Jessica Waite is the Calgary-based author of the memoir The Widow’s Guide to Dead Bastards.
When a friend sent me an ad for Camp Widow, I pictured a circle of black-veiled women weeping around a campfire. I’ve never hit delete faster. Even “normal” widows, I presumed, must have better things to do than convene for despondent rounds of Kumbaya.
My husband of 17 years had died of a heart attack a few months earlier. The day after his funeral, I discovered terrible secrets he’d been hiding, betrayals that fundamentally changed the nature of my pain. One week in, I wasn’t a normal widow any more, I was a mad one.
“You were everything to him,” a colleague offered over coffee, patting my hand. I forced a smile even as my stomach clenched. Condolence visits that should have brought comfort became gruelling charades as I fought to protect my husband’s reputation and spare others the weight of my revelations.
As the first anniversary of my husband’s death approached, I realized that getting through the first year had been a false target, some mirage of a non-existent finish line. Nothing about life as a fortysomething single mom was getting easier. The casserole drop-ins were long over, and after bedtime tuck-ins, my evenings were devoted to chores, ruminating and scrolling off to sleep. Camp Widow popped up again. This time, I gave it a closer look.
Turns out it’s a conference, held in downtown Toronto every fall. The vast array of workshop options seemed designed to help me find others like myself, who’d lost their partner less than a year ago, who’d lost them suddenly to an unexpected death, who were curious but terrified of online dating. There was even a comedy set on offer. Laughing in the face of grief’s life sentence? I could get behind that.
Travelling solo from Calgary on a late October morning in 2016, my nerves fluttered as I watched fellow passengers line up at the boarding gate. I stood up, toes pointing back toward security, tempting me to skip my flight to Pearson and go home. Better to eat the ticket than suffer through a disastrous weekend, smiling and faking my way through workshops with strangers, like I’d done with friends at my kitchen table.
The gate attendant called my zone. It was time to bolt or board. I felt cornered, and a surge of anger brought my hang-up into clear focus. I was afraid of being exposed, ashamed to admit the truth of my situation. First, I’d been cheated on. Now, I felt cheated out of support, healing, compassion … Enough.
“Go,” I coaxed myself, gripping my carry-on handle as I edged toward the back of the lineup. “When you get there, you don’t have to say a word.”
With that promise, I chose Camp Widow to spite the secret life I’d been perpetuating by default.
My first breakout session was with the Recently Widowed group, two men and about a dozen women ranging in age from mid-20s to late 60s, seated on conference chairs arranged in a circle. “We’ll start with an icebreaker.” The facilitator’s voice was warm. “Tell us one thing you don’t miss about your person.”
Cover-hogging. Stinky shoes. Eating all the leftover pizza overnight. We chuckled over each maddeningly beautiful human foible. When my turn came, an easy answer punched through my vow of silence: “He was such a considerate driver until he got his dream car. Then he started parking like a jerk to avoid door dents.” It felt good to peel back one tiny layer, and the false ideal I’d been holding, imagining everyone else as exemplars of perfect love, fell away.
Presenter Jeanette Koncikowski, whose husband died while they were separated but trying to reconcile, says grief can be complicated by many factors, including marital issues, addiction and mental-health struggles. In her workshop, “Standing in Your Story: Authenticity in Grief,” Ms. Koncikowski explained why hiding the truth is a barrier to healing: “Putting the dead on a pedestal does a disservice to the reality of who they were and to the people left behind.”
Given how complex relationships are, grief counsellor Carly Power says all grief is complicated. Mourning a loss is simultaneously the most unique and the most universal of human experiences. People often start individual counselling three to 12 months after a loss, and group work comes after that. Sitting down in a room full of strangers, publicly speaking the vulnerable pieces of our stories feels absolutely unthinkable until … basically right after the first group session.
That’s how it was with my first breakout group at Camp Widow. I’d been tending my personal injury long enough, and finally felt ready to let my pain alchemize from unique to universal.
What I didn’t expect was how Camp Widow helped me soften into the reality that my husband was more than his worst actions. Remembering him the way others remembered their partners, as a whole and complex human being, helped remediate my shame and humiliation. After getting through the first year, I could step more deliberately into my new life.