Young Widow: A Memoir

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Young Widow is a raw and expressive journal of the year following the unexpected death of Sarah’s husband, Mark. At only 29 years old and without children, Sarah had to deal with the loss of her husband, lover, and best friend. She writes about the feelings, events, struggles, and inspiration she experiences over the following year. Young Widow is an uncensored look into the feelings and experiences of a young widow in the midst of her grief.

Quotes from Young Widow: A Memoir:

"Time is a difficult thing to measure. You measure it in seconds, minutes, hours, days, and so on. However, in the initial moments of tragedy it feels as though time ceases to be a tangible thing to measure. It feels as though it stops altogether, and yet, somehow, minutes, hours, and days continue to go by. What once seemed like a twenty-four-hour period of time no longer feels the same. I don’t remember the passing of time that afternoon when I found out Mark had died. I simply remember John, Vicky, Mike, and myself sitting in the suffocating silence of my living room. We sat there staring quietly at the ceiling as the clock kept ticking, but all of our hearts had stopped beating."

"Shock is a thief. It steals reality from you, as well as entire passages of time. However, it ironically acts as your protector. It keeps you from feeling the full magnitude of the sorrow. It allows it in, but only in manageable pieces. Piece by piece you eventually feel all the sorrow but still have lost the passages of time. Shock simply won’t let you feel the reality and the intensity of all the many losses that the one loss fully represents. Shock is perhaps the best word to describe my feelings in the days after Mark’s death. I am able to recall only fragments of my life at that time. For that I am grateful. I don’t want to remember those days."

In the midst of my grief, I searched for resources to help me and found that there were few for young widows/widowers. There were also very few books that dealt with the journey of the first year after the loss of a spouse in the form of a journal or memoir. Most books I found were written as “what to expect” and also written years after the author had experienced the loss. The most comforting book that I read was CS Lewis’ “A Grief Observed”. Using this as inspiration, I decided to look into having my own journal published as a means to help other young widows, young widowers, and their family and friends who seek to understand and support them in their grief.

-Sarah