Becky Aikman’s 'Saturday Night Widows' Chronicles Life After Loss

We talked a lot about this in our group: Is a slow loss better or worse than a sudden one? Well, they're both lousy, but in different ways. The sudden loss is very traumatic; the longer loss puts you through the agony of watching someone you love suffer. I wouldn't choose either one.

Q: You note that initially the widows "had practically nothing in common. The youngest was 39, the oldest 57. One was a blunt, scary-successful lawyer, one a chatty homemaker, and every post-feminist option in between." How did you meet them?

A: I didn't know a lot of other young widows — we're rare — so I had to actively search them out. One person I approached was a real estate agent, because I knew they meet a lot of people going through transitions. I also sought out a travel agent who arranges trips for solo women, because I figured she would come in contact with a lot of widows. But overall it was totally random and unscientific.

Becky Aikman's book has received lots of praise and press.

Q: You did do a lot of hard-science reporting for the book — enough to feel confident dismissing what you call "the five bogus stages of grief."

A: The "five stages of grief" were never intended to be about grief, but about dying. More recent studies show that grief comes in waves: intense at first, then you alternate between feeling normal and feeling sad, and gradually over time the waves become less pronounced. I visited the Loss, Trauma and Emotion Lab at Columbia University, and discovered that the true grieving process looks nothing like the long-term, debilitating sadness many people seem to expect. That's why I based the Saturday Night Widows on the idea that getting out into the world with friends who have a sense of humor is helpful. Getting back to normality is helpful. New experiences help, too.

Q: If we have no community in which to grieve, are we grieving alone?

A: Americans are spending more and more time with immediate family, which makes it harder on us when we lose a member of that family. We don't have the broad ties we had in the past. Everyone in my social circle was married, for example, and suddenly I was the odd person out. I wasn't socially active while my husband was sick. [After he died] I felt I had to get out there and forge an entirely new community of people I could have companionship with. It was hard work.

Q: Your strategy was that "together we might find a way to triumph over loss."

A: From the moment I was on my own again, I craved role models for how to live a solo life, so having this group of women [to learn from] was fantastic: We could talk about how we were [each] approaching things, and I could draw from [the] others' approaches to dating again or finding a new place to live.

Q: So you're thinking of franchising "Saturday Night Widows"?

A: [Laughs] Could be! The women in our group were extremely eager to form this kind of connection, [because] it's hard to find other people [in similar straits]. They were relieved I found them! People [at readings] ask me, "How can I find a group like yours?" They crave the connection. You can go to a standard bereavement group, sure — but in my experience that was not helpful.

Q: In 2008, you married again — to Bob Spitz, who happened to be a widower himself. And you describe feeling "scandalously free" about your newfound sexuality: "Having lived through the worst, we found it was hard to take mere inhibitions and insecurities seriously." That's something you don't find in too many grief memoirs.

A: Well, widowhood did remind me of a second adolescence! It's scary to have sex with someone new after being with the same person for so many years. On the other hand, I think we're more confident, and more comfortable with ourselves, than we were as teens. Bob and I were able to just "go for it." We didn't get too hung up on the details.

Allan Fallow is the book editor for AARP Media.