I Was Unexpectedly Widowed At 36. I Expected To Grieve, But I Never Expected This.

During the pandemic, my husband Brent bought a used Jon boat to escape the confinement of lockdowns — to find a sense of peace in nature. 

On July 10, 2020, two hours after he took it out for a test drive, the police showed up at my door. Brent was missing. Two days later, EquuSearch found his body. He had drowned. He left behind two young sons, ages 11 and 3. 

I was 36 — and suddenly, a widow.

In the days after his death, I moved through the world in a daze. The grief was crushing, but it wasn’t just that. I began to feel lost and unmoored in a way that surprised and frustrated me. I expected the sorrow. What I didn’t expect was the disorientation, the sense that I no longer recognized the world, or myself in it. 

After all, I had strong friendships, a deeply fulfilling role as a newly appointed assistant professor of social work at the University of Houston-Downtown, and a clear sense of purpose as a researcher. I couldn’t understand it — how I could be so surrounded, so rooted in meaning, and still feel like I was disappearing.

Later, as I pivoted my research to study young widowhood more deeply, I started to hear the same thing from others: “I’m lost. I don’t know who I am anymore.”

From research participants and grief scholars, I’ve come to understand this as the loss of self-familiarity. We aren’t sealed-off individuals, we’re co-created through our relationships. So when someone central to you dies, it’s not just grief. It’s the slow, disorienting unraveling of who you were in their presence.

I felt that unraveling most clearly in the smallest moments, like the first time I sat down for dinner without him.

Brent used to set a drink beside me every night at dinner. I never had to ask. It was just there — part of the rhythm we had created. Three days after he died, my family urged me to eat. I hadn’t touched food in days. I was too terrified, too grief-stricken. I sat down in my usual spot at our breakfast table. My body moved the way it always did: I reached out for the drink that should be there.

But there was no drink.

Instantly, I realized no one would be thinking of me in that quiet, everyday way anymore. I felt less important. Unseen.

That small act — him pouring me a drink — had been a reflection of care, of attention, of mattering. I hadn’t even known how much it meant until it was gone. The missing glass of water became the clearest symbol of what I had lost — not just Brent, but the quiet feeling of being cherished.

That’s when I understood something I hadn’t fully realized before: So much of my self-worth had been quietly held in his ordinary acts of care.

In that moment, everything I thought I knew about who I was began to unravel. I didn’t have the language for it then. I just knew something inside me had shifted. I became unrecognizable to myself.

Some books give language to grief’s sorrow. Fewer speak to the quiet horror of becoming unfamiliar to yourself.