BW 001: Welcome to the Brave Widow Show!

I help young widows heal their heart, find hope, and dream again for the future. In this episode, I share an overview of my story, the purpose of Brave Widow, and what to expect going forward.

Being widowed is tough!

Not only do you miss your spouse and what you shared, but you grieve for the future. Milestones and goals are tinged with pain and sadness. Dreams and plans seem to evaporate.

So much of your identity changes.

But it IS possible to find hope and joy again. ____________________________________________________________

Hey guys, I’m Emily Jones I was widowed at age 37, one month shy of our 20 year wedding anniversary. Nathan and I have 4 beautiful children together. My world was turned completely upside down when I lost him. With faith, community, and wisdom from others, I’ve been able to find hope, joy, and dream again for the future. I want to help others do the same, too! FOLLOW me on SOCIAL: Twitter @brave_widow Instagram @brave_widow Facebook https://www.facebook.com/bravewidow

Show transcript:

Emily: [00:00:00] Hey guys. Welcome to the very first episode of The Brave Widow Show. I'm so excited to be able to share some of the encouragement, insights, wisdom, vulnerabilities, challenges, things that other widows have gone through, and leave you with a bit of inspiration, encouragement, and education. Today I wanna share with you my personal story, the purpose of The Brave Widow Show, and really what to expect on the format going forward.

So starting with my story, I was the oldest of four children and I definitely was a high achiever. Now, some people may say that I was bossy. Some people may say that I was opinionated, but I knew that I wanted something big outta life and I was gonna go for it. I see that as leadership skills, but if you wanna [00:01:00] call it bossy, then?

You're probably not wrong. Just 10 days after I turned 18, I married Nathan and we were best friends through and through even if we. We're doing our own thing. We just enjoyed being together, being in the same room, running errands together, like we just truly enjoyed living life together. Over the course of our marriage, we had four beautiful, amazing children together.

I ended up going back to school to get my master's degree. He helped a tremendous amount with kids while I worked full time and went to school, as well as both of his parents. And really it allowed me to focus on career school and achieving some of the personal goals that I had for myself and also for my family.

Over the course of my 20 year career, I really found a home in healthcare and I worked myself up from being a temporary [00:02:00] person in a. Stamp basement filing papers all the way up to a senior vice president and executive in the revenue cycle space within healthcare. I traveled quite a bit about 50% of the time and worked a lot of hours, but the partnership that I had with Nathan really helped support that.

It was an amazing career experience. I'm so grateful and blessed for the opportunities I had there. The mentors that I had there and all of the valuable things that I learned during that time while pursuing that career. Over the course of that time, it really made sense for Nathan to be a stay at home dad, take care of the kids and everything around the house while I focused on my career and pursued some of those goals that I had.

Nathan is an amazing cook, and he would cook frequently for the family. He would chauffer for the kids everywhere they needed to go. He would make sure that everything was handled around the house and the bills and [00:03:00] finances and the property and all of those like inner workings of our family that those were all taken care of.

I didn't have to worry about any of that, and that was a huge, incredible blessing for me, knowing that I didn't have the stress of taking kids to doctor's appointments and dealing with the school and doing some of those things outside of their events, of course, which I would attend and be there to help cheer them.

One month shy of our 20 year wedding anniversary I lost Nathan unexpectedly to covid, complicated by double pneumonia. We were both sick with covid and pneumonia for weeks. He ended up in ICU for about 11 days, during which time they put him on a ventilator, and unfortunately he ended up passing in July of 2021.

Not only did I have the loss of my best friend and my partner in life, [00:04:00] but now I also had almost an implosion of the inner workings of just day to day things that were keeping our family afloat and keeping us running and humming. All of a sudden I had to learn more how to cook, how to login to all the accounts to get the bills paid, how to coordinate things being done around the house, how to mow the lawn, and how to do all of these things that he just handled on a normal routine basis.

I vowed really early on that I would not let myself die with Nathan. The grief and the raw pain and just the overwhelming combination of your brain not functioning the way that you normally do. Widows get widow's brain, which is basically a massive brain fog. So you have this complication of I'm in grief and I'm grieving for this person.

Now I'm also just trying to function like a normal human [00:05:00] being, which seems very difficult. And now I'm also taking on all of these additional tasks and responsibilities, and I could easily understand, especially in those first few weeks, why spouses often die soon after. Their spouse dies from broken heart syndrome.

I didn't know how I was ever gonna feel any sense of normalcy, any sense of having hope again, any ability to laugh for the future. Or even to dream. Nathan and I had so many dreams for the future. We had our retirement plan worked out. We knew exactly what we wanted to do, and I felt like in an instant all of that was gone and I started reevaluating everything and wondering do I still want to do that?

Is that now a goal I still wanna have for myself? Will I ever make a plan with someone else, or was that just something that was ours and that we wanted to do? All of that felt very [00:06:00] uncertain and difficult to navigate, but I made a promise to myself that some way, somehow I was going to get out of that pit of grief and despair, and I was not gonna let myself die with my spouse.

One of the things that was so crucial to getting through this horrific experience is my faith in God. And while it was very tempting to ask why, to be angry, or to be bitter, I was really just in a moment of shock and I distinctly remember one time there at the end, Nathan was in the ICU. Been in the ICU for about 11 days and they had called us in to let us know that they were gonna run a brain scan and potentially cardiac procedures because they believed that he was brain dead.

And essentially if they ran these tests and they found that he had no brain activity, then legally they could declare him dead and [00:07:00] pull the plug on the ventilator and everything that was keeping his body alive in the moment. They ran the tests. I remember Nathan's family was over with me at my house and when they gave us the call to come in to discuss I just remember being in the car and driving to the hospital and just praying.

As I drove in the car to the hospital, nervous about what they were gonna say I just prayed the entire way back to the hospital. And I had this thought that there are things that are worse than death. He had probably at least three heart attacks in the last couple of days. I know they had to perform cardioversion on him three separate times to restart his heart.

He could have had a stroke. No one really knew. And so I was just worried. I was emotionally exhausted after being sick for so long, him being sick for so long and having all these days of up and down progress, and I just remember praying like. God, if [00:08:00] this is gonna go on another six months, or if he's gonna be in a position where he physically can't function or he's in a wheelchair and highly dependent, paralyzed I know that would be, we've talked about it several times.

I know that would be hell on earth for him to have to be physically that highly dependent on other people. And I just remember praying like, if this is. Going to end. Just let it be done. Just let it be done and over. I don't want this to continue to draw out. I don't want to go through this anymore.

And it was a flurry of activity of events that happened in the hospital. But needless to say, he was gone. I got to go into the room fully geared up to protect against. Potential Covid traces and be with him as they turned everything off and his body shut down. But I knew going into that room that he wasn't there anymore.

His face was completely sunk in and I [00:09:00] just knew that he was gone. And after we had our time at the hospital and I'm driving back, I still had, my three youngest children to explain to them that their dad had died. And I just remember playing a couple of songs and one of which was, I'll praise you in the storm.

And I remember saying, God, I don't understand this. I don't even pretend to understand this, but I'm gonna trust that you know what you're doing. And that if you still wanted Nathan to be here, that there's nothing physically on Earth that could have happened differently, that Nathan still wouldn't be here.

I kept reiterating to myself over and over that God doesn't promise us that life's gonna be easy, and he doesn't promise that we're not gonna go through hard times. In fact, he tells us as Christian and believers, we are gonna suffer.

We are gonna have hard times, and people even will persecute us to an extent. I knew in my mind, in my heart that none of us are immune to sorrow and suffering just given the [00:10:00] state of the world that we live in. And the thought that just kept coming to the top of mind was, You're not alone.

You're not alone. You're not alone. And it was just something I kept saying to myself, and I knew even in those first few days that something good would have to come out of this.

I didn't believe that God would let this happen just to let it happen, that he would somehow set us backwards just for us to live in pain and grief for forever.

So I promised to myself that I would find a way to give back, to help other people to do something good out of this horrible tragedy that we were experiencing. Whenever I was gonna be able to do that, I didn't know what it looked like. I didn't know how it was gonna be possible, that I could get through this horrible experience, but I had to hold on to that tiny shred of hope that I'm not alone. That God can create something good out of something bad that happens and [00:11:00] that I could somehow be a help to other people.

I also met other widows who had lost their spouse recently, within months of me losing Nathan. And one of the things that really helped me was not focusing so much on myself and my grief, but in very small ways reaching out to some of those other widows and doing what I could to help them.

Maybe it was just sending a text or a Facebook message. Maybe it was sending them a Christmas present or letting them know during different times that I was thinking about them. But whatever little thing I was able to do in those first few months of my self grieving, really made me feel good. I think it made a good positive impact with those other widows as well, and it fed my desire and passion to help other women through this process of losing their spouse.

Early on, I joined several communities of other widows. I had to know how did they survive? [00:12:00] How, when did they start feeling normal again? What advice would they have for other widows? And I really just wanted to learn. Absorb and process everything else that people who had been in my shoes before me had to share, and this was an invaluable experience.

The widow community is absolutely amazing. They're supportive, they're good listeners. They're affirming, they are nonjudgmental and they truly want to help, support and encourage each other. It's really an amazing group of people. I have. So impressed by the people that I've met and been able to talk to over this past a little over a year.

But I did what most task-based people do. I bought several books. I watched online videos. I talked to other widows. I read all of their stories and really started to formulate a sense of normalcy a sense of healing. I quickly, Met up with [00:13:00] a counselor and psychologist and started working on my own healing and processing of grief and tried to accelerate as much as I could, my ability to understand what this process should look like and how I could heal and turn around and help others.

As I started to really get a sense of what life might look like going forward, and this was probably about six months in. I really. Got a good understanding of what is it that most widows want or need, or find the most helpful, and I wanted to think about how I could give back in a way that's scalable.

Sending cards is nice. Sending flowers to people is nice. Doing small things for someone else is great, but it's really not scalable. It's really limited to resources, time, and just logistics of coordinating all of those things. So early on, I knew I wanted to provide an online community and platform for widows, but I felt like some of that was missing.[00:14:00]

What most widows want is a platform where they can hear stories from other widows. Where they can share their own stories and talk about their loved one in a way that's accepting and nonjudgmental and supportive. They want the ability to know how to do things and what's normal on this journey to healing, and there's a ton of information out there.

There's checklists and videos and all kinds of different resources. To me, it felt all jumbled up or pieced together, and not really in a comprehensive way, but I knew that I could provide a platform where people could access courses or workbooks or checklist, and a way that helps keep things very structured and organized, but also keeps it very simple.

So for the past several months, I've known I could provide a place for widows to call home from a community perspective, for connections, for sharing stories, for getting coaching on their [00:15:00] own, for courses and resources and tools. But I felt like a piece that was missing was my ability to help coach other people through their own grief process.

Sure, I had my experience. I'd read books. I looked to other widows for their experience, but I didn't feel a hundred percent equipped to coach someone else on what they should do during their grief journey. I prayed a lot about this in understanding what should the next steps be, how do I move forward?

And I started building some things really in the background that I thought might eventually become something, but I wasn't really sure. God brought an amazing group of people into my life that has helped fill that missing puzzle piece. I met Dr. Betsy Guerra in another community that we're a part of, and she's a 20 year practicing clinical psychologist who had just launched her coaching certification program.

Now I had heard about life [00:16:00] coaching and coaching programs, and I wasn't really a hundred percent sure that's what I wanted to pursue. I knew that counseling was something that I was interested in. I've taken several courses on psychology. I even enrolled in a counseling program for a while. But I never really feel like it brought everything together, especially from a faith perspective.

Typically in counseling, even in a faith-based program, Faith was more of something on the side or something that if the client brings it up, you can bring it up, but not something that we really counsel and teach from. And so I didn't end up staying in that program, and I still just felt like everything was very segmented.

What I loved about Betsy and her program of what she was doing is she has suffered a personal, immediate family loss. So she has also done a lot of specifically grief coaching. She has brought into her program elements of [00:17:00] psychology, of counseling and the models and of coaching, and the benefits that are buried in coaching of building a business and a coaching program.

For clients of your own, and she does this from a spiritual lens, a faith-based lens, something that pulls all of those components together and really empowers us as coaches to be able to help our clients and people that we work with move through the journey that they have and accomplish goals on their.

I was so excited because I finally felt like that was the piece I needed to be confident in what I could do to help other people find hope, heal their heart, and create dreams again for their own future.

The Brave Widow community is something that I'm actively building and I'm so excited about being able to share with other young widows. We're gonna have [00:18:00] forums where people can connect with other widows. We're gonna have courses where people can learn how to do different tasks or things that maybe they've never done before, where they're going to be able to focus on their healing journey on dealing with grief, on being able to move forward without leaving their loved one behind and really start thinking about how they can create a new part of their life and a new future for themselves instead of feeling like all of that has been taken away from them.

We're gonna have live coaching and q and a calls. We're gonna have small group coaching where people can be held accountable and really take the time to work on what it is they wanna work on themselves and where they're at in their journey. And, Just so much more.

I'm really excited about this. I know it's something that personally I would've loved to have, and I can't wait to be able to share it with the world and be able to continue [00:19:00] to create things that provide value and positively impact other young widows.

Now, for the format of The Brave Widow Show and what to expect. Well, first of all, who knows? We're gonna try a few different things and see what works well and what really resonates with people. My plan for right now is to release episodes two to three times per week and in a couple of different formats so that people can find something that really resonates with them and helps them. In where they are in their journey. I have a few podcast episodes where we're walking through different concepts.

We have several interviews completed with widows one on one, where they're sharing their stories, their advice. Their encouragement and lessons that they've learned. And we even have a couple of panel podcasts set up where you can hear from a panel of folks on their thoughts around things like how to survive the holidays grieving a loved one.

[00:20:00] Different perceptions on timelines, like, how long should you wear your wedding ring? How long should you wait until dating? How long should you do whatever it is in. For our folks that are widowed and you'll get to hear all kinds of different opinions. So we have a lot of great content lined up, recorded, underway, and I can't wait to be able to share to, and I can't wait to be able to re release that, and I can't wait to be able to release that and share it with you.

All right, guys. Thanks for hanging out with me on episode number one of The Brave Widow Show. I would love to be able to help you heal your heart, find hope, and dream again for the future. I have some free resources for you. If you wanna check those out, just head on over to brave bravewidow.com/free. Again, that's brave bravewidow.com/free.

Thanks guys.