Episode 187: If your marriage was complicated, your grief still counts
10/28/26
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You are listening to the Life Reconstructed podcast with me, Teresa Amaral Beshwate, grief
expert, best-selling author and widow. I’m so glad you’re here because in this and every
episode, I shine a light on the widowed way forward.
Hello and welcome to episode 187. What if your marriage was complicated—or you felt relief when
your person died? In this episode, we're talking about grieving what was, what wasn't, and what
you hoped could have been—and why you still belong in the widowed community.
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Today I want to talk to those of you whose relationship with your person was complicated.
And “complicated” can mean a lot of things.
Maybe you were estranged when your person died.
Maybe you were separated.
Maybe your marriage had been difficult for a long time.
Maybe there was a lot of conflict. Maybe there were things that happened in your marriage that
were incredibly painful.
Maybe you loved your person deeply and were also deeply disappointed by the relationship.
Maybe you were still hoping things would change.
Maybe you had already accepted that they probably wouldn't.
There are so many versions of complicated.
And if that's your story, I want you to hear this today:
You are welcome here.
You belong in the widowed community.
The definition I use for a widowed person is someone who loses the person they planned to spend
the rest of their life with.
I don't add any qualifiers to that.
I don't say you had to have a happy marriage.
I don't say you had to be getting along when they died.
I don't say your marriage had to look a certain way.
I don't say you have to feel a certain way about their death.
You lost the person you planned to spend the rest of your life with.
And you get to grieve that.
You get to grieve what was.
You get to grieve what wasn't.
And you get to grieve what you hoped could have been.
You might grieve your shared history.
You might grieve their physical absence.
You might grieve the future you thought you would have together.
You might grieve the possibility that things could have gotten better.
You might grieve the conversations you thought you'd eventually have.
The apology that might have come.
The forgiveness that might have happened.
The relationship you hoped you might eventually create together.
And now death has made some of those possibilities seem impossible.
That is grief, too.
And there may be another emotion here that we need to talk about.
Shame.
Not just shame about how you feel now.
Maybe you carry shame about the relationship itself.
Maybe somewhere along the way you decided that your marriage was a failure.
And if the marriage failed, maybe you've made that mean something about you.
Maybe you look back and think:
I should have known better.
I should have done things differently.
Why did I stay?
Why didn't I say something?
Why couldn't we figure this out?
Why wasn't our marriage like other people's marriages?
Maybe there are things that happened inside your marriage that very few people know about.
And maybe even now, you don't talk about them.
Maybe you're part of widowed groups where you hear people talking about beautiful marriages and
wonderful spouses and how much they miss the life they had.
And you stay quiet.
Because that's not your story.
Maybe only a handful of people know what your marriage was actually like.
And when someone learns that your spouse died and says, “I'm so sorry,” there's a part of you
that wants to say:
I'm not.
That might feel shocking to admit.
It might even feel shameful.
But what if we don't make that wrong, either?
Because maybe you're not sorry that the marriage, as it existed, is over.
And at the very same time, you can be deeply sad about what you never got to have.
Those aren't mutually exclusive.
Maybe you wish you had known then what you know now.
Maybe you wish you'd had different tools.
Maybe you wish you'd communicated differently, set different boundaries, made different choices,
or understood yourself better.
Maybe you wish you had known how to do your part differently.
You can acknowledge all of that without assigning yourself responsibility for the entire
relationship.
Because there were two people in your relationship.
You could have shown up differently.
You could have made different choices.
You can own the things that were yours to own.
And you still could not have created a different marriage all by yourself.
Both things can be true.
And perhaps one of the most painful parts of death is that there is no longer an opportunity to
find out what might have happened.
You don't get to go back with everything you know now.
You don't get to try again differently.
There may be no final conversation.
No resolution.
No opportunity for either of you to become the people you might have become and see whether the
relationship could have become something different, too.
And you get to grieve that.
You can grieve a relationship you didn't want to continue in the way that it was and still
grieve the possibility of what it might have become.
And I want to be careful with this word failure.
A marriage can have been deeply difficult.
It can have contained choices you regret.
It can have been something you wish had been different.
But when we take the sentence, “My marriage failed,” and turn it into “I am a failure,” we've
moved into something else entirely.
We've moved into shame.
And shame loves secrecy.
It tells us:
Don't tell them what it was really like.
They won't understand.
They'll judge you.
You don't belong with these widows.
And that's exactly why I want to talk about it here.
Because you do.
And there may be something else you've been reluctant to admit.
When they died, you might have felt relieved.
I want to say that one again because I suspect there are people listening who have never said
this out loud:
When your person died, you might have felt relief.
Please don't let that relief hide in shame.
Maybe you had been living with conflict for years.
Maybe you had been walking on eggshells.
Maybe there was addiction, illness, anger, betrayal, instability, or simply a relationship that
had become incredibly difficult to live inside.
Maybe you had been exhausted for a very long time.
And then they died.
And alongside the shock, sadness, anger, or grief, there was relief.
Relief that something difficult was over.
Relief that you didn't have to manage it anymore.
Relief that you didn't have to wonder what was going to happen next.
Relief that you could finally exhale.
That relief does not mean you wanted them to die.
It doesn't mean you didn't love them.
It doesn't mean you're a bad spouse or a bad person.
And it doesn't mean you're not grieving.
It means part of your experience was painful—and when that pain ended, part of you experienced
relief.
We don't need to make relief mean anything more than that.
And we certainly don't need to take a perfectly human emotion and pile shame on top of it.
You might miss them and feel relieved at the same time.
You might love them and be angry with them.
You might wish things had been different and also know that some things never would have
changed.
You might grieve them and grieve the marriage you never got to have.
Human beings are perfectly capable of holding seemingly contradictory emotions at the same time.
Love and anger.
Grief and relief.
Sadness and resentment.
Longing and disappointment.
There is room for all of it.
None of those emotions disqualifies you from grieving.
And none of them disqualifies you from belonging here.
But I do want to offer you one word of caution.
Be careful about looking around at other widowed people and deciding that everyone else's
relationship was different from yours.
Because it's really easy to do.
You hear someone talk about their spouse being their best friend.
Someone else talks about having an amazing marriage.
Someone says their person was the love of their life.
And your brain says:
See? These aren't my people.
They won't understand me.
I don't belong here.
Our brains are really good at finding evidence that we don't fit.
And there's a reason for that.
Human beings survived in community.
For our ancient ancestors, belonging to the group wasn't just nice.
It was survival.
Being part of the community meant protection, food, shelter, resources.
Being rejected from the community could mean death.
And we're walking around today as the proud owners of these version 1.0 brains that are still
very interested in one question:
Do I belong here?
So our brains are constantly scanning.
How am I different?
What if they don't understand me?
What if my story isn't like theirs?
What if I don't fit?
And if that's the question we're asking, our brains will happily start producing evidence.
Her marriage wasn't like mine.
His grief doesn't look like mine.
They miss things I don't miss.
They feel things I don't feel.
And pretty soon we've convinced ourselves that we're the only person in the room who doesn't
belong.
But here's the thing:
Does your grief look exactly like someone else's?
No.
But then again, no one's does.
Even two people who had wonderful marriages aren't going to have the same grief experience.
Because they aren't the same people.
Their spouses weren't the same people.
Their relationships weren't the same.
Their histories aren't the same.
Their circumstances aren't the same.
Their brains aren't the same.
There is no universal widowed experience.
So yes, you can allow your brain to continue looking for all of the ways you don't fit.
Or you can give your brain another assignment.
You can ask:
Where do I fit?
What do we have in common?
Where might these people understand something about me that most of the world doesn't?
Because regardless of what our marriages looked like, widowed people tend to understand some
things that other people simply don't.
They understand what it's like for life to change in an instant.
They understand what it's like to walk into a room alone when you're accustomed to walking in
with someone.
They understand the awkwardness of being the only person without a partner in certain
situations.
They understand anniversaries and birthdays and holidays.
They understand that grief doesn't follow a schedule.
They understand that sometimes you want to talk about your person—and sometimes you absolutely
don't.
They understand that you can be laughing one minute and crying the next.
Widowed people are some of the most grief-savvy people I know.
And many of us crave community.
We crave friendship.
We crave spontaneity.
We want someone to call and say, “Hey, do you want to go grab dinner?”
We want new experiences.
We want people to do things with.
We want to belong.
And that brings me to a story I've told before, but it feels especially important here.
In 2019, I started a Meetup group for widowed people where I live in Central California.
I had absolutely no idea what would happen.
I didn't know if anyone would join.
I didn't know if anyone would actually show up.
But one person did.
One woman joined.
And she and I met for coffee.
She had had a difficult marriage.
And she had experienced one of the most horrific losses I had ever heard about to this day.
Her marriage didn't look like mine.
Her story didn't look like mine.
Her grief didn't look like mine.
And I remember thinking:
If she's the only person who ever joins this group, mission accomplished.
Because here were two widowed women sitting together having coffee.
Our stories didn't need to be the same.
We just needed a place to connect.
Well, she wasn't the only person who joined.
Over the years, a few hundred people have joined that group.
And every single relationship represented in that group has been different.
Every marriage has been different.
Every person's grief has been different.
We have people who had beautiful marriages.
People who had difficult marriages.
People whose spouses died suddenly.
People whose spouses were sick for years.
People who were widowed young.
People who were widowed much later in life.
People whose lives probably would never have intersected otherwise.
And you know what matters now?
We're friends.
We enjoy each other's company.
In fact, there is rarely a louder table in any restaurant than ours.
More than once, someone has looked at this big group of people and asked us how we all know each
other.
And I understand why they ask.
Because when you look around the table, we don't necessarily look like we “belong” together.
And I usually skip the potentially awkward explanation of how we all originally met.
I just say:
“We're friends.”
Because we are.
But there's something that happens at those gatherings that warms my heart every single time.
Someone walks into the restaurant alone.
They walk through the door and start scanning the room, looking for us.
And then they see the group.
And there's this moment of recognition.
There they are.
Those are my people.
I belong there.
And it never gets old for me.
So if your marriage was complicated, I want to leave you with this:
You don't need to have the same story as everyone else.
You don't need to have had the same marriage.
You don't need to miss the same things.
You don't need to feel the same emotions.
You don't need to grieve the same way.
And you don't need to tell anyone more about your marriage than you want to.
You get to decide who knows your story.
But I hope you don't confuse privacy with shame.
You don't have to hide the truth from yourself in order to belong.
And you don't need to prove that your relationship was good enough, happy enough, loving enough—
or anything enough—to earn your place here.
You lost the person you once planned to spend the rest of your life with.
You get to grieve what was.
You get to grieve what wasn't.
And you get to grieve what you hoped might someday be.
All of it counts.
So when your brain starts showing you all of the ways you're different, all of the reasons no
one will understand, all of the evidence that you don't quite fit...
Maybe give it another job.
Ask it to show you where you do.
Because somewhere, there may be a table full of people laughing much too loudly in a restaurant.
And maybe one day you'll walk through the door, scan the room, see them and think:
There they are.
Those are my people.
I belong there.
If this episode was helpful, please share it with a widowed friend. And remember that I believe
in you, and I’m here for you. Take care.
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If you’ve found this podcast helpful, check out my newest book, Time Doesn’t Heal, Why High Achieving Widowed People Feel Stuck, and How to Rebuild a Meaningful Life. It’s now available on Audible, in paperback and Kindle, plus there’s an accompanying journal to help you apply what you learn. And, join the free course so I can help you even more. Links are in the show notes.
