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When it comes to what happens after a woman becomes a widow, Deborah van den Hoonaard wrote the book on the subject. The professor, researcher and author will be speaking on the subject at the Downtown Library tonight, but stopped-in at KelownaNow first.
"They're whole lives have changed," said van den Hoonaard, as she described the impact of becoming a widow. But the women of today are in some ways better equipped to handle it than women were 25 years ago. "They are more likely to have been in the labour force, they're more likely to be professionals, they're more likely to be able to drive, they're more likely to have been married before, they're more likely to have lived alone before. "
Apart from grief, van den Hoonaard's work shows that women struggle with identity after the death of a husband. "She used him as kind of a mirror to see who she was," she said. "She says half of me is gone. I feel like my leg is gone."
And while widows try to sort that out, there are often problems in social circles. "Often friends that are couples no longer include them in social events," she said. "And sometimes even avoid them. They don't get calls from them anymore."
As tough as that can be to deal with, van den Hoonaard said she has also observed how resilient women can be if the fact of this kind of thing."It also drives them to find a new group of friends. And often single women find each other," she added.
People often suspect the study of widows would be depressing, noted van den Hoonaard, but she said it's not like that. "Because the women do rebuild their lives, they do rebuild their identities," she said it's actually quite uplifting. "They develop these groups of friends, they learn to manage their relationships with their children, and so when I come away from the study I'm always struck by how creative they are and how strong they are."
Along the way, however, they often find they have to 'keep up appearances" by not appearing to be sad too much. Because women tend to live a bit longer than men, and because men tend to be slightly older than their wives, there is a great likelihood that women who stay married end up as widows. According to van den Hoonaard, six times more likely than men. Her talk gets underway at 6:45 pm at the downtown Kelowna branch of the Okanagan Regional Library.
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