For readers who are searching for words
If you are reading because something in you recognises this terrain but you cannot yet name it, know this: difficulty finding language may mean you are in a phase where experience is outpacing vocabulary. It may not necessarily mean confusion, weakness, or regression. Part of what follows is an attempt to give shape to that unnamed middle — far from me trying to explain it away, but rather to make it speakable.
Abstract
This text documents the first winter following sudden spousal death through contemporaneous auto-ethnographic record. January and February are approached as field sites in which grief operates across administrative, cognitive, somatic, relational, and temporal systems.
January functions as audit: a period dominated by institutional demands, irreversible facts, and enforced categorisation, during which executive function persists alongside acute attachment injury. February introduces spacing: widened intervals between impacts that permit modulation of affect, the emergence of counterfactual thought, and the organising roles of rage and laughter in maintaining structural integrity.
Across both months, grief appears as a composite process expressed through cognition, physiology, ethics, language, and timing. It unfolds within systems that require participation regardless of capacity, shaping experience through paperwork, calendars, social expectations, and bodily limits.
The production of this record has carried substantial bodily toll. It has required sustained cognitive effort under exhaustion, repeated physical depletion, disrupted sleep, and prolonged engagement with grief responses that remain raw, painful, and physiologically taxing. Writing has intensified contact with broken-heartedness rather than alleviated it, adding load to an already strained body and mind.
The record attends to what these systems do to a person required to live inside them. Its purpose is to preserve an accurate account of early bereavement as lived, and to contribute language for experiences that are frequently flattened, sanitised, or mischaracterised.
January: Winter is come
OK. This is a long one.
*Exhales*
It is, as I type, early February 2026, somewhere after 9pm. That means I have walked through January somewhat more intact than I expected.
January is hard.
Harder than usual.
This January marks the first full calendar year without my – our – universe of three decades.
The first year of being alone.
This is where language arrives before I am ready for it: –
Forms that ask questions that assume compliance. Boxes that appear, requiring an answer. And words – words on a tick box series – arrive assuming unearned authority.
Widow.
The word “widow” belongs to documents and legacies, of aftermaths. It organises how institutions see me. Yet it does not describe the life I am living.
Single follows.
This seemingly innocuous word names the present without reference to the past. It compresses a long, shared life into a flat category, stripping away the mutual structures that once existed and the violence of their loss.
And I – I do not recognise myself in either word.
January carries both our birthdays. My birth date is no longer simply my birthday; it now marks the day he died. Like a wormhole, time folds in on itself.
It also brings wry humour. True to my husband’s dead-pan (yes, aware) delivery, he is now forever intertwined with my arrival in this world. My beginning and his ending share the same date. That is now part of the record.
January’s administration still arrives. Taxes.
When I open our spreadsheet to complete my HMRC self-assessment due January 31st, his formulae remain intact. Not just numbers in cells, but sequences we built together. Strings of logic shaped through conversation. We argued syntax. We checked edge cases. We decided which codes belonged where and why. His mind moved ahead, mapping structure. Mine followed fast, testing, adjusting, tightening. Different approaches converging on the same result.
The spreadsheet formulae still work.
They carry his intelligence. His way of thinking. The part of him that drew me beyond the physical — the clarity, the precision, the pleasure he took in making something elegant and functional. His competence was deeply seductive to me. Seeing his work on the spreadsheet lands in my body before it reaches language. A tightening in the chest. A pause in the hands. A sense of him thinking alongside me, just out of reach.
I have not worked in Excel professionally since 2020. I am a printmaker now. Muscle memory has thinned. Formulae reference sheets replace instinct. Still, his logic remains legible. The system holds. What we built together continues to function, even as our combined life that held it has been violently sundered.
His mind is present in the work.
He is not.
In our working lives, our roles were deliberate. I moved; he stayed.
I progressed through roles in planned cycles, building income and long-term security for the life we were shaping, absorbing risk — sustained intensity, excess energy expenditure, and exposure to demanding, at times toxic environments — on behalf of our wholeness, of us as a family. He held continuity. He remained steady by choice, so that I could progress without collapsing what we were building together. This was understood between us. His steadiness made my movement possible.
Our long-range thinking paid off. My progression compounded. The strategy held.
From the inside, this was coordination. A shared plan. Mutual consent. A life organised so that each of us could do what the other could not at the same time.
It was demanding. It burned me. Still, it worked. We both understood the cost, and we carried it together.
Then the world changed. Lockdowns arrived. Work moved into the living room and boundaries dissolved.
Life tipped sharply out of balance: my work intensified rapidly, burning hot and fast, with directed pressures applied against my internal limits, incinerating time, attention, and energy into systemic collapse past recovery, without containment. Burnout arrived fully. I left.
A year later, he left the place he had been for so long and took up another role.
His death arrived just days after my first solo exhibition as a printmaking artist.
There is a country we built together, all thirty-one years of it. Consisting of space, rooms, systems and our rhythms. Built with our pairs of hands. Where two minds are moving in trust – and often without words.
Now I move through it alone.
The home terrain remains unchanged, the space persist. Boxes in the loft. The rowing machine in the corner. The spreadsheet with his formulae. Everything still shaped for two participants.
Only one remains to carry it.
Everything was designed for shared labour. The labour now concentrates on one fulcrum. Responsibility condenses. Attention stretches thinner.
The load is violently redistributed by a sudden, non-consensual rupture of a shared life.
I row six times this week.
Broken-hearted, on the floor emotionally.
But I row anyway.
Twenty minutes.
Three point two kilometres.
On the machine he bought for us around the lockdowns. Back then we competed — no, not in speed or distance, but in frequency. It was funny then. And he would not row without me.
Now I row without him.
I row because the body must remain strong enough to carry what this trauma, this bereavement, demands.
This is my thread of survival.
I am whole. I am altered. Carrying the shredded consequences of a violently ruptured, mutually built life.
And I deeply miss him.
And I love him still.
Winter Is Here
(February — so far)
February does not bring relief.
It brings spacing — temporal, cognitive, somatic.¹
The absence remains unchanged. His urn remains in the room. None of the facts soften. What changes is interval: The time-gap between impacts widens slightly. The body can breathe for longer between waves. The system begins to register separation between surge and baseline.¹
And the spacing alters function.
I still row. I still tire easily. I still nap. Recovery is marginally quicker. The body begins to distinguish waves from the ocean.¹
Executive function remains present, requiring greater energetic investment. Tasks that once moved automatically now demand preparation, pacing, and recovery. Cognitive capacity holds; the cost of accessing it has significantly risen.
In February, a different thought arrives.
Most days I am on the floor, or close to it, and my mind constructs a counterfactual. The scenario is …socially plausible and specific.²
I imagine him alive and me gone.
I imagine him out with friends. He is warm, sociable, good with people. Alcohol loosens judgement. Someone decides he is safe. His drinking buddies perceive that companionship is a kindness now that I am gone. The children are grown and living elsewhere. No one is waiting for him at home.
Loneliness accumulates. Alcohol lowers resistance.
In this imagined sequence, another body comes home with him.
Into our bed.
And to this arriving thought, my response is immediate.
Fury — hot, fast — arrives.³
My mercurial mind delivers stark clarity, swiftly:
The bed functions as more than furniture. It holds shared sleep, shared gravity, shared witness. It is the most concentrated site of the life we built together. The mind selects it because erasure would be most complete there.⁴
I was defined with him. With him.
Across three decades, we built a shared structure: shared sleep, shared gravity, shared witness. Two nervous systems learned each other so thoroughly they ceased to register their separateness. When one half is removed, the remaining structure feels excavated. Hollowed. Excavation implies prior architecture. Something real has been removed.⁴
The fury organises around this recognition.³
The response centres on the erasure of that mutually-built system.
The body refuses reduction of a life to a plausible social outcome of loneliness, alcohol, and well-meaning people.³
I observe what the fury does: It tightens the edges of the wound. It supplies organising energy. It arrests diffusion. And the response is sharp, almost clean — an astringent action that slows bleeding.³
Fury is followed by something unexpected: I laughed.
This laughter modulates intensity. Though pain remains acute, its spread is …slowed. The wound continues to bleed, but at a lesser rate.⁵
I allow the thought and reaction sequence to pass without resolution. I record it.⁶
February so far sees me still alive enough to feel anger. That I am still intact enough to laugh while bleeding. January did not.
I learnt that rage organises. Laughter modulates.
And the spacing, this time interval, enables structural integrity to begin reasserting itself.
Function continues, as it had, in narrower bands.
Anger remains accessible whilst cognitive coherence remains intact.
And so, the system continues under altered load.
Winter is here.
Winter, Observed (January and February)
January and February are not chapters of recovery. They are field sites.⁶
January audits. February spaces. January enforces gravity; February permits boundary. January is survival under darkness; February allows the system to assert integrity rather than merely endure.¹
What I record here are not feelings for their own sake, but functions and mechanism. I am not interested in what systems intend — bureaucratic, social, or cultural. I focus on what they do to a person required to live inside them.⁶,⁷
Across these months grief appears as a composite process: cognition, physiology, ethics, language and timing. And yes, in contrast to popular believe that flattens the processing entirety to the simple “sorrow”. Through it, over time, rage emerges as coalescing force, and laughter may temper. I learnt that insurance and tax forms can and do wound. And too, Calendars can cause a collision in time, compounding heartbreak. (3), (6), (7), (9)
These are my field notes as I am walking through the world as it now is.
This is what it does to me.
Footnotes
¹ Stroebe, M. & Schut, H. (1999). The Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement.
Used for: spacing, interval widening, oscillation, alternation between impact and restoration.
² Davis, C. G., Lehman, D. R., Wortman, C. B., Silver, R. C., & Thompson, S. C. (1995).
The undoing of traumatic life events: Subjective appraisal and coping.
Used for: socially plausible counterfactual thinking under trauma.
³ Solomon, R. C. (1993). The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life.
Used for: anger as organising affect; arresting diffusion; sharpening structure.
⁴ Klass, D., Silverman, P. R., & Nickman, S. (1996). Continuing Bonds.
Used for: shared relational structure; excavation of attachment architecture.
⁵ Samson, A. C. & Gross, J. J. (2012).
Humour as emotion regulation.
Used for: laughter as modulation of affective intensity.
⁶ Ellis, C., Adams, T. E., & Bochner, A. P. (2011). Autoethnography.
Used for: recording, observing, analytic distance.
7 Bourdieu (1991) – Language and symbolic power
Reflection, Scope, and Contact
These writings are contemporaneous personal records of lived experience following sudden spousal death. They are written for clarity, memory, and integrity, and shared as auto-ethnographic material rather than guidance, therapy, or instruction. That is to say, I write for me.
Nothing published here constitutes medical, psychological, legal, or financial advice. I do not offer counselling, interpretation, or ongoing correspondence. Readers remain responsible for seeking appropriate professional support where needed.
This space exists to document experience accurately, to contribute language where language is often absent, and to maintain clear personal and ethical boundaries. I read all messages with care, though I may not be able to reply individually.
Thank you for reading.
First Winter
Field notes from traumatic bereavement: documenting grief’s administrative violence, temporal mechanisms, and survival at 8-9 months post-loss.
Grief on the Body: Embodied Loss and Creative Practice as Record
This essay documents grief as a lived bodily state and considers creative practice not as recovery or remedy, but as record: work made alongside life, under altered conditions.
First Christmas
When your husband was Christmas, you inherit the Turkey Problem. Navigating the first Christmas bereaved – the unfathomable grief, the planning, picking up broken pieces.
Grief’s Imprint on the Body: An Auto-Ethnographic Reflection
A reflective, research-informed exploration of how sudden bereavement reshapes the body, from immune vulnerability to hypervigilance — blending poetry, personal narrative and academic insight.
Closed Curtains
The body keeps the score. The mind ransacks the memories, grasping to stay among the living. The memories—if they’re of deep love and respect—offer tenderness, warmth. Pale though they are compared to the real thing, they just have to be enough. This is the grindstone of the bereaved.
Juggernaut and Friends
How to Support Someone Grieving | Juggernaut and Friends | SouthSeaEyes, Printmaker | A Widow’s Reflection on Grief and Friendship.
