#215 Widowhood effect

One week after Janne died, my Apple Watch showed me a message telling me that my nighttime heart rate was higher than the previous week. It suggested that I try to reduce stress in my life.

I have been finding out about the role that stress plays in our health. One of the suggestions given to cope with stress is to identify the cause. It’s simple for me: my heart was just ripped out of my soul.

For widowers, this has a name: the widowhood effect. Christina Frangou, a widow herself, wrote a good summary in the article “The widowhood effect: What it’s like to lose a loved one so young”. She writes: “The widowed are two and a half times more likely to die by suicide in the first year of widowhood than the general population. We are, in fact, more likely to die of many causes: heart attacks, car accidents, cancer, many seemingly random afflictions that are not so random after all. There’s a name for this in the scientific literature: the widowhood effect.” Read the whole article if you can.

There is also a syndrome, the Takotsubo cardiomyopathy that is also called “the broken-heart syndrome”. It shows up after a stressful situation and loss of a loved one is one of the root causes. I have my work cut out for me.

In 2021, when I was diagnosed with diabetes, I was going through a very stressful situation. Even though I had all the risk factors and some were my fault, the final trigger was possibly that stress.

Janne never told me until the very last weeks that she believed that stress was the cause of her cancer. We don’t know objectively if that is true, but she pointed to a particular relative long period where she was coping with something very difficult for her.

Knowing all of this is positive for me. I know I have work to do. I can influence how my life could go in the near future. I want to cope intentionally with stress in my life. I need to be here for Trevor and Daniel.

I’m not too structured about it, but I am following some of the suggestions to reduce stress. Writing these lines is a form of mindfulness. If I reach my limits with the boys, instead of exploding (I do have a temper), I try to breathe and count to 10. Good and strong relationships are also a buffer against stress (this is why we travel as most are abroad).

I will never be free of stress after something as essential as Janne went missing from my life. But I can cope with that stress in the most rational, intentional, actionable way I can. Even that takotsubo syndrome has an optimistic outcome.

I dislike wishful thinking, but if I could have a wish, it is that I would have liked to have known all of this before: Janne could still be here.