Many of you know that my husband died recently. I can write it in a sentence and it sounds so matter of fact. You can meet me and talk to me, and you’d never know what it’s like inside of my head. Widows (and widowers) can smile and laugh, many young widows carry on with full time jobs and raising kids, but inside of them there is a secret sorrow. We don’t often show it, because we don’t want others to feel bad, or to be uncomfortable, but it’s there. I can’t imagine what widowhood was like before the internet. Widows were alone. They had no one around them who actually understood their experience. Of course most of them had family and friends, who also suffered a loss, but our kind of loss is just not comparable.

Losing the person you thought you were going to spend your life with is unimaginably hard. People do not understand. They compare losing a spouse to losing a parent, an aunt, a pet; they even compare the loss of a spouse to their divorce! Thanks to the internet, modern widows don’t have to be quite so alone.

There are forums where we find others like us and discover, we’re not that unique, we’re not crazy, and we can talk about all this crazy stuff and not disturb our well meaning aunts, sisters, and friends. I painted this painting today thinking of all the young widows I have met on line. Some of them are younger than my own sons, but widowed just the same.

This painting is sold!