Getting to the Other Side of Grief: Overcoming the Loss of a Spouse

Universal understanding coupled with compelling practical advice. All will benefit from the authors’ valuable insights and guidance in the agonizing challenge of spousal loss.

Rabbi Dr. Earl A. Grollman, author of Living When a Loved One Has Died

This book is specifically written with young widows and widowers in mind. Yet it would be beneficial reading to anyone who has lost a spouse through death. Readers will sense that the authors are walking alongside them as they journey through their own grief and find comfort and support in their pain and loneliness. Counselors, pastors, and friends who assist their grieving will find this volume a useful addition to the support they offer.

American Journal of Pastoral Counseling

I cannot think of a better book for the recently bereaved. I would go out of my way to give a copy to someone whose spouse has died. This book is simple, true, practical, honest, and wise. It avoids nothing and covers everything.

Presbyterian Record

© 1998, 2019 by Susan J. Zonnebelt-Smeenge and Robert C. De Vries

Published by Baker Books

a division of Baker Publishing Group

PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.bakerbooks.com

Ebook edition created 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4934-1768-1

Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

In loving memory of our deceased spouses

D. RICHARD SMEENGE

and

CHARLENE K. DE VRIES

whose living and dying taught us so many things.

With appreciation and dedication to our children

SARAH

and

BRIAN, CHRISTINE, and CARRIE

and dear parents

NORMA (now deceased) and BILL ZONNEBELT

for their love and support in our writing and speaking.

Contents

Cover    1

Endorsements    2

Half Title Page    3

Title Page    5

Copyright Page    6

Dedication    7

Mourning into Dancing     11

Preface to the Second Edition    13

1. Why Grieve?    17

Do I Have to Go on This Grief Journey?

2. What Is Grieving Like?    33

Understanding the Ins and Outs of My Grief Journey

3. How Does Gender Impact My Grief?    55

Being Myself on the Journey

4. Help! I Don’t Want to Be Stuck in Grief!    83

The Important Stuff I Need to Know to Avoid Complications

5. Taking Charge of My Grief    107

Understanding the Goals of My Journey

6. Meeting the Challenges on My Journey    135

Working My Way through the Obstacles

7. Dealing with My Children’s Grief    157

The Challenge of My Grief alongside That of My Kids

8. Figuring Out the Practical and Necessary Parts of My Life Now That I’m Widowed    175

Looking at My Finances, Employment, and Housing

9. What Does the Other Side of Grief Look Like?    191

Completing My Journey and Moving Forward

Notes    211

Index    215

Back Ads    221

Back Cover    225

Mourning into Dancing

I should dance in God’s presence, they say,

though my heart is burdened with grief.

I should revel in God’s mercy, they say,

though my life is shattered with pain.

My partner has died.

This is the dark night of my soul.

Days and months press on.

Evenings and mornings lumber past.

My grief is great; my soul cries out,

Why me, O God? Why me?

"Not you, my child. Not you.

Your spouse has died. Not you.

I gave you life. I gave you joy.

I can give again."

Sabbath.

Rest now, and begin again.

The sun burns brighter—so slightly brighter.

The pain of the grave becomes the power of grace.

Step by step, God works his miracle.

"You shall dance again, my child.

You shall dance again."

You, O God alone, can turn

My mourning into dancing.

r. devries

Preface to the Second Edition

Death is not unusual. People die every day. But each death is unique. Lives woven together are now torn apart.

The death of a spouse is especially difficult. Your partner has died. Feelings of abandonment or loss can overwhelm you. Perhaps some feelings of guilt or regret crash in, coupled with powerful feelings of anger, loneliness, and confusion.

This book is written for those who are grieving because of the intensely impacting death of a spouse. We are writing for the widowed of all ages, for those who are younger as well as mid-life and in retirement. The death of a spouse is very difficult regardless of age, although in every age group and phase of marriage there are different challenges to face. That’s why your age and length of marriage are both factors that make your grief unique.

We are writing for both widows and widowers. Gender plays a role in how you manage the grieving process because women and men often address the goals of grief in gender-specific ways. That is a significant reason we decided to collaborate on this book: to examine grief from both the male and female perspectives.

We also write out of our own professional and personal experiences. Susan is an RN and a licensed clinical psychologist who helps others face the issues of grief and loss regularly in her practice. Bob is an ordained minister and a seminary professor emeritus who deals with the issues of grief in the pastoral context. Both of us have experienced the death of a spouse. The writing of this book was in part motivated by our desire to share what we learned on our personal journeys toward wholeness as well as to impart our clinical and professional expertise. We do very much recognize the importance of credibility in that we have each walked the walk too, so this book is not only our professional insights but also the experiences of our challenging journeys through grief.

We found that our Christian beliefs combined with an accurate understanding of all that the grief journey entails following the death of a spouse provided us a helpful platform for dealing with our grief in a healthy manner. This does not imply, however, that persons from other backgrounds or no religious affiliation cannot benefit from what we say here. Death is common to all. Grieving a death is a natural consequence of loss when attachment has occurred, and what we discuss with you on these pages can help—no matter where you come from spiritually—as you are seeking to deal with your own grieving process.

Each chapter addresses specific issues of the grieving process from both the psychological and the spiritual perspectives; however, these two sections are kept separate. Susan is primarily responsible for The Psychologist Says sections that deal with healthy goals and behaviors for managing the grieving process. Bob is primarily responsible for The Pastor Says sections that deal with spiritual beliefs about your spouse’s death and your grief journey. In the chapter on gender differences, we have woven our personal stories of our grief journeys with a broader perspective of cultural similarities and differences of how men and women tend to look at the death of their spouse.

The primary metaphor of this book is that of a journey. We are not focusing on stages or phases of the grief process that tend to be descriptive of what occurs for many who are widowed, but rather we take more of the prescriptive approach, discussing essential goals to work toward on your journey and incorporating helpful tasks and behaviors in order to move to the other side of grief. Like a volume of a major journalistic work, your marriage has come to an end, bound in its own volume, and placed on the shelf, but still available to you through your memories whenever you want to pull them out. Your own life continues; you are beginning a new volume!

You should note that the first writing of this book was done after completing our own grief work following the deaths of our spouses. At the completion of our individual grief journeys and the writing of that book, we began to cautiously date and eventually married. In no way do we believe marriage is a preferred outcome for those who are widowed. We address remarriage at the end of this book as one option, but we want you to know that remaining single is an equally healthy choice for beginning a new volume in your life once you have completed grieving, and that it can be as fulfilling as remarriage.

Our original vision was to create a book that would give support and guidance to the thousands of persons who experience the death of their spouse each year. We sincerely believe God brought us together as psychologist and pastor, female and male, both having been widowed, to use our experiences and knowledge to bring comfort, encouragement, and direction to our fellow travelers on their grief journeys. In 1998 that vision came into reality with the publication of Getting to the Other Side of Grief: Overcoming the Loss of a Spouse. Over the years, individuals, counselors, therapists, churches, hospices, funeral homes, professional organizations, and countless other professionals and organizations have used this book as an important resource in their work with bereaved spouses.

But twenty years have elapsed, and while many of the fundamental principles and the multitude of helpful suggestions are still valid, a revision was needed because of advances in the field of grief and bereavement and our own growth from extensive and intensive involvement in speaking, writing, and counseling bereaved widowed persons. For more than fourteen years we facilitated a Younger (pre-retirement) Widowed Support Group for the Greater Grand Rapids Widowed Persons Service and still continue to do Growth Through Loss seminars for all ages semiannually for that organization. We have been privileged to be integrally involved with the Grief, Crisis, and Disaster track of the American Association of Christian Counselors (AACC) and have served as expert resources for Church Initiative’s GriefShare and DivorceCare programs. Revising this book gives us an opportunity to share new insights and techniques with those grieving the death of their spouse.

We thank Baker Publishing Group and Robert Hosack, our acquisitions editor, for his encouragement and support throughout this project. We also thank Robin Turici, assistant editor, for her careful scrutiny of our text and her valuable suggestions. In addition, we want to thank our parents, Bill Zonnebelt and Norma (now deceased) Zonnebelt. We also thank Pat Cassell, RN, MSW (social worker), Art Jongsma, PhD (psychologist), and C. J. Weidaw, RN, EdD (psychologist) for their encouragement and support of our writing and for their reading of the original manuscript. Special appreciation for their suggestions in the original manuscript is extended to Carol Luther (past director of Widowed Persons Service) and her husband Doug who were co-facilitators with us in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for a number of years.

This revised edition is now presented to you with our best wishes and prayers that it will enlarge your understanding of the grief journey and provide encouragement, hope, and assurance as you journey to the other side of grief following the death of your spouse. Whether you believe it or not right now, if you are determined to do the work it takes, we believe you can and will get there!

With warm regards,

Susan J. Zonnebelt-Smeenge, RN, EdD

Robert C. De Vries, DMin, PhD

August 2019

1

Why Grieve?

Do I Have to Go on This Grief Journey?

No one cries very much unless something of real worth is lost. So, grieving is a celebration of the depth of the union. Tears are the jewels of remembrance—sad, but glistening with the beauty of the past.

James Peterson, On Being Alone, The Adventist Chaplain

What Is Grief?

At 3:00 a.m. on an October Sunday morning, Bob’s wife, Char, slipped into a coma. At breakfast time, he called his three children and Char’s mother to her bedside. By late morning she had died.

Nearly a year later, Susan’s parents were on their way to the airport to pick up their granddaughter, Sarah, who was flying home from college to see her dad for the last time, but she had to contend with a flight delay. At 5:55 p.m. on that Tuesday evening, Rick, Susan’s husband, died. Susan was home alone with him when he died quietly in her arms. Sarah didn’t get to see her dad alive that one more time.

In one split second life ends for your spouse, and he or she has died. Just like that! Sometimes with a warning, and sometimes not. As quickly as you can snap your fingers, your whole life changes forever when your spouse dies. You had woven your lives together, and his or her threads are now cruelly ripped out of the tapestry you uniquely created. No wonder in that moment it may feel like a big part of you has died too!

Then the fog rolls in. It begins to cover up most of the landscape as you begin to feel disoriented in your disbelief. I can’t believe he or she died! The shock and numbness cover you like a wet, cold blanket. No longer here? No longer partnered? Unbelievable! Incomprehensible! The cold, harsh reality of being alone on what looks like an impossible journey is muted only slightly by the onset of the fog. Glimpses of reality break through momentarily as you plan the funeral or memorial service, or when you stand in the receiving line at the visitation or sit in the front row at the funeral listening to words spoken in tribute to your spouse. It doesn’t sink in yet. Gushers of emotion erupt when reality hits momentarily, and then, by God’s grace, more fog rolls in to rescue you.

When all the activities of the funeral subside, and your family and friends return to their homes and individual lives, it becomes uncomfortably quiet. Some people may have gone off to a football game, or to work, or to some other gathering with their friends. Their lives resume their normal pace, having missed only a few beats. You want to scream, Stop! Can’t you stay? My spouse just died, and you’re going to a game? Can’t you pause and experience with me the earth-shattering fact that my spouse just died and grief is washing over me like a bucket of ice water?

The space around you is silent. No one is there to answer you. You are all alone. Or maybe one or two people stay behind with you to try to be helpful. It’s hard to receive help when what you want is your spouse back.

In the days immediately following the burial you begin to have glimpses of the truth—this is really happening. You may feel an intense ache for your spouse, and you finally crawl on the bed and let the tears flow freely because you no longer have the strength to hold them back.

Although you may feel totally alone, isolated from the rest of the world, you have now joined the 800,000 spouses who are widowed each year in the United States. That’s about 7 percent of the population. You may cringe at that thought—to now have the credentials to join that 7 percent. Even though spouses do die, that reality is staring right into your face. It has happened to you!

You have now become a widow (or widower) and perhaps already realize this is one of the most life-changing and challenging situations you have ever had to deal with. Marriage is one of the few relationships you will ever have that impacts you twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Raising children is usually only like this until they become adults and emancipate. Children don’t normally continue to live with you. Not at all like a marriage, where you plan a lifetime together!

In a marital union, the sad fact is that many couples hardly ever address the issue of death while they are healthy and happy. They may have said until death do us part at the marriage altar, but they never really focused on those words then or followed up afterwards. But here you are. The until death do us part has separated you and your spouse, and you are left by yourself.

So, what now? Those buckets of tears flow because you suddenly feel abandoned or left behind or perhaps that you lost something extremely valuable that you can’t do without. The tears and pain are a result of attachment. How much did you attach to your now-deceased spouse? Attachment refers to how much you loved, connected with, interrelated, and were interdependent with your spouse. Did you function overall as a well-greased team? Was it a good and satisfying connection, and were you really close? C. S. Lewis, in The Four Loves, says that the only way to avoid grief is to never have loved!1 Can you imagine having lived your life up to this point without your spouse in it and having never had the experience of loving and being loved by him or her?

Some people try to hide or stuff their grief, but that is blatantly unhealthy and counterproductive. You’re only fooling yourself if you think you can just continue to carry on long term trying to ignore or push down your grief with no negative effects.

So Why Do I Have to Grieve?

When we ask the question Why grieve? we’re not suggesting you can, at least initially, ignore the onslaught of emotion, intense pain, and trauma that accompanies your spouse’s death. Grief is a testimony to how meaningful and special your spouse was to you and so now, through your grief, you are honoring and paying tribute to him or her. In fact, you have no choice but to grieve if you attached to your spouse.

The choice comes when you need to decide to either embrace your grief and work through the process or fight it by trying to stuff it into some dark private place. We hope this book will help you catch the vision of grieving as a necessary journey through your grief—to face it and come out on the other side of it, reshaped and eventually able to live and embrace life fully once again.

What Was Lost When Your Spouse Died?

There are at least four primary components that comprise a healthy spousal relationship that are suddenly eliminated when your spouse dies. They are referred to as secondary losses because, beside losing your spouse as the primary loss, you lost many of the functions and roles that were part of his or her being a healthy, contributing partner.

One of those probably hit you almost immediately: the emotional and physical intimacy that you experienced in your