Why Moving Forward Feels Like Betrayal When You're Grieving

There is a moment in widowhood that almost nobody warns you about.

It is the moment you catch yourself laughing.

Or wanting to wear something that makes you feel beautiful. Or wanting to post something light on Instagram. Or wanting joy. Or wanting anything that is not the heavy, public sadness the world has decided you are supposed to wear from now on.

The second you notice yourself wanting it, the guilt arrives. Not loud at first, just a small, quiet voice in the back of your head that says: you can't do that. Not yet. Not now. What would people think. What about him. You're supposed to be sad.

If you have ever felt that voice, I want to tell you something that took me almost two years to figure out:

That voice is not your loyalty to him. That voice is your fear of being seen as anything but a grieving widow.

And the fear is keeping you small.

What the betrayal actually is

I want to say something plainly, because I know how this gets misread.

When I started feeling things other than sadness in the months after Steven died, I did not feel like I was cheating on him. Not when I laughed. Not when I wanted to feel beautiful. Not when, much later, I started dating again. The marriage was real. The love was real. None of that was in question.

What I felt was something different. I felt afraid to show any of it.

Afraid to post something light. Afraid to be photographed smiling. Afraid to wear something that wasn't muted. Afraid to be seen, by friends or family or strangers on Instagram, as anything other than the broken version of myself that grief had handed me.

Because somewhere between the funeral and the first month, the world quietly handed me a role: grieving widow. And the role had a script. The script said sad, hollow, restrained, holding a coffee mug, looking out a window. The script said you do not get to be light. You do not get to be sexy. You do not get to be the woman becoming someone new. Pick one emotion, grief, and wear it for the rest of your life.

I was not faking the sadness. The sadness was the most real thing in my body. But I was hiding everything else, because I was a brand-new widow trying to do this right, and the only version of widowhood I had ever seen modeled was sadness on display, all the time, indefinitely.

So when other emotions started showing up, joy or desire or curiosity or the simple wanting to feel pretty, I felt like I was breaking a rule. Not breaking a rule about loving him. Breaking a rule about being a good widow.

That is the part nobody warns you about. The role of widow comes with an audience, and the audience expects sadness, and showing them anything else feels like a violation. Not of the marriage. Of the costume.

The specific moments the fear showed up

The fear is not abstract. It shows up in concrete decisions, on regular days, attached to small actions that anyone outside your widowhood would call totally normal.

The wedding ring. It took me nine months to switch my ring from my left hand to my right. Every time I almost did it, I put it back. The marriage didn't end because of where the ring sat, but moving it felt like I was announcing to the world that the marriage was over. And it wasn't over to me. It still isn't. Eventually I did move it. I survived. So did the marriage.

Wanting to feel sexy in my own body. There is a particular cruelty in the cultural script that says a widow can be many things, gracious, brave, strong, inspirational, but she is not allowed to be sexy. The first time I wanted to feel desirable in my own skin again, I had to fight off the voice that said what is wrong with you, your husband just died, what will people think. It wasn't wrong. It was me waking up.

The boudoir shoots. When I finally booked one, it didn't feel like a violation of anything. It felt like a reclamation. Like I was claiming my own body back from the version of grief that had told me I wasn't allowed to live inside it anymore.

Making a major decision he wouldn't have agreed with. The first big decision I made entirely without him was getting a nose job, something Steven always said I didn't need. I really wanted one. I went through with it. It didn't feel like a violation of him. It felt strange in the way it feels strange to do anything for the first time without the person whose opinion used to weigh in on everything. The truth is, he doesn't have an opinion anymore. The decisions are mine.

Wanting to date again. Wanting sex again. I will say this here: the wanting itself was not a violation. The violation would have been pretending I didn't want.

Every one of these came with the same internal voice telling me I shouldn't, not yet, what about him, what will people think. And every one of them taught me the same thing on the other side: the fear was not protecting him. The fear was protecting an image of widowhood I had been handed by people who had never actually lost a husband.

The trap of staying small

Here is what I want every widow and every griever reading this to hear, because it is the thing that almost nobody says out loud:

You can spend years hiding every emotion that is not grief, and the longer you hide them, the worse you will feel.

The sadness is not the problem. The sadness is honest. But when sadness is the only emotion you allow yourself to show, in public, on social media, around friends, around family, you start to feel like you're disappearing inside your own life. You become two people. The widow that everyone sees, and the woman who actually exists.

And the woman who actually exists is multiple things at once. She is sad and angry and curious and scared and turned on and bored and joyful and exhausted and alive, sometimes all in the same hour. Editing her down to one emotion to make other people comfortable is not loyalty. It's just shrinkage.

The turning point for me was the day I realized I could not get the audience right.

There was always going to be someone with an opinion. Someone who thought I was grieving wrong, smiling too soon, posting the wrong photo, wearing the wrong dress. The more I let myself feel what was actually happening in my body, the better I felt. The more I tried to look like the version of widowhood I thought other people wanted to see, the more disconnected and bad I actually felt.

That is the trap. The way out is to stop hiding.

What loyalty actually looks like

I want to give you a different definition of loyalty, because the one we get handed is a costume.

Loyalty to the person you lost is honoring them.

Not freezing yourself in the version of you that knew them. Not editing your emotions down so the world can see you as broken. Not staying small in their name.

Honoring them is carrying them with you while you keep becoming.

Honoring them is saying their name out loud while you live a life they would have wanted you to live.

Honoring them is letting the grief be one of many emotions in your body, not the only one, and letting the others be just as real, just as deserving, just as yours to feel.

Honoring them is refusing to let their death turn into your death too.

The version of you who loved him is not threatened by the version of you who is becoming someone new. She is the foundation of her.

The new self is built on top of her, not in place of her. You can grow into a woman he never met without losing the woman who loved him. Honoring him does not require disappearing.

This is the work I do with my coaching clients. Not the work of feeling the grief, that work you can do alone or with a therapist or in your own kitchen at three in the morning. The work of building the next self. The work of giving yourself permission to be visible in all of it. Sad and joyful. Grieving and alive. Tender and sexy. Honoring him while becoming her.

One last thing

If you are reading this and you have been holding back on something, a haircut, a date, a body suit, a decision, a laugh, a piece of joy, because the guilt has been telling you it would be a betrayal of him:

It isn't.

You are allowed to want what you want.

You are allowed to feel what you feel.

You are allowed to let your wanting be evidence that you are alive, not evidence that you have forgotten him.

And you are allowed to stop hiding the parts of yourself that are not sadness, even if it makes other people uncomfortable. Even if it doesn't fit the image of widowhood they were expecting. Even if you, yourself, have to relearn that you are allowed to be visible in joy.

Honoring him does not require shrinking.

Honoring him is bringing him with you into a life that is becoming bigger, not smaller, in his absence.

If you're ready to stop surviving and start rebuilding, explore my self-paced programs →

I love you. I am proud of you.