Grief Wears More Than One Face

Widow Grief and Daughter Grief

This month marks eleven years since my dad passed. By the time it happened, grief was already familiar to me. I’d already been a widow for thirteen years when my father died in 2015. I knew how grief moved, how it showed up without warning, how it settled into daily life. What I didn’t realize, though, was that I had only learned one version of it.

When Robert died in 2002, the grief was a full-body demolition. We’d been married six years, raising two girls. Every plan we’d made, every future we’d assumed we had, stopped cold. I didn’t only lose my husband, I lost the life I thought we were building, my co-parent, my daily companion, and the version of myself that existed inside that marriage.

Thirteen years later, on February 6, 2015, I lost my father. By then, I knew how to function through loss. I had rebuilt a life. I had raised my girls. I had learned how to be alone. I assumed that experience would carry me through.

It didn’t.

My mother became a widow the day my father died. They had been married nearly fifty years, a lifetime built side by side. I had already been a widow for over a decade. We lost the same man that day, but the loss landed in very different places.

She lost her husband, the person she had built her adult life alongside. The one who shared her mornings, her routines, the small, ordinary decisions that make up a long marriage. The daily shape of her world changed overnight.

I lost my father. Not the center of my daily life anymore, but a constant presence beneath it. The one who had always been there, steady and familiar, even when I no longer leaned on him the way I did as a kid.

Mom and I shared a title, but the experience inside it was different. We understood each other in ways my siblings couldn’t. Her grief was raw and immediate, the kind that makes you forget to eat and question how you’ll survive the next hour. Mine had been shaped by time; I knew how to carry it, even as she was just beginning to learn how.

When Robert died, I lost my future. Every plan ended mid-thought. The years we assumed we’d have; growing old together, becoming grandparents, all of it disappeared. I couldn’t picture the next decade, let alone the rest of my life.

When my father died, I lost a piece of my past. The version of me he knew. The sense of being anchored by someone who had always been there. His death shifted something underneath me and made me realize how much I had still been standing on.

No more Dad stories, no more Dad wisdom, no more goofy Dad jokes.

The practical impact was just as different. When Robert died, my entire life restructured overnight. I woke up alone. I parented alone. I paid bills alone. Every decision became mine to make. Watching my mother learn how to live without my father reminded me that grief always asks something new of us, no matter how much we think we already know.

When my father died, my routines stayed the same. I slept in the same bed, went to the same job, lived in the same house. On the surface, nothing changed. Underneath, something essential had loosened. A quiet sense of safety I hadn’t realized I still relied on.

The response from the world reflected that difference too. When I lost Robert, people brought meals; they checked in regularly. They understood the scale of what had been lost.

When I lost my father, I received three days of bereavement leave. People were kind, but the grief was treated as expected. Adult children are supposed to lose parents. The loss is acknowledged, but briefly. The grief was no less real, but it didn’t register the same way outside the family.

I didn’t expect losing my father to give me insight into my daughter’s loss. The circumstances were too different. She was five years old when Robert died; barely old enough to understand what “forever” meant. I was an adult when my father passed, with decades of memories and context. Those griefs don’t translate.

I’ve learned that grief doesn’t prepare you for more grief. Losing Robert didn’t make losing my father easier, it only taught me that each loss has its own shape. The hole Robert left was shaped like a future I would never have. The hole my father left was shaped like a past I could no longer reach.

I’ve learned that you can carry more than one grief at the same time. They don’t replace each other or compete for space. Thirteen years after losing Robert, I still missed him. And I missed my father too. Both losses were difficult - both deserved room.

Widow grief taught me how to rebuild a life alone. Daughter grief taught me that I was mortal too. Neither one prepared me for the other; they were simply different experiences of the same human truth.

Losing a spouse and losing a parent each reshape a life in lasting ways. There’s no hierarchy to the pain and no fast track through it. What changes is your capacity to carry it, and the way you learn to carry it alongside other people who are hurting too.

I would give anything to have Robert back for Emmy’s sake. I would give anything to sit with my father one more time. But I wouldn’t trade having loved either of them to avoid the pain.

Grief doesn’t disappear. It changes over time, settling into something that stays with you rather than overtaking you. Some losses rearrange the future. Others reshape the past. Carrying both can be disorienting, even years later. That’s part of what it means to love people across a lifetime.

With Grace for the Mess,

~Stef