I Thought I Was Ready, But God Was Still Rebuilding What Loss Had Torn Down: The sacred work of learning to trust again after widowhood.

To the man who tried to love a woman who may have looked healed, but didn’t realize how much of her was still grieving: 

I thought I was ready.

After all, I was functioning.

I was smiling again.

Doing things instead of sleeping and crying all the time.

Eating, sleeping, socializing with more normalcy than I had thus far.

Laughing.

Showing up for everyone else (my kids and my granddaughter who had to walk this journey with me.)

From the outside, I looked like a woman who had survived the storm.

Living in Florida for the last 36 years, I should have recognized that grief is like hurricanes. What I didn’t understand at first was that surviving a grief storm and recovering from one are not always the same thing.

Losing my husband had shattered me in places no one could see…some of them, I didn’t even realize that the pieces there were broken, even though I also felt like everything in me had shattered at once.

And somehow I convinced myself that because I had learned how to carry the pieces, I had put them back together.

I hadn’t.

Grief is a conundrum - everything about it is a paradox. Time seems to move quickly and slowly all at once. And just like time, nothing else makes sense. Nothing. Not even me. Especially me.

Dating again after loss brought things to the surface I didn’t know were still buried.

Fear.

Hypervigilance.

Distrust of good things.

The inability to fully exhale.

The inability to believe that someone staying didn’t automatically mean they would eventually leave - one way or the other.

I had created invisible boundaries that even I didn’t know were there.

My nervous system had spent so long bracing for impact that peace felt unfamiliar.

Safety felt suspicious.

Consistency felt unnatural.

I kept searching for the catch.

For the flaw.

For the reason it wouldn’t last.

Or watching for any issue - health or otherwise - that would mean it would all end too soon. 

Honestly, he was very healthy, but also drove vehicles like his lifelong dream was to drive in the Daytona 500 and had a penchant for motorcycles. Call me scared…I constantly was back then. 

Scared something would happen to one of my kids, to my best friends, someone else in my family, my pets.

I wasn’t mad at God, but that didn’t keep me from not fully trusting Him to stop the enemy from stepping in again. 

I think, subconsciously, I still felt like my life was in ruins and I was just floating through whatever was left, trying to find a way to survive the longevity of it. 

Consciously, I thought I was on a mission to rebuild a post-apocalyptic Earth after nuclear fallout. 

I was taking action. 

I was gonna beat this thing.

I was going to put my own life back together, like I had so, so many other times before.

And yet, without even meaning to or realizing it, I can see now that I did it recklessly.

I was reckless myself and the fallout happened to someone else. 

It wasn’t fair at all.

And I still wasn’t myself at all.

But I digress…

So, with him, I tried to pull in close and then backed away.

Wanted connection while simultaneously feeling terrified of all of it.

Wanted to let someone in, but somehow couldn’t find the door myself to even grab the doorknob.

It was confusing.

For me.

Definitely for him, too.

Because the truth was this:

It wasn’t rejection.

I was still protecting wounds I hadn’t realized were still open. 

A soul that was still bleeding.

Still battered like I’d gone one-on-one with Tyson and went eight rounds before the big KO. 

One thing I did know is that I had been fighting exactly that hard to regain…a life that mattered.

And in the fray, I had mistaken surviving for healing.

I had mistaken strength for restoration.

And I hadn’t yet learned that grief doesn’t only break your heart.

Sometimes it changes your nervous system, your sense of safety, your ability to trust goodness when it finally arrives.

The hardest part was realizing that I wanted to love again.

I wanted companionship again.

I wanted intimacy again.

I wanted to be 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸𝘯 again.

But some part of me still wasn’t convinced it was safe to need someone.

Not because he had done anything wrong 𝘰𝘳 because Scott had - (because they both actually did so many things more than just “right.”)

And certainly not because I didn’t care.

But because loss teaches you terrible lessons you never wanted to learn. Lessons you pray daily that your kids and your friends…and even anyone you didn’t really have an affinity for.. never have to learn. 

It teaches you that people can “disappear” - in an unexpected instant.

That ordinary Tuesdays can become final goodbyes.

That in a single, solitary moment everything you think you know about who you are, and what life means, and what your future looks like…it can all seem pointless, and fickle, and gone.

That the people you cannot imagine living without can suddenly be an invisible being that you talk to out of habit and comfort, even though you know they are no longer anywhere near here…and yet the soul-filling love still survives without a tangible source to feed from…starving, day in and day out. 

Like a chicken that still moves around without its head…and has no clue where it is going.

And once you’ve lived through that kind of pain, opening your hands, your heart, your soul to love again can feel less like hope and more like standing completely unarmed in the middle of a raging battlefield.

Bullets whizzing past that you realize were inches from your own destruction.

The thing is, he deserved a version of me that I thought already existed.

Instead, he met the woman who was still rebuilding - no, not even that. A woman who was building something new for the first time, and without a contractor’s license.

It was like having a home destroyed by a hurricane and trying, desperately, to build a new one that can withstand the next storm…all while feeling the impossibility of it, because other storms will always come.

It is an unavoidable reality in this broken world.

She was still learning.

Still healing.

Still trying to figure out how to stop just-surviving long enough to start actually living again.

I didn’t understand yet that grief isn’t something you “get over.” 

I was still fighting to kick it out and refuse its residence in me. 

I thought it had to get out for me to find the “new normal” people were always spouting about. 

I hadn’t yet learned that fighting to evict it just made it dig its claws into the solid doorframe and dare you to push harder, baring its teeth at you in the process. 

It is, in fact, something you learn to grow a life around.

You allow it to exist, accept its never ending presence, and then it tends to skulk in a corner, bored and unbothered by most day-to-day events, occasionally rising to the surface to remind you of its ability to interfere if it wants to, but bored with your quiet acquiescence and your pursuit of the joy God promises.77

It’s relearning life but with specific caveats that you don’t even realize exist yet.

In the long and short of it, I truly don’t think either of us understood that at the time.

But I understand it now.

I wasn’t too much - although I’ve often felt that I am, in a myriad of ways.

I probably seemed like far too little - since I never really let him all the way in. 

But I wasn’t broken beyond repair.

I was just still grieving.

And that’s not an attempt at an excuse. 

It just one of those things that you don’t know until you do. 

And that’s you can’t understand until you’re forced to, unwillingly.

It turns out that, annoyingly, grief has a way of hiding inside places you don’t discover until someone tries to love you there.

So, to the man who truly tried to love me, this is my thank you. 

Not for saving me.

Not for fixing me.

Not for carrying responsibilities that belonged to my healing journey. Even though you did.

But for the kindness that existed in the middle of it all.

For the patience that grief often requires from everyone involved.

For reminding me that healing is rarely as complete or as linear as we think it is; sometimes it plays tricks on you.

And for helping me realize something I desperately needed to know:

Wanting love again and being ready to receive it are sometimes two different things.

This is also my heartfelt apology.

I wasn’t wrong for trying to find love again. 

I could not know what I could not know, and your heart became an unwilling participant in something I said I was ready for…when I simply didn’t know I wasn’t.

I was truly a widow learning that surviving loss and healing from it are not the same journey.

You have to get past just surviving to begin to heal.

And you have to heal to truly allow yourself to love again.

And perhaps that realization was part of the healing, too.

And then this is also my thank you to God. 

I have survived many difficult seasons…𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘺, and 𝘥𝘪𝘧𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘵. 

Not one of them provided the complete, full-volume set of beauty for ashes in the way this has. 

God didn’t burn me to the ground. But those ashes from what did? Oh, He has worked wonders with those. 

It seems it is always the darkest seasons in our lives when the fog lifts enough for us to see Him more clearly. 

This time, I feel like I’m finally seeing who He really is. Like a curtain has been lifted. Like the scales have been removed from my eyes. Like a bride meeting her arranged bridegroom for the first time without a barrier in between them. 

I’ve been both the bride and the barrier for a long time. 

This season, this journey of widowhood, has been the place where He met me at my lowest, where He put His finger under my chin and lifted my tear-filled eyes to see His own. 

I saw pain - a hurt He felt specifically because of seeing my own despair. 

I saw compassion.

I saw faithfulness.

I saw love.

And I saw and heard Him say “Daughter, why are you trying to do this alone?” 

“I wasn’t.” I said. “Didn’t You see me try to get back up? To try it all again? To fight to have what You promised me? To trust You to make it well with my soul? Didn’t you watch me try to find someone so I didn’t have to do it alone?”

And He smiled a soft, one-sided grin and said “Yes, I saw. But you never were. I was always right here. And I am still the God of infinitely, abundantly more than you can even ask or imagine. I Am.” 

And so now I just wait.

No more fighting.

No more striving. 

No more stupid dating apps and seeking, hunting, digging for what He is able to provide at the time when it’s just right. 

Now I just wait and spend time getting closer to El Roi, the God Who Sees Me and never lets my tears fall without catching them. 

I just wait and listen for His call to do things He means to prosper me and not to harm me, and then I act on that call, each one.

Now I am grateful for opportunities to consider it all joy. Because I know, and choose to remember, that each time I face trials of many kinds, I’ve seen Him move in my life in ways I could never have imagined. 

So. Now. I. Just. Wait.