Dear Grief Guide, I'm Mourning A Death And A Betrayal

A grieving wife who discovered her husband's affair after his death questions her self-worth and grapples with how to mourn a relationship that is muddled with betrayal. I read her anonymous letter and then offer her practical tools and compassionate wisdom for growing through grief.

Dear Grief Guide is a weekly advice podcast where I answer anonymous letters from people feeling lost, stuck, or overwhelmed in the midst of grief.

Music © Adi Goldstein, Used with Permission

Trigger Warning: This practice may include references to death, dying, and the departed.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Dear Grief Guide,

A podcast where each week I answer one anonymous letter from a listener feeling lost,

Stuck,

Heartbroken,

Or overwhelmed in the midst of grief.

My name is Shelby Forsythia.

I'm a grief coach and author,

And I'm here to help you create a life you love from the life loss forced you to live.

Let's get to today's letter.

Dear Grief Guide,

Listening to your episode 49 from Foe Widow,

I'm interested to know your response to the widow whose husband had an affair,

Who suffered the grief of her husband having an addiction.

Perhaps she suspected an affair,

But it was unconfirmed at the time of his death.

She was devastated by the sudden loss of being widowed and had to suffer being widowed by a man she loved and sacrificed for.

She found out deep in grief she was betrayed,

And was unable to confront him or feel empowered by making the choice to leave or stay.

Perhaps she still has to respectfully parent the children she shared with this man and carry his memory for them.

She still grieves the love they had that was very much real,

But questions the validity of it knowing another woman is out there grieving the same man in a romantic way.

Now she questions her worth.

Her day-to-day life has changed in every way because the primary money earner,

House security keeper and co-parent is gone forever.

The loss was traumatic,

And on top of that,

She's carrying the weight of his betrayal.

Grief Guide,

How does she rebuild her self-worth?

How does she grieve a relationship that was ultimately a lie?

How does she tell what was real?

How does she confront the man who hurt her when she can't because he's dead?

How does she hold space for the other woman,

Honoring her value to hold up all women,

But while also processing the betrayal and unwanted shared grief?

I send this with as much respect as possible,

But also pain and hurt.

Signed,

The Betrayed Widow.

Hi there,

Betrayed Widow.

I am so glad you wrote to me,

Because having released episode 49 from Faux Widow,

I received a lot of letters and a lot of comments from people who said,

Yes,

You responded to the affair partner,

But now what about the wife?

And it sounds like you are the wife,

A wife,

A wife standing in for all wives who have been in this situation before,

And it is so,

I hesitate to use the word good,

But it is so balancing to hear your perspective,

Your side of the story.

I want to start off by saying that grieving somebody who betrayed you is a devastating kind of double grief that not everyone has to contend with.

And I am extraordinarily sorry and sad that this is your reality.

And in your case,

Especially because your husband who died suffered with addiction,

It's traumatic loss on top of loss loss.

And on top of that betrayal,

It is layer upon layer upon layer of awfulness and tangledness and taboo and deceit.

And you are the person to whom this is all happening.

You are the person standing in the middle of that storm.

And I am even more sorry that you found out about the affair after your husband's death,

Because you're right.

It absolutely sucks that you cannot confront this man and receive,

To your words,

The empowerment that comes from making the choice to stay or to go,

From letting him have it,

And from deciding in yourself with both of you still alive and conscious of your choices and who you are as people to say,

Yes,

I am committing to seeing this through,

Or no,

I will not stand for this and I'm going.

He is not here,

Unfairly,

He is not here to process and co-carry the ramifications of his actions.

He has left you to do that by yourself.

And that shit is painful.

Society encourages us,

A lot of the time,

Spoken and unspoken,

To quote-unquote,

Not speak ill of the dead.

But that turns everyone who has ever died into a saint,

Which they are not.

As anyone who knows any human being can attest,

No one magically receives sainthood upon their death.

We are all human beings,

Grieving human beings,

And I am a big believer that our grief should include the full humanity,

The mistakes and the failings and the blunders and the faults of the people that we're grieving.

And I want to,

I just kind of put together a little list here for you,

But you are grieving your husband,

Not just who he was to you romantically,

Although you are grieving that,

You are grieving him in all of his facets.

And this is a task that in many ways only you can do,

Only you can grieve him in these very specific ways.

You are grieving your husband,

The man.

You are grieving your husband,

The partner.

You are grieving your husband,

The breadwinner.

You are grieving your husband,

The home security and protector.

You are grieving your husband,

The co-parent.

And you are grieving the husband,

The affair haver.

And you are grieving your husband,

The addict.

And you are grieving the husband who died.

Your task in grief,

Perhaps for your lifetime,

For as long as you live and walk on this planet because grief keeps going,

It keeps coming along for the ride,

Will be to continue to grieve each of these facets of your husband as they appear.

I can see from this collection that there are parts of him that you love and miss dearly and parts of him that you absolutely loathe and are wounded to the core by that hurt.

You are grieving a rose and all of its thorns.

You are grieving a whole rose bush for all,

As far as I can take that metaphor,

That is what you are grieving.

You are grieving the blooms and the thorns and the scars that stay with you in the aftermath and the memories of the scent and the work that it takes to grow something that big for that long and something so precious and delicate and fragile that has roots that has touched the sun and the sky that has been exposed to the storms of life and its elements.

That is what you are grieving.

So the most important thing I can offer you is for you to allow each of these facets to exist both independently as individual things you are grieving,

The breadwinner,

The addict,

The affair-haver,

The lover,

The romantic partner,

The co-parent,

And all together as a single unified portrait of him.

Allow yourself,

I know grief is full of paradoxes,

But to hold both of those things.

You are grieving all of your husband and everything that implies,

And you are grieving all of these individual facets of him and all the others that you can list,

All the things that I did not name.

A practical exercise that I want to offer you is something that I teach to my students inside Life After Loss Academy,

And if you're interested in working through this grief in the course,

I would love to have you there.

But this is something I teach very close to the beginning because it establishes such a foundation for moving forward in the aftermath of loss,

Especially before doing the deep,

We call it the hard and the heart work,

Of releasing painful emotions with regard to grief.

So first we build a foundation so we have a place to return to when all the emotions get too big or too heavy to carry.

So this can be the start of your foundation of returning or rebuilding in life after loss.

And here's the exercise.

It's inspired by Oprah Magazine.

It's called What I Know For Sure.

I want you to ask yourself,

In this relationship with your husband,

What do you know for sure?

Because it has come out that a lot of what you built,

Or a lot of what you knew,

Was not real,

Was not true,

Was not sure.

And so of the things that you can see right now,

Of the things you can survey,

What is true?

What can you build upon because you know without a doubt it is true in your heart and soul?

These could be things like the love I gave was real.

These could be things like the sacrifices I made were meaningful and profound.

The commitment I made was true.

I held up my end of the bargain.

The life I built with him changed me.

And that can be for better or for worse,

But the life I built with him changed me.

I know that for sure.

I know we have children together and I will continue to parent our children that we made and raised together.

I know for sure that we shared a home together and I will continue to tend that home.

I know that we navigated life's ups and downs together.

Notice how I am simply listing facts.

And the beauty of this what I know for sure exercise is it changes the story from everything was a lie to most of it was a lie.

It takes the extremism out of the story,

Out of the equation.

The story you may be telling right now is I have nothing left to stand on.

In reality,

When you look at where you are and who you were to him,

Especially what you could control on your side of the equation and what you are committed to going forward,

You have about 1% to stand on,

Maybe two.

And that is something when you are deeply grieving.

So please do this exercise before diving into processing what you have lost.

Because by noticing and seeing and writing down what remains,

That is the foundation on which everything else can be built.

And it is strong because it is your truth.

The next thing I want to offer you is pretty simple,

But it points to this idea of you're right,

You can't confront him directly and it sucks and it's stupid and it's shit that he cannot receive your questions and your vitriol and your rage and your sadness and your upset at how all of this has transpired.

So after doing your what I know for sure,

Building that foundation,

Find a way that works for you to express anger,

Betrayal,

Outrage,

Dismay,

Anything else that you feel needs to go in his direction that you cannot and should not be containing and holding in your body with no place to go.

You could scream into a pillow or at his photo,

You could turn a picture of his into a dartboard.

I've seen that on one of my favorite TV shows.

You could write him letters that of course he'll never send.

You could set his affair having clothes on fire safely,

Of course.

You could work with a therapist to have a literal person receive the rage or the dismay or the words that you want to say to him,

Perhaps even role playing as your husband,

If that's something that they are willing to do.

But whatever it is,

Get these emotions out of your body.

It will not give you closure because closure is a myth.

So I do not want to guarantee you that.

But what it will do is tell your brain,

Your heart,

Your mind,

Your body,

I'm pointing to all these things right now on myself,

Will recognize that the things that you need to say,

That the emotions you need to express have been said and expressed.

That task is done.

So you can complete those tasks over and over and over again and re-regulate and re-ground into your body.

The last thing I want to say,

And this was so lovely that you wrote this and it really took my breath away to read.

You have this value,

Betrayed Widow,

Of holding up and valuing all women,

Worldwide,

Just internet,

Women,

Yes,

I am for women,

Is a value that it sounds like you deeply hold.

But and,

Because grief is full of but ands,

I need you to know that you are not required to uplift others while also dealing with your own grief and loss.

You can let that be the job of other women for a little while,

As you do the work of holding yourself and tending to yourself and nurturing yourself and healing yourself and bandaging yourself and figuring out which way is up.

In this scenario,

I want you to consider that maybe the best path to honoring both of you,

You and the other woman,

Is by letting her have her journey and by letting you have yours.

In the spirit of honoring humanity,

You can honor her humanity without needing to be in contact or needing to hear more details about the relationship.

You have your husband in common,

Yes,

And that is something that you cannot tear yourself away from.

That is a connection or a cord that you cannot sever.

But you also have wildly different relationships with him,

And you are allowed to honor and protect and respect and grieve the integrity of your own relationship without trying to look closer into hers or even showing any sort of interest.

You can let that connection,

That non-consensual connection,

Be the only thing that ties you together.

It is okay for that to be where your engagement with her stops.

It's really okay,

And I imagine she will understand.

If you can see it this way,

It is a sort of version of putting on the oxygen mask of grieving your own version of your husband first,

Before considering anything that feels like additional outreach in her direction.

Let her have her experience.

You have yours.

Regardless of what you choose to do,

With my response to your letter,

Betrayed Widow,

I hope you know that you are not alone.

There are countless people who have found out a secret of any kind about a spouse or friend or family member after a death,

Especially in this day and age now that things like DNA testing are becoming more and more popular.

We are finding out that we are people who are full of secrets.

Beyond this podcast,

Beyond my response,

I did find a couple of resources that may be of use to you.

One is called the Beyond Affairs Network.

The other is called Affair Recovery.

I cannot speak to the background or success of these programs,

I just came across them on Google.

But of course,

Of course,

Of course,

Any sort of grief therapist,

Any sort of grief coach,

Any sort of grief group,

Like Life After Loss Academy,

Will be able to hold you in this space that you are in right now.

Not just in grieving a loss of a spouse,

Because that's kind of the base level for you,

But grieving loss due to addiction and finding out secrets in the aftermath.

And reckoning with all that that entails.

I am sending you so much love and so much gratitude for having written in,

Thank you,

For speaking on behalf of yourself,

But for so many other women and people who are grieving as well.

And I am wishing you so much luck,

Too.

All of my best.

Reviews

Thank you for these words that I can reflect on during this painful journey. I like the shift in mindset; this should help me especially during the moments when I’m suffocating from from the grief.