{"id":39462,"date":"2023-09-02T00:01:08","date_gmt":"2023-09-02T07:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/barbarafalconernewhall.com\/?p=39462"},"modified":"2026-06-06T06:16:05","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T06:16:05","slug":"widowed-yes-it-does-get-easier-sad-to-say","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/widowed-yes-it-does-get-easier-sad-to-say\/","title":{"rendered":"Widowed: Yes, It Does Get Easier, Sad to Say"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"widowed-yes-it-gets-easier-sad-to-day<\/a>
I’m widowed and, yes, it does get easier, sad to say. Here’s the missing Jon Newhall looking up at me from a beach in Southern California in 1997.\u00a0 Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At a big family gathering in Michigan last month, I sat myself down next to the widow of one of my cousins.<\/p>\n

“Tell me, Barbara,” she said. “Does it get any easier?”<\/p>\n

Her husband had died six months earlier. Mine had been gone two and a half years. So, yes, I had an answer to her question.<\/p>\n

But I didn’t want to share it. I hedged. I obfuscated. I changed the subject.<\/p>\n

I didn’t want to give the bad news to my cousin’s widow, which is — yes, it does get better.<\/p>\n

Widowhood gets easier over time, and that distresses me.<\/p>\n

Widowed — Yes, It Does Get Easier, Sad to Say<\/strong><\/h5>\n

A few weeks ago, in the course of sorting through old family photos before sending them off to be digitized, I came across a photo of Jon. There he was, looking straight at me from a photo I’d taken of him. It was Jon. The real Jon.<\/p>\n

But instead of breaking into noisy tears at the sight of him as had been my wont for the past couple of years, my response on that day was, “Hey. There’s Jon. The good guy I spent fifty years of my life with. That’s my husband there in that photo. That’s Jon.”<\/p>\n

I did not cry at the sight of him — which alarmed me. The loud, desperate tears that had burst forth unbidden nearly every day of my life since Jon died in 2021 had gone missing.<\/p>\n

Those Wild, Intense Tears<\/strong><\/h5>\n

I have not had Jon all these months since his death. But I have had those tears, those wild, intense tears.<\/p>\n

They weren’t Jon, but they kept him close. They bound the missing Jon to me. As long as I cried for Jon, he couldn’t get away. He was still there.<\/p>\n

And now, as grief subsides, I feel my husband slipping away from me. I feel I’m losing him all over again.<\/p>\n

Where is Jon, anyway? Look for him with me at “Breaking News: The Afterlife is ‘Fantastic”<\/a>\u00a0 Also, “My Husband Died and Denial and Distraction Are My Go-To States for Now.”<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"widowed-yes-it-gets-easier-sad-to-say<\/a><\/p>\n

Does life ever get easier for the widowed? Yes, it does, sad to say. For some, the fading of that intense grief feels like yet another loss.\u00a0 Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49116,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,14],"tags":[103,1044,34,454,191,1175,29,2074,214,2454,2419],"class_list":["post-39462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-my-rocky-spiritual-journey","category-widowed","tag-aging","tag-cousins","tag-dont-miss","tag-family","tag-grief","tag-husbands","tag-jon","tag-jon-newhall","tag-michigan","tag-my-husband-died","tag-widowed"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39462"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39462\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49117,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39462\/revisions\/49117"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}