Judging Someone Else's Grief

I caught myself judging a new widow for smiling two days after her husband died. There is no correct timeline for grief. A checklist for catching it.

A few weeks ago I found myself watching a new widow grieve, and I was judging her for it.

I caught myself doing the exact thing I have spent three years asking people not to do to me.

I don't know her. She is not in my circles. We have no friends in common and we have never been in a room together. She is a woman I came across online, the way you come across anyone online, and once I found her I kept looking.

The day after her husband died, she was posting. Smiling. Laughing. Out with people. The week after, more of the same. Moments of levity, in public, while the ground was still open.

And I sat there on the other side of the screen and thought: she doesn't seem that affected.

I want to be precise about what I was doing, because I don't want to let myself off easy. I was comparing her week to my week. In my first week I was not in a position where I could even be on my phone, let alone posting moments of levity with other people. Because that was mine, I had quietly made it the standard. Anything that didn't look like that looked like less.

I said it out loud to my friends. Not to get agreement. I said it because I could hear what I was doing and I wanted it out of my mouth instead of sitting in my body where it could keep living. I told them I was judging this woman and I had no business doing it.

That is a widow, three years in, deciding another widow was not sad enough on day two.

I have done this more than once

There was a woman I met early on after Steven died. Her partner of seven years had died. Three weeks later she had a new boyfriend.

Three weeks.

I remember the number because of what I did with it. I could not imagine, in that window, letting someone touch me. My body was not a place anyone was going to visit. So when she told me, something in me went flat and quiet and did the same arithmetic: three weeks, seven years, that doesn't add up.

It wasn't my math to do. It wasn't my body, my relationship, my seven years, or my three weeks. She wasn't asking me to approve. She was telling me about her life.

Sex is where people get loudest

I know how that judgment feels from the other side, because sex is where people have been the least shy about handing me their opinion.

I haven't dated anyone since Steven died. I have been sexual. For a while I was on a podcast where I talked openly about some of my sexual endeavors, and people took that and turned it into a verdict on my marriage. Appetite meant lack of love. It meant lack of grief. It meant lack of respect for my husband. Three different accusations pulled from the same belief, which is that a grieving woman's body is supposed to be closed.

My answer then is my answer now. My vagina did not die with my husband.

There is no world in which refusing my own body makes me love him more. There is no ledger where abstinence gets logged as devotion. Nobody has been able to show me the line in that math where Steven comes out ahead. The best thing I can do for myself is keep living, and part of being alive is being a sexual being. That is not a violation of my marriage. It is the condition of still being here.

And watch how that logic works. Most people would never say out loud that a widow should stay untouched for the rest of her life. They say she moved too fast instead. It's the same rule with a number attached so it sounds reasonable.

Which is exactly what I did with three weeks and seven years.

The part where I check myself

Nothing dramatic happened. I didn't have a breakthrough. I just stopped, in the middle of an opinion I had no right to, and made myself look at what I was holding.

However that woman was acting on day two was however she was acting on day two. Whatever was on her face in a photo was one second of a day I know nothing about. I don't know what her marriage was. I don't know what she found out about her husband's death, or when, or from whom. I don't know who was in the room with her that night. I don't know what she did when the door closed. I know what she posted, which is the thinnest possible slice of a human being, and I built an entire verdict out of it.

And I know how thin that slice is, because I have been on the other side of it. I was living in full color on my own Instagram. I was posting. I was out. Anyone scrolling could have done to me exactly what I did to her, counted the days and decided I looked fine.

What they would not have seen is that I felt guilty for every emotion that wasn't sadness. Laughing felt like a betrayal. A good hour felt like evidence against me. I had a private rule that grief was supposed to look like one thing, and every time I broke it, I made myself pay for it somewhere no one could see.

That's what I did to her. I watched a woman have moments of levity and decided that was the whole story. It was never the whole story when it was me.

There is no timeline

Not for crying. Not for laughing. Not for going back to work, or not going back to work. Not for taking the ring off. Not for going on a date. Not for having sex again. Not for falling in love again, or moving in with someone, or getting married again.

People will judge every one of those, and they will tell themselves it's about respect for the dead. It isn't. My husband is not less loved because I am alive. Nobody has ever been able to explain to me what my staying frozen would have done for Steven.

And the judgment doesn't stop after the first year. It gets more specific. Early on, people judge how hard you fall apart. Later, they judge how well you put yourself back together. Fall apart too long and you're stuck. Recover too visibly and you must not have loved him. There is no version of this you can pass.

So I'm not going to pretend I'm above the thing I'm asking you not to do. I did it. I did it while actively being on the receiving end of it. That's how automatic it is.

The checklist

This is for everyone. If you've buried someone, and if you haven't. Run these the next time you catch yourself with an opinion about how someone is grieving.

1. What did you expect them to look like? Get specific. Say the picture out loud. Then ask where you got it. Almost always it's your own grief, a movie, or a version of grief you once got praised for.
2. How many days in are you counting? If you have a number in your head, you have a schedule. Ask yourself who wrote it and why you think it applies to a life that isn't yours.
3. How much of this person do you actually have access to? Count what you truly know: what they posted, what someone told you, what you saw for a few minutes. Then compare that to the size of the conclusion you drew.
4. If you've said it out loud, what were you after? There is a difference between telling a friend so you can hear how it sounds and stop, and telling a friend so somebody agrees with you. One ends it. The other recruits for it. Be honest about which one you were doing.
5. Would you say it to them? If the answer is no, be honest about why. Usually it's because you already know it's cruel.
6. If you're watching, why are you watching? Nobody is making you look. If you keep going back to a stranger's page to be upset by it, that's information about you.
7. What would you have to feel if you stopped judging them? This is the real one. Judging someone else's grief is often the fastest way to avoid your own. If their day two didn't look like your day two, maybe you'd have to sit with the fact that there was no right way to do yours either, and that nothing you did or didn't do would have changed the outcome.
8. And for anyone reading this who has been judged: you don't owe anybody a performance of your loss. Not a timeline, not a face, not a socially acceptable date to start living again. The people watching don't have to carry any of it.

You do not get a vote in how someone else survives the worst thing that ever happened to them.

Neither do I. I had to learn that with a phone in my hand and a stranger on the screen and my own worst opinion sitting in my mouth.

Their grief. Their timeline. Their life. None of it is yours to judge.

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I love you. I am proud of you.