Ep #349: How to Survive Your Wedding Anniversary as a Widow

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, Episode 349: How to Survive Your Wedding Anniversary as a Widow.

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, the only podcast that offers a proven process to help you work through your grief, to grow, evolve, and create a future you can truly look forward to. Here’s your host, Master Certified life coach, grief expert, widow, and mom, Krista St-Germain.

Hey there, welcome to another episode of the podcast. Today we’re talking about something that almost every widow dreads at some point: your wedding anniversary. And if that date is coming up for you or if you’ve already noticed that your body is tightening just hearing me say the words wedding anniversary, you are not alone. You are not doing this wrong. This episode is about helping you get through that day, hopefully with less suffering and more self-trust.

I want to start here because I think this really matters, and that is to say that there is no wrong way to feel about your anniversary after your person dies. Everyone listening to this episode is going to feel slightly differently. No one is right, no one is wrong. So if you feel differently than how I talk about how you might feel in this episode, I want you to not interpret that as me saying that you are doing anything wrong or that anything has gone wrong, because that is just not the case. Again, grief is so unique. Every one of us is having a very unique experience, as unique as a fingerprint.

So, that said, for many widows, the wedding anniversary is sometimes harder than the day that your person died, which I tend to call the deathiversary. And that can feel kind of confusing. For some of us that can feel even guilt or shame inducing. But I think it makes a lot of sense. Your wedding anniversary isn’t just about losing them. It can also be about losing what you had with them. And for many, it’s about the identity that you had with them and your life together, which feels a little bit different sometimes than how we experience the deathiversary.

So the wedding anniversary can be a day that represents who you were before and the life that you were building or had built together, the future that you expected but no longer have access to, the version of yourself that existed inside that marriage. So, when the date shows up on the calendar, or when you start to be aware that the date is coming, it might not only feel like you are just remembering the loss of your partner, but you’re having so many thoughts about what was supposed to be and what’s now missing, and you might be wondering who you are outside of that identity that you had as a wife. You might be wondering what’s available to you in the future, and that can feel like a lot.

So if you notice any number of emotions, but especially dread, sadness, resentment, confusion, numbness, none of those things are failures. All of those emotions make so much sense. My hope is that we can remove some pressure. So before we talk about what you could do on that day, I want to take something off the table. And that is any ideas that you might have about rules for how you are supposed to experience your wedding anniversary.

There are no rules. Let’s please throw them all out. You do not owe anyone your tears. You do not owe anyone rituals. You are not supposed to be strong. You do not have to find meaning. You do not have to be grateful. You also don’t have to be consistent, by the way. What you do this year does not set a precedent for future years unless you decide it does. You are allowed to have a different experience every single time. You are allowed to choose a different experience for yourself every single time. So let’s ditch all the rules and remind ourselves we don’t owe anyone anything. Will they have opinions? Yes, they absolutely will. Are they allowed to have their opinions? We might as well let them have their opinions because they will anyway. And we don’t owe anybody anything.

What I also see time and time again is that the dread is very often worse than the actual day itself. Truly, if I have coached on this once, I have coached on it hundreds of times. It’s just so consistent. The suffering that we experience is often in large part because of the dread that we have. It’s coming from weeks of mental rehearsal, weeks of mental worry, weeks of anticipating the ick.

Your brain will probably start asking, if it isn’t already, all kinds of what if questions. What if I fall apart? What if I can’t handle it? What if people are disappointed in how I handle it? What if I don’t handle it the way I should? What if people forget? What if they don’t forget and they actually want to talk about it? How awful is this going to be? What if I cry in public? What if people are disappointed? All these questions that we have. And that questioning, all that asking and scanning for danger ahead of time, can be so exhausting.

So, here’s what I want to tell you. You do not need a plan to feel okay. I know you think you do. I wanted one too. But you really don’t need a plan to feel okay. You do need to believe that you can allow yourself to feel however it is you actually feel. So as much as it feels like your job is to predict how the day will feel or to make it feel some sort of way, it’s not. Your job is to take care of yourself, no matter how you feel when that day arrives.

And the good news is that’s something you can decide now. You can decide, you can literally give yourself permission and I hope you will, to decide that however you feel on that day is something you can handle. However you feel on that day is something you can support yourself through. No matter how you feel on that day, you will have your own back. You will not beat yourself up. You don’t have to feel any particular way. You just need to believe you can allow yourself to feel however it is that you feel.

I want to encourage you to think in terms of capacity and not meaning. And what I mean is, instead of asking what should this day look like, I want you to consider asking yourself, what do I have the capacity for on this day or this year? And that might mean what kind of capacity do I have to be around people? What kind of capacity do I have to be alone? What kind of capacity do I have to allow for noise versus quiet? Do I want to distract myself? Do I want normalcy as much as possible? Do I want something intentionally different? What do I have the capacity for? What do I want from this day?

Knowing that none of those choices say anything about how much you loved them or how you’re doing with your grief or anything about your character. Right? They are just choices that you get to make. You get to check with yourself and decide what you are resourced for, what you have the capacity to deal with, to do, and then make choices accordingly. You get to decide what is my system resource to handle.

Another question I love, because so much of what we dread has to do with other people’s opinions and worries about doing it right or wrong, as though that’s a thing, which it isn’t. But I love the question, if everybody approved of my choice, right? If I knew for sure that no matter what choice I made, everybody would approve, including me. I wouldn’t be mean to myself about it. I would absolutely have my own back about it, and so would everyone else.

How might I deal with this day? What might I do? Because when we ask it that way, what we’re doing is we’re taking all of the external validation away, which then helps us get clarity on what we actually want. If we’re not worried about pleasing other people, and we’ve taken the idea of right or wrong off the table, then that allows us a better shot at accessing what we actually want and feel up to. Please consider that question.

And then I want to give you some options for how you might, not should, but how you might handle that day. Again, feel free to change your mind at any point in time, but here are some options worth considering. As you hear them, you might notice, how does this feel in my body when I hear it? Does it feel supportive? Does it resonate? Does it feel heavy?

You might treat that day like it’s a normal day, on purpose. You might decide to take the day off of work and rest. If you don’t work, you might decide to take the day off of any commitments that you have and rest. You might spend some time with your kids, even if they’re grown, without making it about the anniversary. Or you might spend some time with your kids and make it about the anniversary. You might do something physically regulating, like walking or movement or being outdoors or taking a class or getting a massage, right? Something physical. You might create a small private ritual that only you know about. Or you might decide not to acknowledge the date at all.

The point is not what you choose as much as it is that you choose. I want you to consider that you get to be the one who makes a conscious choice about how she approaches that day. You get to make a conscious choice and then you get to have your own back about it. You also get to change your mind at any point in time. So it’s not right or wrong, it’s not good or bad, it’s not should or shouldn’t. It is, I am the one with the agency. There is no way to do this right or wrong, so I just get to choose what I want. And I will make that choice consciously and then I will have my own back about it. I will not speak unkindly to myself after I have made the choice or after the day has passed.

And then, if emotions show up, which they probably will because you’re a human, let them be there. If emotions show up, don’t make it your goal to manage them. Make it your goal to allow them. That’s all we got to do. I want you to think about a beach ball in a pool. You’re not trying to shove that beach ball under the water. You’re not trying to kick that beach ball out of the pool. You’re trying to let that beach ball float next to you in the water. We’re just allowing it.

The goal is to allow yourself to feel however you feel without telling yourself that it means anything. We don’t need to layer an optional story on top of what we’re feeling. So, if you notice yourself crying and water is coming out of your eye holes, that does not mean that you’re backsliding. That does not mean that you’re not okay. That does not mean that you have repressed your grief. That does not mean that you’re in denial. That does not mean anything. It means you’re human. It means you’re a human experiencing grief.

You also don’t need to make sense of the emotions. You do not need to turn them into insight. You do not need to figure out what they’re there to tell you. You don’t need to be grateful that they’re there. You just need to let them pass. Allow them to pass through. Sometimes I say in my coaching programs, be the screen. A screen, if you think about the screen on a window, water just passes through it. If you pour water on top of a screen, water just flows through it. The screen does not have to understand why the water is there to let it flow through. The screen is just a screen. And if we pour water on it, it flows through. So imagine yourself. You don’t have to do anything with it. You just have to let it flow through, allow it to be there.

I also want you to hear, this day does not mean anything about your future. This is important. Your wedding anniversary is a reminder of what was. It has nothing to do with what’s possible. And how this day feels has zero to do with whether you will love again, zero to do with whether you will feel full again, zero to do with the amount of joy that is available to you, zero to do with how you are doing with your grief. We want to hold this lightly, not take it so seriously. It is just another one of many hard days, and we don’t have to tell ourselves a story on top of that launches it into something that creates more suffering than is necessary.

So, what I want you to remember the very most, if you take nothing else from this, you do not have to do this day well. If you have this idea of what it means to do it well, you don’t have to do that. You really just have to let it pass. And the good news is, it’s going to pass. It’s going to pass. You could try to stop it if you wanted to, you wouldn’t be able to. You literally cannot do it wrong. It will pass. You are so much more capable than your brain is probably giving you credit for. You have already felt so many hard feelings. The feelings that are waiting for you on your wedding anniversary are not harder than the feelings you’ve already allowed. Please remind yourself of this.

All you have to do is allow yourself to feel. We don’t care what other people think. You cannot do it wrong. That is what I hope you will hear. And I also will just say as well, I know sometimes when you hear something like this, you can think, yeah, but if I worry about it in advance, then somehow that’s helpful. If I worry about it in advance and I think about it and I think it all the way through, you know, then somehow that anxiety and dread and worry that I spend time with now sometimes makes it easier then.

And what I want to tell you is that in my experience, that is not true. What actually happens is that worrying about it now, dreading it now, just depletes you. It just takes your time, it takes your energy. It doesn’t actually make anything any easier in the future. So if you can stay present in this moment, and when your brain wants to go to dread about how you’re going to deal with that day, remind yourself that emotions are happening now. And you have survived every emotion you’ve ever felt, so when that day gets here, you’re also going to be able to survive that day too. It seems like it’s helpful to worry about it, but really it’s just depleting. The more you can bring yourself back to the present moment because you remind yourself that you can handle the future, it will also be your present moment, the easier it gets.

If you want help with this, these are the kinds of things that we do in Mom Goes On. These are the kinds of things I love helping people with. There is something to be said for going through the exercise of really getting good at feelings, learning tools to regulate your nervous system, learning tools to help you allow feelings to pass, so that you have a sense of confidence around your ability to allow emotions and survive intense things that serves you in moments like this. So if that’s something that is of interest to you, you can go to CoachingWithKrista.com and click on the Work with me tab. Learn all about Mom Goes On. All right?

That’s what I have for you this week. Remember, I love you. You’ve got this. Take care and I’ll see you next week. Bye-bye.

If you like what you’ve been hearing on this podcast and want to create a future you can truly get excited about even after the loss of your spouse, I invite you to join my Mom Goes On coaching program. It’s small group coaching just for widowed moms like you where I’ll help you figure out what’s holding you back and give you the tools and support you need so you can move forward with confidence.

Please don’t settle for a new normal that’s less than what you deserve. Go to coachingwithkrista.com and click Work With Me for details and next steps. I can’t wait to meet you.