Where are my Cakes and Casseroles? How Being Widowed Is Different From Being Abandoned

I was talking to a client whose husband left after 40 years of an enchanted marriage and she made a comment that I’ve heard many times before. She said that things would be so much easier if he’d just died. We got into a discussion about the difference between being left and being a widow (I’ve been both!) and I thought you’d be interested.

Grief

In both abandonment and widowhood, you suffer crushing grief and a profound sense of loss, but in the case of abandonment, she said, it’s a “dirty grief” - socially not the same thing. Nobody tells a widow, “You’re better off without him” or “I never thought he was right for you.” Widows are permitted space to grieve deeply and for a prolonged period of time, but little room is made for women who’ve been abandoned to experience grief.

That grief is confusing. You’re mourning your loved husband who no longer exists but, at the same time, hurt and angry with the man who is sending you lawyer’s letters. The grief is tainted - not pure. It keeps you in an emotional spin - grieving and then hurt and angry in alternate moments and that makes it hard to resolve the loss.

Memories

Widows tend to remember the happy times they spent together with their husbands. They can bask in the bittersweet glow of special loving moments and when they talk about their departed loves, they highlight the positive. Abandoned wives, however, are stuck remembering the recent traumatic events that triggered the loss. We all repeat in our minds the outrage and shock that lead to the end of the marriage, particularly the moment when it all fell apart. We steer away from remembering the happy times - how can you revel in the happy times when you are stuck seeing him as the liar or coward who hurt you so badly?

Financial stability

Often widows are in a good financial position after their husband dies, especially if he had life insurance, RRSPs or a pension that reverts to them. There’s no question that they will keep the house, cottage and car as well as any savings. Abandoned wives, however, are typically in a weaker financial position than they were before, having to fight for anything that they can get from their ex, while paying astronomical lawyers fees to boot. They often have to split the value of the house and move to a more modest home. They may have to go back to work if they were retired or had been a stay-at-home mom.

Family and friends

One of the topics we often talk about in my Hearts & Minds divorce recovery groups is the painful loss of family and friends. When a husband dies, the whole community rallies around the widow, bringing cakes and casseroles. She’s invited to any family events and remains a part of her late husband’s family. When he leaves her, however, she is often booted out of the family, even if she’d been integrated with them for decades. Her mother-in-law stops calling and even welcomes her ex’s new girlfriend for Thanksgiving dinner. Friends make judgments and take sides and it’s not unusual to lose a certain number in the process.

Privacy

When your husband dies, he takes your secrets with him to the grave. When your husband leaves, nothing is sacred. He’s building a case about why he had to leave to justify his actions and provides evidence to the world of your weaknesses or even secrets that only he knows. You lose control of your version of your story as he proclaims, loud and clear, his version of events.

Children

When your husband dies, you and the kids go through it together. You‘re typically all mourning their dad in harmony. You support each other through special events, like holidays and birthdays, missing him and reminiscing about good times from the past. When your husband leaves, however, your kids are thrown into a profoundly complicated position. They love their dad but may turn against him when they see him in a different light and know the hurt he’s caused you. If they’re young, they may go back and forth to his house with his girlfriend, knowing full well how much that hurts you. You avoid talking about him during special events - they don’t want to hear your pain. You worry about what the loss of the dad they knew will do to them.

Your Future

Finally, another big difference is that, when he dies, your pure feelings about your husband are not tarnished by rejection and betrayal. You smile thinking of him and get to keep the relationship you had with him forever. When a husband dies, it is not his choice. But when he leaves, he purposely did so without any regard for the repercussions. When he dies, you never see him again. But when he leaves, you watch him build a life with someone else.

Divorce Funeral

My client then suggested, why don’t we have a divorce funeral? A rite of passage to acknowledge the end of the marriage rather than what we currently do, which is to slink away in hurt and shame? I would certainly not suggest a bitter diatribe party against the ex but rather, a mindful moment to punctuate this turning point in our lives. We could get together with our friends and family and perhaps recount the story of the marriage, highlighting the growth changes we went through during that stage of our lives.

Light a Candle for Yourself

In my work as a marriage counsellor, there are times when a couple comes to the session wanting to talk about the fact that they’ve decided to separate. I always light a candle during those sessions, to honor the sanctity of their marriage and acknowledge that it meant something important. I ask them to sit with that for a few minutes before jumping into the chaos of separating their lives. That’s because, when you’ve walked a good part of your life with someone and the path comes to an end, either by death or divorce, in spite of all the differences, being married means something that you take with you in your heart.

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Are you a woman whose husband suddenly left? Click here for more resources to start your healing process.

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How long does it take to recover from Wife Abandonment?

What’s the normal recovery time from wife abandonment? One year? Two years? Five years? Eight years? The answer is . . . yes. The normal recovery time is the time that it takes for you to recover. Women who are still dealing with painful thoughts of their ex on a daily basis and anxiety around holidays and events years after the marriage has ended are often ashamed. But they shouldn’t be.

They feel that they should be over it already. Their friends and family insist that they should be over it already. It feels like the whole universe is shouting that they should be over it already! But they’re not. And there are good reasons for that.

There are a lot of complex factors at play but the one that has the largest impact on how long it will take for you to click into a new normal is your belief about your own future. If you’re telling yourself that you will never be happy again and that there is nothing to look forward to, it will be much harder for you to stop ruminating about the past.

I can hear what you might be saying right now: “Vikki! All that is true! I will never be happy again. I have nothing to look forward to!” I think part of the problem is that you are still defining your life in the terms you used when you were with your husband. If your happiness is dependent on you living the life you had in the past, then yes. You will never be happy again because that life is over.

But perhaps, you need to make a new definition of what constitutes your future life and potential happiness. Rather than focusing on all you have lost, can you tally up all you still have? Can you work on becoming agile and pivot to a new vision of your future? One that you define on your own terms.

Really true profound happiness comes from an appreciation of the very simple things in life. The other day, my client told me that she went for a walk by herself on the mountain (the city of Montreal was built around a beautiful “mountain” park). She said she was walking up the trail and drinking in the experience. She thought to herself, “I could be lying in a hospital bed somewhere but I’m here now, walking on the mountain”. She was able to feel how special it was. That felt good to her.

It takes practice to learn to really feel appreciation for the moment, for the simple things. You have to work on it. Practice trying to feel appreciation when you’re sitting at the breakfast table in your warm house with food on your plate. You won’t feel it right away, but with practice, you can get there. Practice communing with the trees outside your window. Feel their quiet energy. Tune into the small beautiful things that surround you. Construct a secret chamber in your heart where you can retreat in peace, just feeling good to be alive.

I believe life itself is a gift that we have to cherish whether things are hard or good.

When you can turn your vision from the past to your own future, whenever that is, the real healing will start. Your future may be small and quiet and different from what you expected but hey, it’s all yours. Make it beautiful.

What do you think about how long it’s taking you to recover? Add your voice below!

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Are you a woman whose husband suddenly left? Click here for more resources to start your healing process.

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Runaway Husbands

The fall of 2006 should have been the happiest time of my life. I had published my first book, My Sister, My Self, about sister relationships and had set out alone on a whirlwind book tour that took me 3,000 miles crisscrossing America. The trip was great but hard - 23 days in the car driving from bookstore to bookstore, eating practically all my meals at the wheel.

By the time I got to my last stop, San Diego, I was so looking forward to coming home to Montreal. I took the red eye back and fell into my darling husband's arms in relief when he picked me up at 8am at the airport. I was so happy to see him! He dropped me off at home and headed to work.

I spent the day getting organized but noticed a long dark hair in the bathtub when I took a shower. I didn’t think anything of it. I also was puzzled later that various dishes in the kitchen were in the wrong place. We’d lived there for years and we always kept the colander under the sink and the spatulas in the pot on the counter but now I had to search for them. Also a bit weird - but, no matter.

When my husband returned that night, I threaded my arm through his and said, “I bought fish” to which he responded, “It’s over.” I thought, weird, but said, “Okay, if you don’t want fish, we can have chicken.” And he said, “It’s over and I’m leaving you. Right now.” And he did. He moved right in with his girlfriend of six years who had been staying in my house while I was away.

That moment marked my descent into the nightmare that I’ve come to call Wife Abandonment Syndrome. Wife Abandonment Syndrome is when a man leaves out-of-the-blue from what his wife believed to be a happy stable marriage. There is typically another woman in the picture. One of the hallmarks is that the husband then turns angrily on the wife, blaming her and dismantling everything she knew as their loving joint history together. He seems to have no regard for his traumatized wife, even if he had been a loving and attentive husband days earlier, as mine had been.

After my husband left, I started researching this phenomenon and was amazed when I realized that it’s pretty common and that the features of how the men leave are almost identical from case to case. I started a study and interviewed women all over the world to whom this had happened. Based on the findings of the study, I wrote the book, Runaway Husbands, and launched the website, runawayhusbands.com. Very quickly we developed an international community of women supporting women through this terrible trauma.

This is not a typical divorce in which the wife may have seen it coming. In Wife Abandonment Syndrome, there are often no signs that the husband is unhappy or thinking of leaving, as was my case. When men leave in this way, their wives feel like they’re crazy and completely alone. When they stumble across our website, Googling in the middle of the night, they’re shocked to learn that it’s a “thing” and deeply comforted to be able to share what they are going through with others.

Recovery is a long and painful process. Initially, the wife is obsessed with understanding her husband’s motivation - how he could morph overnight from a loving husband into a cold and angry stranger? Once she’s been helped to see what was behind his actions, she will become freer to turn her focus from mourning her past to glimpsing her future.

I’m a psychotherapist so my goal in helping women in this situation is to guide them to a point where they can see this crisis as a springboard for change. The first year after wife abandonment is very rough, but with enough support, the wife left behind can start to see possibilities for her life as a single woman and hopefully, be able to flower into embracing her new life.

Over the years, I’ve developed therapeutic resources to provide help both online and face-to-face. The power of being part of a healing community cannot be underestimated - when women get together, they offer each other both strategies and support. We have a Facebook group, newsletter, online meditation group and what we call Healing Circles - where women can meet others locally in their towns to provide support. These exist in cities all over the world.

I’m able to work personally with women through online therapy groups where we can see and hear each other, just as if we were in the same room. We meet together in yearly retreats in Montreal and Sedona, Arizona and for those that need more support, private Skype therapy sessions are available. Our community is powerful, with active participants in Australia and New Zealand, India, Hong Kong, Nigeria and Ghana, Britain, Europe, Canada and the US.

I know how powerfully women suffer and grieve following Wife Abandonment Syndrome. I’ve been there. But I also know that this trauma can also be used for what is called post traumatic growth, in which women are forced to strengthen themselves so they can manage their thoughts and emotions and develop a profound new understanding of their lives. Although they can’t see it when they’re in the midst of it, they’re not always going to feel this badly.

Let me know your response to this post in the comments below. Did it touch you?

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Are you a woman whose husband suddenly left? Click here for more resources to start your healing process.

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