The Day Everything Changed

Notes from inside the loss of my husband, and what came after.

This is the moment the world fell away beneath my feet.

We have all experienced defining moments in life. Some are moments of joy, like the birth of a child. Others are moments of profound loss — death, divorce, the kind of thing that changes the shape of everything that follows. This story is about the loss of my husband, and the way it changed the course of our lives forever.

How is it possible for life to change so drastically in the blink of an eye? Three years on, I still find it difficult to believe. One minute we were laughing and living life together. The next, he was gone — unable to be resuscitated. He was 39 years old, in the prime of his life.

Shock

The shock was instantaneous. I could not fathom what was happening, or make sense of what the doctor was saying. I stepped outside the hospital and for a few seconds it was as though it had not happened. Then I remembered that it had. This back-and-forth went on for a long time as my brain tried to reconcile the awful facts. It slowly sank in, and with it came the pain and the anguish.

It took many weeks before I could even say the words: he has died.

Telling the children

The hardest moment, without a shadow of a doubt, was telling my children that their father had died.

The denial in me was strong. I tried to reason a way that I would not need to tell them, but of course I did need to tell them, and I did so immediately. It will remain the worst moment of my life — a moment I prefer not to revisit.

The ash

Memory in trauma is a fickle thing — the brain’s way of protecting itself. So much is hazy, but some moments are vivid. The city was filled with smoke. Ash fell, even in our garden. My daughter said, the mountain is burning because it’s so angry that daddy died. We all wept.

I am different

I was instantly altered. My heart and essence are the same, but a part of me changed in that moment, and there is no denying it. It was hard for many of those close to me to accept this version of me.

When you are unacquainted with this kind of loss, you imagine you know how you will respond — what you will feel, what you will choose, who you will be. One of the clearest lessons I have learned is that you do not know. Not until you have stood at the very bottom of it, with your foundation shaken to the core, do you know.

Pain

The pain was unbearable. Like being kicked in the stomach and unable to breathe. It came in waves, alongside panic and the same circular question: how will I survive this?

Eventually, after some time, I learned that the only way is through. There is no stopping the pain, no avoiding it, no going around it. There is no being cheered out of it, and no solution to fix it. The only way is through, eyes wide open. Slowly, slowly, you let the steam out of the pressure cooker. Slowly, slowly, you begin to face the remains of what life once was.

Reading

I stopped watching television. Everything felt too trivial.

Eventually I found the strength to read. I read and read and read. But only about death, and loss, and grief — looking for meaning when the world felt meaningless.

The body knows

In the moment I heard he had collapsed, all the energy left my body. Getting myself off the mountain that day was a task. Two kilometres can suddenly become very long. Time becomes elastic.

In the first two weeks I physically fell apart. The effects of shock on the nervous system were unmistakable. I could not eat. I lost weight. I had stomach pain and reflux — symptoms I had never experienced before — and my doctor was concerned about ulcers. I had numbness, tingling and twitching in my extremities and face: the body’s signature of acute panic and anxiety. I had been a runner. In those first weeks I was lucky if I could walk a kilometre or two, slowly. The deliberate work of rebuilding strength came later.

The morgue

Four days after his death I was sent to the morgue to identify him. It felt deeply unfair, given that I had been present at the hospital when he died. The morgue brought more trauma — the confusion, the clinical smell of the place, the cold metal table. He was on the other side of the glass, tubes still down his throat, his running shoes still on his feet.

The memorial

I remember very little of the memorial. Blank. Nausea. I spoke. I spoke for him, and for our children. Most of it I cannot retrieve. People kept asking me afterwards whether I had been medicated; I had not. That kind of dissociation in acute grief is common.

I do remember that everyone was kind that day. And I remember that my daughter comforted me while I cried.

Love and grief

There is no grief without love. It is the price we pay for loving fully.

We grieve in proportion to the depth of the relationship we have lost. The greater the love, the greater the grief — they go together. To open your heart fully to another person is to open it, also, to the possibility of profound pain. That vulnerability does not diminish the love. It is part of what makes it real.

The inappropriate jokes

My friend Tracey and I learned to laugh.

For so many of our morning runs, I would arrive crying. By the end of most of them, we were laughing. Inappropriate widow jokes became a legitimate coping mechanism, and they still serve me well. I know he would have approved. Not everyone does, and I have stopped minding.

The privilege

Is it better to have had something so great and lost it all, or to never have known that kind of love at all?

There were so many privileges in our marriage. The privilege of being loved unconditionally. The privilege of being held to high standards. The privilege of witnessing the life of someone whose presence shaped everyone around him. I am aware that not everyone gets to experience a relationship like that, and I carry that gratitude alongside the loss.

Releasing the ashes

It took a long time to get to the releasing of the ashes.

I had endured — or embraced, depending on how you want to see it — an enormous amount of change. Moving my child to a new school. Moving house. Closing a business and reopening my private practice. The release of the ashes needed to happen when things were calm, or as close to calm as we could find. Balancing the involvement of all those who loved him with the inherent instinct of what he would have wanted came together when the time was right. The mountain and the ocean — right where he belonged. I was glad we waited. It was cathartic, and it was special.

Lonely, but not the only word

Grief is a lonely place. At a certain point I realised that I could not stay in it forever — that I needed to remember what it feels like to be alive. To laugh. To dance. To be with my children, and my friends, and to be in nature. The sadness has never fully released its grip, but it has learned to share the room.

Death leaves nothing to hide. It forces you to see what is real — who you are, who is around you, what holds and what does not. It tests every boundary in life.

Don’t you feel guilty?

I have been asked many times, in many forms, whether I feel guilty about the life I am building now.

I do not.

Marriage, by its definition, ends with death. I felt married for the longest time, and when I no longer did, I did not feel guilt. I am completely certain that he would want our children, and me, to be happy. He would be cheering. Go Chans, go and LIVE. I feel no guilt.

Moving forward, not on

This is the part where you learn to live for yourself, and not for the comfort of other people.

Sympathy has an expiry date. Judgement creeps in, sometimes from the people you would least expect. I learned quickly that having too much fun was frowned upon, and being too sad was also frowned upon. Grief is profoundly uncomfortable for other people. I stopped paying attention to that, and started living the truest version of my own life.

We never move on from a loss like this. But we can move forward with our lives. Grief does not end — it is part of you, forever. You can laugh, cry, be happy, angry and grieving, all in the same hour. You only fully understand it when you go through it.

You can survive this

These are my thoughts as I stand at a further point in time from the 17th of April, 2021.

If you are reading this in the thick of the pain, please know: you can survive this. I know it is the worst thing you could possibly want to hear. And it is also true that it is okay to not be okay right now. The world has rearranged itself, and you cannot pretend otherwise.

But if you can choose to be brave, and face this pain with eyes open, and take many tiny steps over many slow months, there is life on the other side. There is so much life. The grief does not go away. You learn, instead, to grow around it.

You will grow in ways you never thought were possible. You will need to do the hard work — therapy, self-reflection, time, patience — and there are no shortcuts. But it is worth it.

I do believe, in large part, that this is a choice. Hard as that is to accept, the choice rests with you.

I can say very comfortably now that we are happy and thriving. We have not moved on; we have moved forward. We have not gotten over it; we carry it with us. He is part of who we are. He will always be missed and loved, celebrated and spoken about. There will always be tears. He was not ours to keep, and he made his time count.

He taught me about true love, commitment, loyalty. He is the reason I have faith in marriage and relationships. He is the reason I believe in the beauty of deep connection. He is a large part of the reason I am able to give of myself fully to another person now, while also holding gratitude and grief for what came before. I am certain, in every part of my being, that he is happy and proud of us as we walk into our new chapter with our hearts wide open.

A final note

The growth I have experienced through both the death of my husband and the death of my mother has opened my heart in ways I cannot fully describe. It has made me more empathetic. It has shaped my relationships, my work, and the way I hold space for others.

It has allowed me to offer a place of safety and support for those navigating similar losses — and that work has, in turn, allowed me to feel an immense gratitude for what I now have. Despite the loss, and despite the pain, I am grateful for the life I am living. It is only through this loss, and this journey, that this new chapter became possible.

Resources and inspiration

Books

• Notes on Grief — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

• A Year of Magical Thinking — Joan Didion

• Death and the After Parties — Joanne Hichens

• It’s OK Not to Be OK — Megan Devine

• Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow — Elisabeth Lesser

• The Choice: Embrace the Possible — Edith Eger

Other

• The Dominic Pretorius exhibit, which inspired me to write this article.

• Nora McInerny’s TED talk and her Instagram — extraordinarily valuable, and often very funny.

• @imsorrywearefriends on Instagram, worth following if you have lost a spouse.

• Find a good therapist.