On sisterhood, widowhood, and the quiet becoming of willowhood
I've spent much of my life finding my people.
Sometimes I found them in the most ordinary places. A library on a Tuesday morning. A school hallway crowded with mothers and children. A friend's kitchen, where conversations lingered over cups of coffee while little ones played at our feet.
I didn't know it then, but I was gathering threads.
As a young mother, I remember taking my firstborn to Books and Babies at our local library. Those early days of motherhood were filled with a kind of love I had never known, alongside a loneliness I hadn't anticipated. The days could stretch endlessly between rocking, patting, and the soft, soothing routines that held our lives together.
I loved being a mother more than anything. But I longed for the company of women who understood what it felt like to be both completely consumed by motherhood and, occasionally, a little lost inside it.
I made my first local mom friend at the library, which seems fitting as I’ve always thought of books as friends, patiently waiting on my nightstand.
She introduced me to a mothers' club, and before long, our days began to fill with playdates, shared lunches at the park, and conversations that wandered between the everyday and the precious.
We talked about sleepless nights, first words, and the bewildering responsibility of loving someone so much. We celebrated new pregnancies and welcomed more babies. We exchanged stories about labor and delivery, compared milestones, and found humor in the thousand little moments of chaos and wonder.
As our children grew, so did our circles.
There were preschool friendships, school hallways, classroom parties, and familiar faces at Christmas programs. Women who began as someone's mother became friends whose lives I came to know beyond the children who had introduced us.
Somewhere along the way, these women became part of the fabric of my life.
I found another kind of sisterhood in my profession, among women who shared my passion for understanding and helping others. We were therapists, mothers, daughters, wives, and friends, often carrying the needs of so many people while trying to make room for our own.
There were the friendships that reached back into earlier chapters of my life, women who remembered the girl I had been and held pieces of my story that time and distance could never erase. There were sisters-in-law who became the sisters I never had, neighbors who became beloved friends, and women who entered my life through one doorway and somehow found their way into every room.
Our circles grew and overlapped. Friendships became intertwined, one thread crossing another until it was difficult to remember where one part of life ended and another began.
I came to understand that sisterhood isn't always something we're born into.
Sometimes it's something we find.
Sometimes it's something we tend, like a garden, through changing seasons.
And sometimes it finds us just when we need it most.
Throughout our lives, we move through different hoods.
Childhood. Girlhood. Womanhood. Motherhood. Sisterhood.
Each carries its own language of belonging. Each asks something of us, shapes us, and introduces us to new versions of ourselves.
But there was one I never imagined would become part of my story.
Widowhood.
A Life I Never Imagined
For most of my life, the word widow belonged to a distant future. I imagined an elderly woman who had spent a lifetime beside the person she loved, who had raised children, grown old, and eventually learned the sorrow of saying goodbye.
I suppose that was the story I thought I was living.
My grandmother had been widowed at 45, the very age I would be when I lost my husband. She raised three children and continued building a life around an absence that must have changed everything.
As a child, I knew the outline of her story. I didn't yet understand its weight.
By the time I did, she was gone.
How I've wished I could curl up beside her beneath a cozy blanket, hear her call me darlin' or love, and ask her how she survived.
I’ve wanted to know how she faced the morning when the world outside was busily going about its ordinary tasks, while she held her coffee with the extraordinary task of managing her forever altered world. How she made decisions alone that they had once made together. Whether she sometimes stood in the middle of a room and forgot what she'd come there to do because the life she’d known had disappeared.
I wanted to know how she carried what seemed impossible to carry.
And so I talk to her anyway.
Quietly. In my heart. In conversations with her spirit that bring a kind of comfort I can't quite explain and feel no need to.
I search the life she lived for wisdom she never knew she'd be leaving me.
When my very best friend and spouse of nearly twenty years died, I lost the person who had known me for nearly my entire life.
We met in first grade at Catholic school. He was a sweet, shy boy who would eventually become my first boyfriend, my high school sweetheart, my husband, and the father of our three children.
I don't remember not knowing him.
We grew up alongside one another, our histories so intertwined that his memories often felt like extensions of my own. He knew the girl I had been before I knew much about the woman I would become. I love his family like my own.
We created a family. We filled a home with precious children, traditions, ordinary weekends, and the beautiful chaos of a life shared.
For years, I imagined us as the enormous old oak tree in our backyard.
Its roots ran deep. Its branches stretched wide. It had weathered seasons of sun and storms, losing a limb here and there, but remaining the familiar shape against which the rest of our lives unfolded.
I believed we would grow old beneath its branches.
But even the strongest trees are not untouched by storms.
There were seasons of closeness and seasons when the demands of everyday life left us standing beneath the same roof but sometimes feeling far apart. Marriage is rarely unique in this way.
And there were losses along the way that changed us in ways we didn't know how to name.
When Matt lost his mother, I watched grief slowly alter someone I loved.
His sorrow was as gentle as his eyes when he smiled, but its weight was enormous.
There were parts of him I could no longer reach, places where he seemed to retreat beyond the familiar paths of our life. At times, I didn't know how to find him.
I experienced that distance as a loss of its own. I fought that reality desperately.
It wasn't until I entered the foreign landscape of profound and complex grief myself that I began to understand something about where he had gone.
Grief doesn't simply change what surrounds us. It can alter the very terrain of who we are.
It rearranges the rooms of our inner lives. It closes doors we once walked through easily. It can leave us standing in familiar places, unable to recognize the person we've become.
I understand now that there were parts of himself he could no longer access, either. It still breaks my heart and also fills it with compassion.
I am still me.
But I will never be the woman I was before.
And I imagine there have been times when the people who love me the most have stood outside those same unfamiliar rooms, wishing they knew how to reach me.
The Women Who Held Me
In the aftermath, the world I had known seemed to come apart at its seams.
And people came alongside me, quietly gathering what they could.
My parents, though hours away, remained close in every way that mattered.
My mother, who had lost her own father tragically as a teenager, recognized a kind of sorrow that didn't require explanation. She loved me through moments when grief made me difficult to reach, and when I had little tenderness left to offer myself.
My father became an anchor.
His love arrived in practical ways, through the countless decisions and responsibilities that still demanded attention when I could barely muster the strength to go to the grocery store without crying in the parking lot. He helped steady a life that no longer felt anchored.
My friends softened the unbearable edges.
They made me laugh when laughter felt like a language I'd forgotten. They sat with me while I folded laundry, brought stories from the world outside my grief, and reminded me that ordinary life was still happening somewhere.
Sometimes their presence was enough. A familiar voice. Someone sitting beside me. The quiet reassurance that I didn't have to carry every hour alone.
Matt's aunt, who had lost her daughter as a teenager, became something of a spiritual grief doula to me. She understood the intimate landscape of loss and gently helped me navigate it during moments of despair and outrage.
She helped me find a spiritual language for my sorrow, once guiding me through a ritual at the ocean, inviting me to ask the water to hold what had become too heavy for me to carry alone.
There was a mother from church, another widow. Sometimes we imagined our husbands sharing beers together in heaven.
It was an unlikely kind of comfort, imagining them keeping one another company somewhere beyond the reach of our sadness. Humor found its way into places I never expected it to belong.
And there was a grief group that gathered in the living room of an old lavender Victorian home.
I remember walking up the steps to the front porch, enveloped in sorrow and thinking, How on earth did this become my life?
The therapist who welcomed us offered something rare: a place where no one needed to be brave, composed, or pretend to be anything other than how we were in the moment. I found comfort in her wisdom and her extraordinary capacity to hold our grief.
The living room with its creaky wooden floors held all of us in a kind of understanding that didn't require explanation.
In that circle, I could set down the exhausting work of making my grief politely contained.
I found another kind of refuge in a Facebook group for widows.
There were women of every age, from every corner of life. Young mothers, women raising teenagers, women whose children were grown. Women who had lost their husbands suddenly, and women who had watched illness slowly take the people they loved.
Some were pregnant when their husbands died, bringing babies into a world their fathers would never get to see.
Their stories dismantled everything I had once believed about widowhood.
During sleepless nights, I would read their conversations. Often, I didn't write a word. I simply listened to women I'd never met speak aloud the very things I was struggling to understand.
There were practical questions, moments of anger, confessions of loneliness, and flashes of irreverent humor that would have made little sense outside that circle.
Sometimes I would read something and think, Oh. You too.
Three small words that could make the world feel less lonely.
These women, along with the people who loved me in the life I already knew, became threads that helped hold me together.
And yet, the person I most wanted beside me was the person who was gone.
I wanted to tell Matt about our children. I wanted to share the worries that kept me awake, the decisions I didn't know how to make without him, and the small, silly things that happened in the course of an ordinary day.
I wanted the person who had known my life from its earliest chapters to help me understand the one I was suddenly living.
There is a particular loneliness in that truth.
You can be surrounded by extraordinary love and still ache for the one person no one else can be.
And somewhere along the way, a question began to take root.
When I became a mother, I found other mothers. When I entered my profession, I found women who understood the calling and complexity of our work. And when I became a widow, I found women who understood the language of loss.
They helped me feel less alone in a world I no longer recognized.
But I began to wonder about the chapters that had yet to be written.
Where could women like us gather not only around what we had lost, but around the lives we were still learning to live?
Becoming Willow
For a long time, I struggled with the word widowhood.
I resisted it. At times, I felt enraged by the very idea that this was now part of my identity.
The word seemed to define me by an absence.
Yet so much of who I am, and the life I continue to live, remains intertwined with Matt.
I still talk to him.
I tell him about our children, about the extraordinary people they're becoming, about the moments that make me proud and the things I wish he could see.
I talk to him when I'm worried, when I need to make a decision, when something happens that only he would fully understand.
The relationship I have with him has changed in ways I never wanted, but it remains part of me.
And I remain so many things beyond a widow.
A mother. A daughter. A friend. A sister. A woman with dreams and questions and parts of herself she is still discovering.
I began to wonder whether there might be another word. Not to replace widowhood, but to make room for everything it couldn't hold.
Willowhood.
I've been drawn to willow trees since I was a little girl.
There is something deeply feminine about them to me. Their long, graceful branches, the way they sway in the wind, the way they bend toward the earth without surrendering their roots.
They seem to carry both tenderness and strength, without insisting that one must come at the expense of the other.
The willow has always stirred something in my soul, much like the ocean, which has an inexplicable way of making me feel I've returned to myself.
Over time, the willow became a way for me to imagine the woman I was becoming.
Sometimes I look at her with awe for all she has managed to endure.
Other times, I feel an overwhelming sorrow that she has had to endure any of it at all.
Both things can be true.
I don't want to become a woman untouched by grief. That would mean forgetting too much of what has mattered.
I don't expect to return to the woman I was before. She belonged to a life I loved, and parts of her will always remain with me.
And I no longer believe that strength means standing perfectly upright through every storm.
Sometimes strength looks more like a willow.
Bending. Reaching. Resting.
Still rooted.
Still growing.
Willowhood is the word I created for this becoming.
It doesn't deny widowhood or ask us to leave our loved ones behind. It doesn't require us to turn suffering into something beautiful, or to pretend that everything happens for a reason.
It simply makes room for the whole woman.
The woman who loved and lost.
The mother who found a reason to keep going in her children, and who is slowly discovering that her own life deserves to be lived, too.
The daughter, the friend, the sister, the professional.
The woman who carries extraordinary sorrow and still knows extraordinary joy.
The woman who is still here.
And somewhere within this understanding, Woven Willow began to take shape.
I think of our lives as tapestries, woven slowly over time from the people we've loved, the roles we've inhabited, the relationships that have sustained us, and the experiences that have changed us.
Some threads are strong and enduring. Others are delicate. Some are cut short, long before we're ready to let them go.
There are threads we inherit, threads we choose, and threads we never imagined would become part of our story.
And sometimes, when a life unravels, we need other hands to help us gather what remains.
Not to weave the old life back exactly as it was.
But to help us see that there is still something here.
Something worth tending.
Something that belongs to us.
Woven Willow grew from my belief that we were never meant to find our way through all of this alone.
I imagined a place where women could gather beneath the branches of their changing lives. Where we could speak honestly about what we've lost without being defined entirely by it. Where we could remember the women we were, become curious about the women we are, and begin to imagine the women we might still become.
A place for companionship, recognition, and a new kind of sisterhood.
A place where grief can remain part of our story without becoming the whole story.
I created Woven Willow because women helped hold me together when I could not hold myself together. Because I know what it is to need someone who understands. And because I believe we can offer one another that same gift as we find our way toward whatever comes next.
I never wanted widowhood.
But I am learning to embrace willowhood.
Not because I have overcome what happened.
But because, after everything, I'm still here.