Funeral QuestionsMy Wife Died a Week Ago and I've Realised I Don't Actually Have Anyone Nearby
Asked by threadbare_anchor3 ·
My wife Diane died a week ago, forty years married. We moved here for her work back in the nineties and never really moved again. My brother and sister are both gone now, and our two kids are in the UK, one's flying out for the funeral, the other can't get the leave and will call in.
What's actually caught me off guard isn't the grief itself, it's realising I don't have anyone close by to actually lean on day to day. I've got blokes I see at bowls on Tuesdays, but that's about the extent of it. The house is very quiet in the evenings and I keep finding myself with nobody to ring. I've managed the practical side fine so far: funeral director, certificate, all of it. It's the rest of it I don't have a plan for. Is there actually anything to do about this, or do people in my position just get through it alone?
3 Replies
First, you're not describing a failure to cope, you're describing a genuine gap in circumstances, and it's a good thing you're naming it rather than assuming you should just manage. Forty years with someone, then a house that's suddenly quiet, is hard enough with a full support network around you. Without one nearby, it's a different, heavier task, and it's worth treating it as one.
A few concrete things, since you're clearly someone who wants something to actually do rather than just sit with it: GriefLine (griefline.org.au) is free and confidential, and you don't need a big backstory to call: "my wife died last week and I don't have much support nearby" is more than enough to start with. It's also worth seeing your GP soon, not because anything's wrong, but because they can refer you to a grief counsellor, often at reduced cost through a mental health care plan, and that referral is easier to organise now than in a few months when things might feel harder to start. Grief Australia also runs peer support groups, in person and online, specifically for people going through this. Sitting with others who understand the particular weight of it, without having to explain yourself, tends to help in a way phone calls with family overseas can't quite reach. This piece on coping with grief when you have little support nearby goes through this in more detail if it's useful to read rather than just hear.
And don't discount the bowls Tuesdays. It doesn't have to be a deep friendship to help: a standing, regular thing with people who'll notice if you don't show up is worth more than it might feel like right now.
I planned my own parent's funeral essentially alone, for different reasons than yours (mine was estrangement rather than distance), but the practical loneliness of it is the same regardless of why there's no one there. What actually helped me was accepting that a phone call to a helpline counts as real support, not a lesser substitute for family in the room. It felt strange the first time, ringing a stranger about something this big, but it stopped feeling strange within a few minutes of the actual call. Doesn't fix the quiet house in the evening, but it's not nothing either.
Six years on from losing my husband, I can tell you the evenings do eventually stop being the hardest part, though I won't pretend there's a fast route there. What helped me most wasn't one big fix, it was small standing things: a regular call with my sister interstate, a walking group I joined about four months in that had nothing to do with grief at all, just people. It took longer than I expected to feel normal showing up somewhere new without Michael, but it did happen. Your bowls Tuesdays might end up mattering more than they feel like right now. Mine did.
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