It is 9 p.m. and the house is not empty. Your daughter is staying through the weekend. The neighbors have been generous. Your phone has more messages than you can answer. And you have never felt more alone in your life.
If that is where you are, you are not ungrateful: you are noticing something real about the loss of a spouse or partner that most people, including most well-meaning ones, do not understand.
[A note on the research: most of it studied married couples. If you lost a partner you were not married to, your loss counts just as much and it is one the research has examined far less.]
Company does not fix this kind of loneliness
A large Australian study of older adults followed 749 people who lost a spouse, from three years before the death to three years after. Loneliness rose strongly for both women and men. What did not change was social support and community participation. Indeed, contact with friends and family who lived elsewhere actually increased. People saw more of the people in their lives and were lonelier anyway. The authors concluded that efforts focused only on increasing social contact are unlikely to ease this loneliness and suggested that helping people form a new sense of identity could be beneficial.
That fits one explanation researchers have offered from attachment theory: the loneliness of widowhood is not mainly a shortage of people. It is the absence of one particular person, the one who knew what your day had been like before you said a word. No number of casseroles stands in for that.
When it becomes acute
In my work, I have not found that the loneliness peaks at a particular hour or on a particular day. What I do see is that it becomes acute in specific kinds of moments: when you take on something your loved one used to do, when you face a decision the two of you would have made together, or when you find yourself in an activity you used to do as a couple. The loneliness is not always random. It often shows up where their absence has a job to do.
The second job nobody warned you about
Alongside the grief there is a second set of demands. Accounts to change, passwords nobody wrote down, a car or a furnace or a tax return that was always someone else’s responsibility. These are what clinicians call secondary losses: the roles, routines, and practical competence that left with the person. (If this part resonates, The Ripple Effect: Understanding Secondary Losses in Grief.)
It is easy to think of the paperwork as a distraction from the “real” grieving. It is not. It is part of grieving, and it deserves its own acknowledgment.
Moving back and forth is how this works
In 1999, researchers Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut proposed what they call the Dual Process Model of coping with bereavement. Its central idea is that adapting to loss involves two kinds of demands. One is turning toward the loss itself: the missing, the memories, the tears. The other is turning toward the life that still needs running: the logistics, the new roles, the unfamiliar quiet. The key to the model is that adaptive coping is not staying in either one. It is moving between them, sometimes confronting, sometimes taking a break from either.
This means you are allowed to spend a morning on the bank call and an evening looking through photographs. You are allowed to laugh at dinner and cry in the car. Neither one cancels the other, and neither means you are doing it wrong. (For more on taking breaks without guilt, see Dosing Your Grief.)
Who are you now?
Part of what makes this loss so disorienting is that it takes away a way of being as well as a person. Researcher Erin Wehrman interviewed 35 people who had lost a spouse and found that adjusting involved reconciling who they were as part of a relationship with who they were after their loved one died, including changes to both personal and relational identities. Her work also found that stressors and unhelpful interactions can make this harder, and that support from others makes it easier.
You do not have to choose between the two. You do not stop being their husband, wife, or partner because they died. You are also becoming someone who lives on without them, and that second identity does not have to erase the first. (More on this in Who Are You Now? What Loss Does to Identity.)
Staying connected is not a failure to move on
Many people feel pressure, spoken or unspoken, to “let go” or “move on,” which is often heard as a call to loosen the connection to the person who died. That idea has a long history. Early grief theory, beginning with Freud, held that the work of mourning was to detach from the person who died. It is also an idea that grief researchers have largely moved away from. In 1996, Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman, and Steven Nickman edited a volume presenting evidence that bereaved people commonly keep an ongoing relationship with the person who died, and that this is not denial.
In my experience, for most people, staying connected is a healthy part of grieving. It always depends on the relationship, and a painful or harmful relationship may call for a different kind of bond. There is no right way to do it and most people find their own way and simply fall into it: continuing to sit at the bedside and tell them about the day, wearing their sweater around the house, watching a favorite show with their photograph nearby. If you have already found your way, you do not need to change it or ask anyone’s permission. (For more, see The Importance of Continuing Bonds.)
When the loneliness shows up
When the loneliness arrives, you do not have to fix it, fight it, or figure out what it says about how you are doing. Start by noticing it and naming it, even quietly to yourself: this is loneliness, and it makes sense that it is here. It is an understandable part of grief, especially in the moments when their absence has a job to do. Naming it is not giving in to it. It is a way of making room for what you are already feeling, which usually takes less effort than trying to push it away.
Then ask whether this loneliness needs anything from you. Often it does not. Sometimes the answer is simply to let it be there, the way you would let a wave pass.
At other times, the loneliness is a signal. It might be telling you to connect with a friend or a family member. It might be telling you to get out of the house and be among people, whether that is a class, a walk to the coffee shop, or a regular spot where people know your name. (There is more on why small connections count in The Quiet Strength of “Weak Ties”.) The point is not to make the loneliness go away. Connection is worth having whether or not the missing eases, and you get to choose which kind, and when.
Either answer is fine. What matters is that you are choosing, not being run by the feeling.
When to ask for more support
Most people find that the sharpest edges soften with time, though the loss does not leave. If months in, you are unable to function in ways that matter to you, or the grief feels fixed in place and not moving, it may be worth talking with someone. Am I Stuck? When Grief Becomes a Cage describes how to tell the difference.
You are not meant to carry this alone. If it would help to talk it through, I offer a free 15-minute consultation, in person in Boulder or by telehealth throughout Colorado, at shareyourgrief.org. You can also read more about grief counseling in Boulder.
