Finding Gratitude in Widowhood

Grief has a way of transforming your life, leaving you shattered and overwhelmed by the pain of loss. It’s almost unimaginable to grasp the concept of finding gratitude in widowhood.

Gratitude? Are you freaking kidding me?

Find out how we got to a place of nurturing gratitude in the face of our losses as we answer some burning questions, like:

Is there a way to embrace gratitude even when everything feels hopeless and dark?
What are some practical gratitude hacks that can help me navigate my grief as a widow?
How can I infuse gratitude into my journey?
What are some creative ways to incorporate appreciation into my life?

Maybe you’ve had similar struggles trying to find blessings after tragedy and embracing honesty and authenticity as you navigate the complex landscape of grief.

We get it. We’ve been there, too.

Join us as we delve into a heartfelt discussion of discovering the power of gratitude in the face of profound loss.

Listen to the Full Episode

Links + Resources From This Episode

The Insight Timer app for sleep, anxiety and stress
Kim’s Medium Article: How Would You Handle a Death Sentence?
Good Morning, Monster: A Therapist Shares Five Heroic Stories of Emotional Recovery by Catherine Gildiner

“It’s okay to feel blessed and still have moments of grief and sadness. You can feel both of these things at the same time.”

Jen Zwinck

Episode Transcript

Melissa: Hi, welcome back to the Widow Squad Podcast. I’m Melissa Pierce and I’m here with Jen Zwinck and Kim Murray.

We want to talk today about gratitude, and that’s a tough one because when you’re a widow, you may not think you have a lot to be grateful for. You may not be in a good space in your head to think, what’s there to be happy or joyful about? I just lost my life partner and I have no idea what my life is going to look like right now. You’re telling me that I need to be grateful? Yeah, I don’t think so.

But it is a crucial part of the grief process. We’re here today to talk about gratitude and maybe how you can take some steps to add a gratitude practice to your life.

Cultivating Gratitude in the Grief Process

Melissa: I did a couple weird things. It wasn’t intuitive to be like, oh, I’m just so happy, happy that the world is here and all these people are in it and the birds are chirping and all the things. No, you’re in a pretty dark place, but during this grieving process, it’s really important to try and find something. So to cultivate some more positive emotions or some gratitude, here’s some things that I did.

Again, it wasn’t like I woke up one morning and said, “I need to be grateful. Let’s do the things. Give me the homework.” I am a homework girl. I do love the homework. But it was something where I would gravitate towards all the sympathy cards that people sent. I did this, well, very early on, of course, I read all of them as they came through after Dave died. I would always gravitate towards this box and when I couldn’t sleep or whatever, I would just open them up and I would read through the things that people said about Dave.

I became very grateful to them for even taking the time to share a story of how Dave affected their lives in a positive way. I have this box that I will never get rid of or never re-home. There’s no way to re-home these cards or sentiments, but I find a lot of comfort in that. I find that I’m very grateful for the people who wrote those things, who took the time to tell me and my kids about what Dave meant to them. These are people I didn’t even know that he had interacted with. I don’t know, that was just a really interesting way for me to cultivate that sense of gratitude. I would also read through the obituary. Now it’s online and so people can make comments on the obituary and read through that. It just gave me this really heartwarming, really positive feeling. It’s sad and joyful in a way. It’s kind of weird. It can be sad and joyful. That’s kind of how I started creating some of those positive emotions or cultivating some of those positive emotions. Yeah, I don’t know. Do you think that’s kind of weird?

Kim: No, I do the same. I mean, I have a book that we had, we had a Caring Bridges journal. Mark was sick so people were writing in the journal all the time. I had the Caring Bridges journal made into a book for the boys. I would look through it. There were pictures in there too. It’s the same kind of principle. You just read about what people said about your spouse and you’re like, wow, that’s pretty incredible. You forget so much if you don’t go back and read those entries. So, no, it’s not weird at all. If you don’t go back and read those things, you forget a lot of that. I think that’s a good way to keep that memory alive, too.

Melissa: Also, the people in my life, I worked for a company that was incredible. We were about four hours away from where my office was. The office was in Portland. It was about a four-hour drive away from where we lived. There were several hundred people there, so it was a larger company. It wasn’t really a mom-and-pop shop. Now it’s a Fortune 500 company with all the mergers and acquisitions.

But anyway, they had paid for people’s day off to be with me. You need to be with Melissa. Because I had a lot of work friends, like really good friends. They had paid for people to come out and be with me, to drive out, put them up in hotels, like senior directors. I was so amazingly shocked when I saw these people in this tiny little town that they’d never been to or heard of probably, and they’re there. I was just completely shocked. Yeah, so I was just, just in awe, like, I can’t believe you’re here. You took the time out to do this and be here for me and my kids. They didn’t really know Dave that well, but they knew me. That’s another thing. I was very grateful for my work situation and how they had supported me. I have all the emails of all the donations. We had set up a scholarship fund. We still have a scholarship fund now at the high school where Dave taught at. Each year a music or it’s music and athletic scholarship, very small school. You had to do everything there, but each year a senior gets a scholarship to go to college. In part, that was funded by the folks from 12 years ago. I’m so incredibly grateful. I was just so blown away. That just creates overwhelming gratitude.

But maybe you don’t have something like that in your life, or maybe you didn’t exactly get the support that you needed. Cultivating gratitude and positive emotions doesn’t have to cost money. There’s things you can do for yourself. Something that I found, and I still do today, is there’s apps, there’s free apps all over the place. My favorite one is the Insight Timer. It’s free, you can pay too, but I do the free one. You can just search for whatever you want to do. Gratitude practice or just type in gratitude and up will come like 5, 10, 15 minutes either meditations or just something that you can do just close your eyes for 5, 10 minutes and it will guide you through a gratitude practice or something to where you can kind of shift where you’re at. If you’re not in a really great head space, it’s a great way to kind of shut everything out and, and move into more of a gratitude, joyful space.

Melissa: I know sometimes, again, that’s hard to hear if you’re a recent widow or if you’re struggling. It’s kind of hard to hear, like, be grateful. Well, here’s some things that we’ve done, or I’ve done that you can do to move yourself along. It really, it really changes things. You don’t think it will, and it’s not an immediate thing. It’s something you kind of have to practice each day, but it really does change things up to where you can start seeing things in a different way. You can start seeing a little bit of hope. It does, it builds resilience and you can start seeing, well, maybe there’s a future out there. I’m not sure what it is, but I have a little bit of hope. I’m going to take another baby step towards it. That’s kind of some of the stuff that I did to kind of build that practice in my life.

Kim: I use the Insight Timer too, Melissa. I have used that before, too. I love it. I like the Insight Timer and the tapping apps, you know, you can do tapping to simulate gratitude.

Melissa: Tapping is also called EFT or the Emotional Freedom Technique.

The Journey from Anger to Gratitude: Starting with an Anti-Gratitude List

Kim: Like we’ve said, gratitude is not intuitive when you’re grieving. Especially in the beginning when, like me, I was pissed and I’m not the only widow who’s ever been pissed that her husband died. I’m not saying that I cornered the market on that, but I was really pissed for a very long time. I didn’t want to practice gratitude. I didn’t want to be grateful about anything. I’m a reader and I’m a self-help person too, you know, so I’m reading the books and I’m looking at the websites and I’m going through the Pinterest pins and doing all the things and everything I’m seeing is you need to write a gratitude list and you need to practice, you need to find something to be grateful for.

I’m thinking, but I don’t want to. Maybe this is going to be good for me, but I don’t want to. I’m also thinking, you know, don’t tell me what to do. If somebody’s telling me to be grateful, I’d be like, “no, I’m not going to be grateful. Pinterest, stop telling me what to do.“

Melissa: Stop telling me what to do, Pinterest!

Kim: I don’t feel grateful and I’m not going to practice gratitude. I just didn’t know what to do about it because I was just angry. As I know now, because I’ve had many years of practicing this, anger can be a substitute for other emotions, right? Like sadness. We’ve talked about this before. I did not allow myself to be sad as much as I probably should have in the beginning. Anger masked my sadness. I was pissed all the time because I was sad and I wasn’t allowing that sadness to come out, and I just didn’t want to be grateful.

I was kind of upset that I was just being inundated, you know, I couldn’t look at an Instagram feed or a website or listen to a podcast or read a magazine cover or talk to the freaking barista at Starbucks without, you know, somebody telling me I needed to be grateful.

I wrote a blog post about an anti-gratitude list. I called it the “this sucks ass list.” Because I didn’t want to be grateful for anything. I’m going to be mad and I’m going to write the reasons. You know, we’ve talked about this before, just the fact that you get to be feeling whatever it is you’re feeling. In no way do we want to say, you need to be grateful, and you should do this, you should do that. It’s going to take some time to get to that point where you can look back a little bit and go, okay, well, I was anti-gratitude for a long time. Maybe I should try the gratitude thing. Maybe I should see how that works out for me.

It took me several years to get there because I just didn’t want to deal with it. I also didn’t want to feel bad about feeling bad because, well, I felt bad. I’m not going to try to sugarcoat anything. I mean, I don’t, I’m not going to say something that I don’t believe to be true. I’m not going to say I’m grateful for anything when I’m not grateful about anything. I just wanted to be mad. I was, and I wrote my “this sucks ass” list over and over again about everything that made me angry. People said things to me, or I had to do this job, I didn’t want to do and whatever.

Well, you can only also be in that space for so long until you become just a negative Nelly and then nobody wants to be around you. I was not oblivious to the fact that couldn’t go on forever, but I wanted to do it for a while. So I did.

What I did when I would do these anti-gratitude lists was write down the reasons why I was mad. Then take one of those reasons and try to figure out three different ways I could let go of that anger. I allowed myself to be angry, but then I was also trying to figure out a way to let go of it. I used journaling, of course, because you can’t do this in your brain. You have to write it down. Like, you know, back when my kids were young I had to cart them everywhere. You know, when they didn’t have their licenses yet. They couldn’t drive yet. I was basically, you know, an unpaid Uber driver for ungrateful teenagers, right?

Melissa: Did they tip? Did they give good tips?

Kim: They didn’t tip. And they left nasty reviews.

Melissa: Maybe they gave you a french fry or something.

Kim: Yeah, not nice. I’m driving them all over the place. Nobody else is available. Because again, I wasn’t asking for help. We’ve talked about that before. But that would be one thing I’d be mad about. I was an Uber driver for my ungrateful kids, or, you know, my self-employed health insurance was off the flipping charts expensive. Well, there was nothing I could do about that because, well, that’s a whole other story, right? But maybe I screwed up my checking account because I didn’t reconcile it the right way.

I’m mad about all these things while I’m trying to figure out which one of those could I actually change? Which one of those could I be less angry about if I were to change my circumstance? What can I let go of?

I thought, well I could let go of being an unpaid Uber driver to ungrateful teens. I could let that go because what I was doing was changing my schedule to accommodate theirs. After a while, I’m like, why am I changing my schedule? Why don’t I put my schedule first and then work them into it? Again, when you’re a solo parent, you have to do everything for everybody all the time and be there for everybody all the time. It gets to be a lot; it gets to be too much. We know that because we’ve all gone through it. I had to drive them around. I can’t really get out of that job. Because there’s no public transportation where I live. It’s not like I could send them on a bus. We don’t have public transportation around here and they didn’t have their driver’s license.

I could get mad about it or I could do something about it. I’m thinking, okay, I am willing to maybe let go of that anger. How can I do that? I would write down 3 ways. For example, I would write, 1) say no, when I can’t be in 2 places at once. Somebody or something is gonna have to give, and somebody’s gonna have to go second. 2) I can place a priority on my schedule, not their schedule. And 3) I don’t have to justify or rationalize my decisions. When I’m doing it that way and writing down why I’m angry, but then also trying to trick my brain and to figure out ways to be less angry, that was sort of my backdoor into gratitude.

You know, you’re creating a new way to fix something, you know, right, without having to bow to the Pinterest and Instagram feeds of being grateful all the time.

I had friends that would text me too. They’d be like, “I just wish you were happy. I just wish that you would just take deep breaths and just let things go.” It’s like, just please stop talking. Do you think that I don’t wish I could just let things go? Don’t you think I wish I was happy too? But when you’re in that space, you can’t figure out how to make that happen. Like me, with my personality, I have to go through the anger and the being pissed off and the, you know, this sucks ass list and do all the things in order to get to the other side. I can’t just walk to the other side. I have to go through all the other roundabout ways.

You have to literally process your anger about that specific thing. Get it on paper. Good. Get it out of your head. When I was writing about my anti-gratitude list it wasn’t like I’m writing to teach you everything I’ve learned. I’m writing to understand what I’m learning, you know, at the same time. I didn’t have an answer to everything, but this was my answer to that particular dilemma and, you know, me just being mad all the time.

I stopped just saying yes to everything. You know, your kids, God love them, will take advantage of you as long as you let them. What? Yeah, I’ve never heard that! Like, they’ll actually continue taking advantage of you until you put a stop to it. I had to put that stop to it. Like, okay, boys, there’s only one of me and there’s only this many hours in a day and this is all I can do. And as they got a little bit older, I I started asking for a little bit more help too. I would ask other people to come and get them for their ball games or practice or whatever.

Melissa: Carpooling.

Kim: Carpooling. Somebody was driving by my house, you know, they could come and get them.

I guess if you can’t write about why you’re grateful, write about why you’re pissed, but just get it out on paper. Just get it out of your head and just start to think about why you’re feeling this way or what’s contributing to it or how you could potentially change it so that you’re not contributing to your own suffering.

I went through a lot of years of being really angry, but then I kind of came around. I did come around to the benefits of writing a gratitude list. I do that now. I don’t do it every day. But I try to do some kind of meditation. The app that I have for meditation that I like is called Balance. It is a guided meditation. I can’t obviously sit in a chair by myself and try not to think thoughts. You don’t want to be in my brain. It’s not a nice place to be. I need to be guided and told to breathe and do this and do that.

I would come back around to that gratitude list, even if it was just listening to the birds chirping outside my window, which I absolutely adore. When I hear them chirping, I feel good. That makes me happy. I would hear the birds chirping today or I had a great cup of coffee, whatever, it doesn’t matter what it is. Just getting in the routine of just looking at things in a positive light. We talk all the time about opening up your mind to possibilities. Synchronicities can happen in your life when you’re open to them.

Well, you have to be open to gratitude too. You have to open it up and look for things. They don’t fall in your lap, you know, you have to look for them. I do more gratitude now than I did back then. But again, you know, listeners, it’s been 9 years. I have a little experience under my belt.

It wasn’t this way in the beginning, it was several years before I got there, but to your point though, Melissa, about reading your stories. We had the Caring Bridge Journal, but my husband also wrote a letter that we read at his funeral. He wrote a letter knowing that he was going to die and thanking everybody in his life. The funeral director read this at his funeral. I had read it before his funeral, but it’s only been after he’s been gone that I’ve gone back and read it a zillion trillion times that I can really appreciate how immensely grateful that I am for that letter and that I am that my kids can see that letter too.

I had written an article on the Medium platform about this, called How Would You Handle a Death Sentence? It goes through his letter and talks about a man who was told he had 12 to 15 months to live. He wrote a letter thanking everybody that he wanted to thank in his life. Who does that?

Melissa: Mark Murray does.

Kim: Mark Murray does. Yeah. He did it. Then he wrote some letters to his friends. I helped him pen some letters. He wrote that other letter himself, but I did help him pen some letters to his friends and they’re grateful for those letters. He wrote me a letter specifically. He wrote his children a letter specifically. They’re in my safe downstairs in my basement. There are no words to explain how important that is and how important those words are, which is another way to say to everybody listening, write something down for your kids, write something down for your grandkids, write something down for people who will want to know what you have to say or what you think before you’re gone. Write a book, a letter, do whatever you need to do.

Those letters and the way he handled his impending death, I’m immensely grateful for. You can find things to be grateful for. Sometimes you have to search. Sometimes it’s not going to come to you for several years after the fact. Right? That’s okay, too. But look around, see what you can find. Talk to people. Listen to their stories, too. When you have other people telling you about your husband or your spouse, that’s priceless. When I would go to work, which again, didn’t like the job, but I liked the people, we would talk about Mark all the time. In those 8 years that I was running that business, it was like he was still there with us because we were always talking about him. But I was grateful for their stories too because I learned things about him that I didn’t always know, his work ethic and things that he did for his customers that I didn’t know about. Things like that. You don’t know that unless you’re talking to people or you’re asking them questions. Heading up and sitting in that office with those people doing this job I didn’t want to do. I never would have heard those stories. They weren’t calling me up on the phone. I had to be there.

We had to talk about it. We had to say his name. We had to exchange stories. Again, listeners, exchange stories. Talk about him. Ask questions from other people so they can talk about him. Then do it around your kids, especially if your kids are little. I talk about my husband all the time around my kids. Now they’re adults, but even back then, they didn’t always want to hear it. They didn’t always want to share stories or listen, but I repeated them over and over and over again to the point now I’m like, “Oh my gosh, you guys remember that story?” And they’re like, “Yes, mom. We know because we’ve heard it like 25,000 times.” And I tell them, “well, you’re going to hear it 25,000 more because I’m never going to stop telling it.” We’re going to hear it again and again. But you have to just be asking the questions and listening to the answers.

Melissa: You’re also modeling that for them because they know that you’re open. At the point they get older, they want to talk or share a story. And you know, we’ve talked about this before where folks are like, “Oh, I don’t want to mention his name because it might upset you.” If you’re sharing stories, it’s telling others, Hey, I’m open. I’m open to hearing this stuff. I’m open to talking.

Kim: Yeah. That’s a good point. Because it took my older son a very long time to start talking about his dad. He was 10 when his dad died and he’s 20-years-old now. I mean, it’s only been in the last couple of years that we’ve actually had conversations about his dad. One time we were at a restaurant, this was maybe 6 months ago. We’re talking about his dad and we both just start sobbing in this restaurant and, you know, I’m holding his hand and we’re just looking at each other. I didn’t give a crap who was in the restaurant. I didn’t give a crap who was looking at us. He’s looking around like “mom, you know, people must think we’re crazy.” I said, “I don’t care.” We just had that moment where we were just sobbing over this man who died 9 years ago, just sobbing and it was okay. That whole modeling thing. Finally, I get this kid to open up and start talking. I don’t care if I’m sitting with the Queen of England. I mean, I’m going to bawl my eyes out if that’s what it takes.

We gotta keep talking about it and keep repeating the stories and keep asking the questions because sometimes it takes 10 years, 8 years, whatever, before you can get that out of it. Now my son is way more open to sharing his stories with me too, because yes, we kept that open enough to talk about him and let everybody know it’s okay. It’s okay. My husband now, we still talk about Mark. He’ll say, “what do you think Mark would do in this situation?”

Sometimes the gratitude path is curvy. It’s not a straight line. That’s okay. Take as much time as you need. But eventually try to work your way back to gratitude. It helps. You said, Melissa, that it’s beneficial for your mental health. There’s proof of that. It is scientific.

Melissa: Yeah, we’re not scientists, but we’ve read stuff. We just know from our experiences, it does move you forward on the path to hope in a new future.

Kim: Jen, what are your gratitude stories?