Finding Joy While Grieving

Recently, a grief counselor told me something disturbing. He had been describing my new memoir, Carrying the Tiger: Living with Cancer, Dying with Grace, Finding Joy while Grieving, to one of his support groups. When he reached the point where I began to form a new relationship just a few months after the death of my beloved wife, several of the women stopped listening.

“Women grieve, men replace,” one said dismissively, and the others nodded in agreement. They assumed that my actions suggested emotional abandonment, or perhaps a kind of infidelity, both of which they found repugnant. They didn’t want to believe that I could continue loving Lynn while forming an attachment with someone else.

But that is exactly what happened to me.

Not Looking for Love

I wasn’t looking for another relationship. In fact, I couldn’t imagine looking for one. Lynn and I had been married for almost 35 years. During the last six of them we grew increasingly close, as we learned to live with Lynn’s incurable cancer and then shared the intimate grace of her departure from this world. During the weeks of home hospice, I bathed and fed her, and we talked about the mystery of what was to come. When Lynn said, “I want you to find another girlfriend,” we both assumed that would be years away.

After Lynn died, my grief shattered me. Even though I knew it was coming, I wasn’t prepared for its intensity. Nothing prepares you for the loss of your beloved partner.

About a month later, I realized that I had become more open when talking with other grieving people. I think I craved a connection with someone, anyone, who would understand what I was going through. And I wasn’t the only one. Just as my gay friends say they have “gay-dar,” the ability to spot another gay person in a crowded room, I’ve come to believe in “grief-dar,” the uncanny ability of grieving people to identify and connect with each other.

Meeting Someone New

I was talking to an administrative assistant at the firm that managed Lynn’s retirement savings when suddenly she started telling me how her father had recently died. Her mother had to sell the house and move in with one of her daughters because she could no longer stand to live in her own home. I had never spoken with this woman before, but we spent thirty minutes sharing stories related to our grief.

Then I exchanged emails with Cordelia, an acquaintance whom I hadn’t seen since we were children. I told her how much I had appreciated her stepmother’s recent memorial, and she sent me a lovely note with a poem, “When I die, give my love away,” that had been part of the service. In response, I told her about e e cummings’ poem “I carry your heart” that Lynn and I had chosen for her memorial.

Cordelia replied “Oh Dear, Dear Tony, that poem means a lot to me. My husband and I selected it for our wedding thirty-three years ago. But last month, he told me that he wanted a divorce, so now we’re figuring out how to live apart.” Her words were openly emotional, and I realized that she was experiencing her own deep grief, losing her life partner just as I had lost Lynn. We connected because of our shared loss.

Sharing Grief Brought Joy

Cordelia lived in Minneapolis, 1200 miles away, and I wasn’t attracted to her in the conventional sense. But we began exchanging emails about our grief, which quickly progressed to phone calls. We talked for hours, sometimes several times a day, about what hospice was like, what our spouses were like, what it feels like to be alone in a newly empty home, what we did that morning and what we hoped to do next. Our conversations didn’t replace my grief or make me miss Lynn any less, but they did comfort me, and I no longer felt so alone.

One day, Cordelia stopped in the middle of a sentence and said, “Tony, are you feeling what I’m feeling? Because I’ve got a crush on you.” It’s one of the bravest things anyone has ever said to me. And I had to admit that yes, I did, too—the feeling was mutual. We made plans to see each other the next time she came through New York. Then I went back to organizing Lynn’s memorial.

When I finally met Cordelia in person, we quickly fell into bed together. Neither of us had experienced physical pleasure in quite a while, and we both missed it. The sex was thrilling but also confusing. “How can I do this without cheating on Lynn?” I asked myself, again and again.

Guilt and Self-Doubt

It didn’t matter that Lynn had encouraged me to have another relationship; I was riddled with guilt and self-doubt. I still cried for Lynn several times a day – fierce, overwhelming floods – and I talked to her all the time. Now I needed to reassure her that my attraction to Cordelia didn’t diminish my love for her.

Cordelia was aware of my feelings; in fact, it’s part of what she found appealing. She encouraged me to tell her about Lynn and describe the experiences we’d had together. Rather than asking me to leave Lynn behind, she helped me find a balance in which I brought my memories of Lynn into my relationship with Cordelia. It took us several years to get there, with many setbacks along the way, but eventually I stopped feeling guilty and was able to enjoy this unexpected and improbable gift. Far from “replacing” Lynn, I continued loving her while making space for Cordelia in my heart.

When the women in the grief group assumed that I had stopped grieving prematurely, the counselor suggested a different interpretation. “Men grieve too,” he said, “they just grieve differently.” That’s probably true. But it’s not only men who grieve differently: everyone grieves in their own way.

Each Grief is Unique

It’s easy to believe, when you first experience shattering grief, that your grief is the same as everyone else’s. Even the great writer Joan Didion, in her book The Year of Magical Thinking, fell into that trap. After more than a hundred pages describing the specific contours of her grief, she summarized her experience in a long paragraph that begins: “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it,” and then went on to make a series of statements about grief that don’t match my own experience. Where Didion called grief an “absence,” a “void”, Lynn remained deeply present in my grief long after her body was gone. I’ve read several other memoirs in which the author assumed that their experience of grief applies to everyone. It seems this is a common misconception.

But that misconception becomes harmful when you assume, as did the women in the support group, that if other people don’t behave as you would, they aren’t really grieving. I’ve seen this happen in my own family. Two of my aunts began giving away their husband’s possessions as soon as the men died – in one case, a few days before he died. “He’s not even dead!” the rest of us whispered. “She’s moving on too soon.”

We didn’t want to believe her grief was real. But now those two aunts, shedding their late husbands’ possessions in order to make it through the day, remind me of the administrative assistant’s mother who had to sell her house.

Death May Bring Relief

When my cousin’s wife died, he told his daughter “I feel rescued” and began emptying his wife’s closets and drawers. His children were shocked; their father seemed to have stopped grieving even before he started, and they treasured some of the things he was eager to discard.

But he had accompanied his wife through six years of Alzheimer’s, a difficult journey both physically and emotionally. It’s possible that he had already grieved the loss of his wife for several years, and did indeed feel rescued, even if that’s not what anyone else wanted to hear.

“Women grieve, men replace.”

“How can she move on so quickly?”

“He must not really have loved her.”

We reach these conclusions because we expect others to experience grief and loss as we do. Yes, there are men – and women – who quickly start a new relationship, apparently moving past grief. But unless we ask them, none of us knows what they are feeling. Joan Didion was right that “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it,” but it is a place particular to the person who is experiencing it. We do ourselves a disservice when we project our assumptions onto them, without knowing what they really feel.

Tony Stewart is the author of  Carrying the Tiger: Living with Cancer, Dying with Grace, Finding Joy while Grieving, Copyright © 2025 Anthony Stewart. Reprinted with permission from West End Books.

Visit Tony Stewart on his website.

Read more about spouse-loss: The Emotions of Spouse Loss – Open to Hope