In the name of love, I hereby draw your attention to the shadow widow. In our Western culture, the nuclear family (consisting of 1 man, 1 woman and a number of children) is the norm. Within that standard there is officially no room for another, although that often happens, with or without the knowledge of the legal partner. What if someone has a (secret) mistress and dies? What will happen next with the mourning? First of all: I’m talking about a shadow widow here and not a shadow widower. There’s a reason for that: very little is known about shadow widowers. Perhaps men are more likely than women to pass for a position as perpetual second, which means there are fewer shadow widowers?
Secret
The shadow widow is in a very unpleasant position. While anyone else who loses a loved one can surrender to the grief and mourning rituals, the shadow widow may surrender to ‘none’.
‘No’
- She is not involved in any illness
- No obituary
- No condolences
- No goodbye (some funeral directors do give her that chance upon request, in a stolen moment when no one knows, as was her entire relationship with her lover)
- No funeral
- Don’t send flowers
- No speech
Does she even know?
Unless, during her life, she herself has come up with the idea that everything is impermanent and that her lover can also die and she has taken measures accordingly to find out about this, it may even happen that she knows nothing about the death . She then only notices that ‘he’ no longer comes or calls and has to investigate herself to discover the death.
Conditions
In summary, it can be said that the situation in which the shadow widow finds herself has all the ingredients to develop into postponed grief or into stuck grief.
When she seeks help with this, she receives a very different kind of advice than is usually given to mourners. Her is advised:
- not to make the relationship public, because the deceased did not want that
- not to negatively influence the mourning of the legal family, because they did not choose this situation.
Crisis
What plays a role here is that a death creates a crisis and in times of crisis we find support in common behavior. In the emotional chaos after a death, we cling to rituals, so to speak. And those rituals do not provide a blueprint that tells us how to deal with a situation in which there is a shadow widow.
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- Grief, a special life situation