when your partner dies. Here's a letter we got from Marilyn Phillips.

I lost my husband Alan in August 2023. This is my second Christmas without him, and I'm finding it more difficult than the first one. Emotionally, I carry my grief every minute of every day and keep putting one foot in front of the other. We were together for 48 years and his death was completely unexpected as he had a 99% chance of surviving his cardiac surgery. I think the loneliness is the worst and I miss the support of sharing issues with someone and his hugs. I'm very proud of myself, however, learning how to cope with the household repairs that he always looked after. I'm also so truly grateful that I always told him that I loved him and appreciated what he did for us all. This is a difficult journey, however, one that nobody escapes. Sharing and reaching out to others helps too. Marilyn talks about that idea of

finding common ground with other widows, and this is something that Jessica Waite spoke with us about as well. Yeah, and one of the places that Jessica found some of that common ground with other widows. And this is something that Jessica Waite spoke with us about as well. Yeah. And one of the places that Jessica found some of that common ground was at this event called Camp Widow. As I was working on that interview with Jessica, I actually went to Camp Widow last month and I heard so many really compelling stories from people there. I thought I'd share a few more with you. Okay. So remind us what Camp Widow is all about. It's an annual event and it's run by a nonprofit called Soaring Spirits Canada. Okay, so remind us what Camp Widow is all about. It's an annual event, and it's run by a non-profit called Soaring Spirits Canada. Basically, it's like a conference for people whose partners have died. People come from all over North America, and at this year's event,

there were about 250 people there or so. So when you walked in, what did you think? Well, I went down these escalators and got into the main sort of reception area. What did you think? Well, I went down these escalators and got into the main sort of reception area. There were lots of people hugging, sort of exclaiming, running into old friends. That's what it felt like. There was people at the conference who'd lost their partner really young, like in their 30s. And the other thing was it's not all women.

So it's not strictly speaking widows, but also widowers. There was about 40 men or so at this year's conference. There were those people that were happy to see one another hugging and so on, but there were also these people who you could tell were a bit more solitary. They were sliding into their seats in the main ballroom. One woman that was sitting right in front of me looked pretty nervous to be there, and I could see that she had this Ziploc bag full of Kleenex tucked into her purse. Jodi Skeets, who's the CEO of Soaring Spirits, took to the stage, and you could tell she was trying to sort of offer some reassurance to people about what this was all about. Yes, we're all alone because grief is a very individual journey.

I often say it feels like a maze. You constantly turn a corner, and you never really know which part of the maze you're on. It could be rocky, or it could be thorny. It could be thundering and lightning. And I don't know if any of you remember walking through a childhood maze and it was sort of fun to hear the people on the other side because you knew there was a way out, right? There was like somebody else on this maze with you. And so once people get settled in, what do they do all weekend at this event, at Camp Widow? Well, it is like they make jokes about how there's no campfires there, right?

But it is more like a conference. People are kind of divided into these streams. So you might be in the recently widowed stream, or you might be a little bit further into your journey, or what they call a seasoned widow or widowed person. And everyone's got these lanyards that they wear. So people put ribbons on the end of it. So it indicates you're vintage, so to speak, five years, seven years, whatever. And then out in the lobby, there's like this little marketplace area. You can buy various books about widowhood.

There's lots of widow-themed swag. So there's t-shirts that say, badass widow, buttons that say, love never dies, and stickers that say, death sucks. And people talk a lot about death. I mean, it's kind of death in your face. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. There's really no taboos there.

This is a place where you can get into these conversations about death and grief in a way that can feel really difficult in the wider world. And there's also this big wall of photos. So here's volunteer Stacey Brown explaining what that's all about. This is our tribute tile wall. And so campers have the opportunity to send in a photo of their person. And so when they are at camp and they're meeting people, they can also introduce them to their person. So this is my husband, Andre.

And so when I get to know people, because we talk about our people all weekend, but you're talking to people who don't know them, will never know them. And yet, you know, it's nice to be able to put faces to names and just to bring them with us. The language is really interesting. You're referring to somebody as your person. Yeah. Everybody's got a person. And as I found out, every person has a story. And I found that people were super willing to share those stories with me. Tell us about some of the people that you met. So one of the first people I met at Camp Widow was Stephen Souza, who's from Ajax, Ontario. He first started coming to the camp in 2019. And that was several months after his wife of 17

years, Maggie, had died of cancer. He was left raising their three kids, and he'd been struggling to find some support. It was pretty lonesome, honestly. You know, I went to, there was a local group in my area, and yes, there was 10 people there, and for a while I think that was the only guy. So it is, yes, you do feel pretty lonely and you do feel on the outside. Sometimes there's also, it can be a little bit of a dismissive attitude a lot. There's a general consensus that, you know, men tend tend to move on earlier men tend to get over it earlier so you find that community but you you're still a little bit on the outside and coming here it's uh you

know this was also the first time that i actually found a large enough community of men that we could you know going to my first men's group here at Camp Widow was so overwhelming and so emotional. And it was an amazing experience. Finally, I can actually talk to other guys who get it. I'm super interested in vulnerability and masculinity and how the two kind of coexist. Did you talk to other men in this space? Yeah, I did. I met a man named Greg Mays.

And so he lives in Milton, Ontario. And he's really involved in Camp Widow. He's been volunteering for a number of years. He runs men's groups. He's a member of the board. And what did he tell you about his own experience? Greg's story was also unique and interesting. His wife, Rose, was diagnosed with appendix cancer in 2015. And as her condition progressed, she decided on a medically assisted death. And so I wondered how that had affected Greg's experience with grief. I don't like to compare my grief to somebody else's because everybody's grief is different. With my grief, there was some

anticipatory grief because of the fact that it was a terminal illness for two years. So she fought it with 26 rounds of chemo and about five rounds of an experimental drug. And then in the end, when she went into hospice, she thought, I'm going to use MAID because the prognosis just doesn't look good for the future of feeding tubes. And just, she didn't want to do that. She had a sense of dignity that she wanted to go out on her own terms. So she only, it was only my sister-in-law and myself that knew the day. She didn't want to tell my two daughters. They were 21 and 26 at the time. She was diagnosed on Mother's Day 2015 and then we, the MAID process happened the day after Mother's Day in 2017. So Mother's Day, when I was taking her back to hospice,

was hard because she knew the next day she wouldn't see them again. Sorry, I get choked up thinking about it. The words that she said when we were in the van and she was waving goodbye to the kids, she said, this is the hardest thing I've ever done. That's really quite something. Yeah, I mean, incredibly tough to go through that. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news.

So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. When you talk to people at this conference, you realize that each person has this very particular story about grief and about how it has affected them. And at the same time, they all find comfort in finding other people who can relate in some way to what they have experienced.

That's also what I heard from a woman named Janice Martin. We were talking about the experience of LGBTQ widows and widowers. She's a really soft-spoken person. She told me she was an introvert, a little bit nervous about sitting down to share her story. What did she tell you about what she's gone through? Well, her story is about her wife, Karen, who died in 2011 of cancer. And at the time, she found that there really wasn't a lot of support out there for LGBTQ widows. I was actually shocked because I sought out a queer grief spousal loss group.

There wasn't one at that time. I thought surely with the AIDS crises, there would be such a thing. No, there wasn't. So I had built a very straight and narrow community before that we'll say I had come out at 40 I have a couple of children and I was obviously out to them because I married Karen and out to my parents oh they didn't come to my wedding so degrees of acceptance but I know there are many people who don't have that kind of acceptance. They're kicked out of their families. They don't have the family that would normally support a widow to rely on for validation of the relationship and validation of the loss of the relationship. It's an emotion-denying, death-denying society. And it's hard to be a widow, period. It's hard to have that other layer of invisibility

or feeling of lack of support sometimes. But here in this safe bubble, people get it. This is something that Jessica Waite talked about in the interview that we did with her, that we live in this society where people don't talk about death. They don't talk about grief, despite the fact that it's this universal thing that everybody's going to go through. And that when we do talk about it, we have some sort of expectations to what this is

going to look like. Absolutely. And it was amazing sort of almost to a person when I spoke with people at Camp Widow, they brought up this idea of getting over it. Here's what a woman named Nancy told me about how some people reacted to her grief. I think they thought I would get over it. That expression really is bothersome. We go through it. I have some absolutely fabulous days and other days, even now, almost seven years, I don't want to come out of the house. There's something will trigger, maybe a song or something I've read, something on TV. And I don't understand sometimes why I still am like this at seven years, but I don't dwell on it either.

I mean, anybody who has been through this knows that it is a nonlinear process. Yeah, and I heard from other people about that idea that somehow you move beyond it, right? And you remember that guy, Stephen Sousa, the dad I introduced you to at the beginning of this, who was widowed in 2019. He talked to me about how even though he has a new partner now, he still thinks of himself as a widowed person, even if other people might forget. My own mother says, why are you going to Camp Widow? It's like, well, because Maggie still died. She's still not here. I'm still raising our children without their mother. It doesn't matter that I've remarried again. I still have all that loss. Children graduate,

and every time a child graduates, I know that their mother's not here. I remember how proud she would be of them. And so the losses do keep coming, and it's never over. You never actually graduate or finish. Life just keeps changing. It's interesting. You don't graduate from grief. Yeah. We heard that from our listeners, too.

Here's some of what Jackie Connaughton wrote. My beloved husband died quite suddenly seven years ago at Christmas. He was killed in a car accident. He drove off one morning and I never saw him again. I was totally unprepared for this, of course, and what I was even more unprepared for was the immediate need for me to take over running his business. times since he died, I don't have to keep putting my grief aside to function as a high-powered business person. As the years go by, fewer and fewer people understand that I can still be grieving. It's easy to start feeling ashamed or judged and to feel very isolated in my grief. I think it's so important and so wonderful when people can share this experience together and realize that it's a very normal, natural response to such a devastating loss, no matter how long it takes. It's interesting. Part of the response to this is that people feel like we aren't talking a lot about grief

and talking about it in the right way. Anderson Cooper has this podcast, which is wildly popular, which is all about that, that idea that we need to acknowledge something that we try to bury. So what do we do about this? How do we get better at understanding that grief is a normal thing? Well, there's this notion of grief literacy, which is something I talked to Jodi Skeets about. You remember, she's the woman who was leading Camp Widow. Our community doesn't bring death to the dining room table. And I think we can learn from other cultures when it comes to

how they deal with the reality of death. We're all going to die. We all need to deal with the belongings of our loved ones. We all need to deal with the absence of our loved ones. We need to prepare for that death. I think there's a lot to learn. There's a movement afoot right now to bring grief literacy to the forefront so more people will not be caught off guard by their grief experience. And so part of that is just, what did she say? Bring death to the dining room table. Just talking about it more, right? Which I hope we have contributed to. And, you know, as you can imagine, Jodi, I mean, part of the whole purpose of Camp Widow is opening up

that conversation. And, you know, she points out it's not necessarily a depressing conversation. It can provide a way forward for people. It can really be a source of hope. And that was kind of the message that she tried to deliver at the conference. So people have a really interesting relationship with hope. Sometimes you don't want to hope. You don't dare hope because the last time you hoped, you ended up devastated. When we say hope at Soaring Spirits, it isn't like a sparkly, shiny, diamond-like hope.

It's a gritty hope. It's the hope that you've got to work hard for. It's the hope that getting out of the bed today is the right decision for you. It's just the hope to keep going forward. It's dirty. You have to keep finding it. Sometimes hope can be for the long term, and sometimes it's just for the next moment.

But it matters. Hope matters. It's really interesting. Alison, thank you very much for this. Thanks, Matt. Alison Maisman is a producer here at The Current. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.