The article below is about widowed people, mostly younger women, finding help online, mostly by being able to connect with other people who are in the same boat.
I copied and pasted the body of the article below, but you’ll have to click on the link (the title of the article) to be able to view the statistics chart on the side. It’s a chart that shows the percentage of widowed people within a certain age group. My age group doesn’t even make the chart. That’s because in the 30-34 age group, only 0.6% of us are widowed. 0.6% How in the world did I ever get so lucky? (enter dripping sarcasm here) The truth just sucks. Looking at the odds, I had a better chance of winning the lottery than I did of losing my husband. I hate to say it, and I know we’re not supposed to ask, but I have to know - WHY ME?!?! WHY CHRIS?!?! WHY SHANE?!?! What in the world did we ever do to deserve such crappy luck. 0.6%
The young and widowed find solace, one another, online
SAN DIEGO — Dana Jackson has gotten three tattoos to honor her husband’s memory.
One, of magnolias, is on her left foot and wraps around her ankle. Another, of a lily, is on her rightarm. Surrounding the flower, the tattoo says “It’s a beautiful ride,” taken from a country song. The third is on her back. In Japanese symbols, it says Dana and Joe, husband and wife.
The union lasted four years, until 2008, when Joe — just shy of 29 and with three tattoos — died in a motorcycle accident. She had just turned 31.
“I could have done worse things than get tattoos,” says Jackson, 33, of Everett, Wash. “I feel the tattoos were a way of expressing myself through this and in honor of him also.”
Jackson, a research lab manager at a cancer center, also started distance running since her husband’s death. She says it clears her mind and helped her “get out of the house.” On Sunday, she ran in the Widow Dash 5K in San Diego, as part of a national weekend gathering of widows and widowers called Camp Widow.
“People still are shocked when I say I am a widow because they envision a widow as being an 80-year-old grandma,” she says.
Census data show that almost three-quarters of women ages 85 and older are widows; 53% of women ages 75 to 84 are.
“Widowhood isn’t a very major issue below age 50,” says Samuel Preston, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. “It just doesn’t move the percentages.”
Social networking brings them together
The most recent Census data from 2009 show just 1.1% of women ages 35 to 39 are widows. Among those 30-34, it’s 0.6%.
Deborah Carr, a social demographer at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., has studied widowhood since 1998. She says about 1 million people are widowed each year in the USA; nearly 75% are 65 or older. Life expectancy for women is longer than for men, so women are much more likely to outlive their spouses.
Our image of widows has changed in some ways, but not in others, she says. “It used to be an older woman dressed in black who would never get on with her life. Today, older women … are getting back into dating, going online and joining activities. They’re finding their life isn’t ending after the death of their spouse, but might take a new direction.”
Although most widows and widowers are older, everyone knows stories about circumstances that have transformed those under 65 from husbands and wives one day to widowers and widows the next. They were changed by illnesses and accidents, heart attacks, suicides and deaths from 9/11 terrorism and from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Even if these younger widowed are a small population, they are not living the stereotype of a widow. Though saddened by their losses, they are offering each other support — both in person and online — that they haven’t been able to find in groups aimed at the older widowed.
“Grief spawns a huge amount of activism,” says social-media consultant Robin Moore of Silver Spring, Md.
Moore, 43, was widowed in 2006 when her husband died of kidney cancer. She blogs as Fresh Widow and says there are at least 120 other blogs by the widowed. “Before social media, the population of young widows was so widely dispersed. They couldn’t find each other at all,” she says.
“We would not be here today without the Internet,” says Michele Neff Hernandez, 40, who spoke to those attending Camp Widow about Facebook groups and other online communities for those who have lost a spouse or partner.
‘It gave me so much comfort’
She created Camp Widow, sponsored by a national support network she started after she became a widow in 2005. Her 39-year-old husband was hit by a large SUV while riding his bicycle.
“When he died, I was 35 and the only people I knew who were widowed were my great-aunt and my grandfather,” she says. “I didn’t have any framework for what did a widow of 35 looked like.”
Taryn Davis of Buda, Texas, founded a non-profit after her husband, Michael, was killed in Baghdad in 2007 at age 22. Her group, the American Widow Project, offers support for military widows.
“Before Mike was killed, my perception of a widow was an 80-year-old woman in a rocking chair wearing black and with knitting needles,” says Davis, 24. “Then I sat up in my bed and saw me.”
Although Davis was the youngest at Camp Widow, the widows and widowers there gained strength from each other.
“It gave me so much comfort to see that this is the face of a modern widow,” Jackson says. “We’re all so young.”
**On a side note, I’ll be sharing an article about Camp Widow later this week. Michelle Neff Hernandez has done AMAZING things for the young widowed population. The Camp Widow weekend in San Diego was the same weekend we were on the Cape. I honestly think I would’ve considered going otherwise. I think it would’ve been great to have been surrounded by 200 other people who were are JUST LIKE ME. Obviously, at 0.6%, that’s not something that’s easy for me to find. More on all that to come**
