Things No One Said: Part 2

Cast Aside

No one said that grief wouldn’t be the hardest part.

No one said the real heartbreak might come from the living.

When I became a widow at 35, I expected sorrow. I expected silence at night. I expected missing him.

What I didn’t expect was to be discarded, not just by death, but by family.

I learned my husband had left nothing for the girls, including me. His mom, the named beneficiary, looked at me, when I asked her what she planned to do, and said,

“If he wanted your name there, he would have put it.”

That sentence still haunts me. Not for what it said, but for what it didn’t care about.

I watched her upgrade her home while my daughters and I tried to recover from a hurricane the year before; still missing doors, still patching up what we could. Still broken.

And still I showed up. I forced my children to visit her. I thought proximity might build something back. I thought pretending might make it real.

Until I couldn’t pretend anymore.

It was another trauma, another mother figure casting me aside. It didn’t matter that I had her grandchildren. It didn’t matter what we had been through.

And just like that, the isolation closed in.

I was estranged not only from her, but from my own mother. From my siblings. From his siblings.

1.5 years after becoming a widow, I wasn’t just grieving a husband, I was grieving the whole web that should’ve caught me.

But no one said that part.

No one said that loss could echo louder when you’re still breathing.