The One About The Year of Firsts After a Loved One’s Death

I became a widow last fall at the age of 55.

I’m figuring out how to navigate the road before me. The road of aloneness, without my other half. It’s been a little over a year since Shane died. He was 56 years old.

The silence in my house is deafening. I am still unable to watch Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune (we shouted out answers every night for the last 32 years.) I find myself watching shows on television now that we wouldn’t have ever watched before. It is just hard to sit here and watch something that we used to enjoy together. There’s no laughter or dialog. Everything is so different. Cold. Lonely. Since he’s been gone I feel like my whole sense of humor is changing. I eat alone. I do yard work alone. I clean alone, do laundry alone, everything alone. While it’s not completely horrible all of the time, sometimes it is really, really hard.

After your loved one dies, you begin to discover your year of firsts. Getting through the firsts was pretty harrowing. And by firsts, I mean all of the “firsts without him.” Obvious examples are his birthday, our anniversary, and his death date. Then there are holidays. Christmas was very difficult. Honestly, I was in such a fog I don’t remember much. Then there’s Father’s Day. Ugh.

But there are many less obvious firsts. For me, there was the first time winterizing the house and yard; the first season shoveling snow alone; getting firewood ready and piled for winter. The first time our lawnmower broke down and I had to call his friend for help. All of this brought home the reality of just how very alone I really was now.


But maybe the weirdest first for me was making a pot of homemade chicken soup.

You see, Shane had aggressive cancer all over his body. He did a couple of rounds of chemo and radiation which left him with a broken sense of smell and taste. He couldn’t stomach much of anything because all food tasted foreign to him. His brain was telling him it tasted gross and odd, so he couldn’t eat. He was, however, able to eat chicken noodle soup.

I think at one point I was making a big pot of homemade soup every five or six days. He savored it because for some reason that still went down great for him. I was very happy about that because it was pretty healthy.

It was late spring of 2020 and the world had just shut down due to the pandemic. Since Shane was immunocompromised we ordered all of our groceries for delivery to the house. We didn’t want him to survive cancer just to die of this virus. One day we ran out of egg noodles and not one store near us had any for sale. That’s when we became an amazing noodle-making team. I would make the dough and he would stand there and roll them out and slice them. Honestly, neither of us had ever tasted a homemade noodle before and we were hooked right from the first bite.

When I started writing this post, I remembered that I had a photo of Shane making noodles. I quickly went to look for it.


I came across hundreds of photos, all with his bald chemo head. There were so many quick little video snippets, too. (When he was diagnosed, I tried to collect as many videos of him as I could.)

So I’m looking for this noodle-making photo and I could feel the heaviness in my heart. Before I realized it, it was an hour later, and I was down the rabbit hole wallowing in my sorrow. That sadness is truly never very far away. Even when I think I’ve been doing really good for a while, that door of grief cracks open ever so slightly and heartache just spills out all over the place.

So, anyhow, back to the soup.

He died in September of 2020. Up until today, one year and one month later, I have had great mental turmoil about making a pot of soup. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was talking with a friend about it and she said the brain has a strong association between memory, taste, and smell. My stomach would feel queasy every time I thought of making a pot of chicken noodle soup.

All that time I put it off. But this week the weather turned cooler and I thought, “I need to make this soup.” Not so much because I really wanted soup, but because I needed to cross that bridge in mourning.

My heart was heavy as I chopped all the ingredients. I chuckled to myself while chopping up the kale—Shane hated kale pre-diagnosis but was willing to tolerate it afterward. He would always say, “Not a lot of green-anything in that bowl, please, thank you!” And usually after the last of the broth was slurped out of the bowl, there would be a few pieces of soggy kale or spinach in the bottom.

The soup simmered for a couple of hours. The entire time the aroma brought me back to Shane making noodles. He was so thankful that he was able to eat something somewhat healthy. For nearly three months, chicken soup was just about all he was able to eat. Three months. Every. Single. Meal. He ate that soup until he was just unable to force himself to eat anything else. Cancer will do that to you.

As I ladled the soup into my bowl, my heart took a trip back to the year prior and it seems like so many emotions came out of their hiding spots. The soup didn’t taste as good as before, and now it seems, my soup is imprinted with memories that make me sad.

But, the important thing is that I got through this particular first. It’s a big deal to summon up the courage to take these seemingly simple steps. It really is.

I think I’ve come to realize that time doesn’t make anything feel better, but time does afford you the space to think about your loss and the person that they were in this life. That space in turn provides you with a place to heal and to discover meaning in the life and love lost.

All of these firsts can be very painful. At first, you might feel as if you’ll never get over the anguish, but maybe you will also learn that these firsts create a place for you to revisit happier times. You’ll find memories that make you smile again.

Sometimes you might start a new tradition with these firsts.

Maybe every Christmas, you hang an ornament of remembrance on your tree. Maybe you can create a positive ritual around these important firsts. The anniversary week of Shane’s death brings random acts of kindness in his name from his friends and his family.

In your own time, try to make a goal of letting go of the painful memories and holding onto the good, beautiful memories.

On my first post-death wedding anniversary I decided that I don’t care what anyone thinks, I’m still celebrating our anniversary.

I think it also might help to plan out these firsts. If you decide you want to be alone, plan out what you think might feel like a good day for you. If you plan to include others, let people know how they can help.

Give yourself some kudos for getting through this the way you have—whatever that looks like. None of it was easy. Just because you made it through the first year doesn’t mean your grief is going to go away. But your grief WILL evolve into something you can live with.

Be proud of yourself for how far you have come.

If you are interested in Shane’s story, you can read it in the book Bullshit to Butterflies.