A month after Sara Brady's husband died, she ran into a friend at the store. The couples were part of a group that would get together every few weeks. Sara described her friend as saying, "'We need to get the gang back together.' She said it three or four times." At that point, Sara was experiencing anxiety about breaking the news in the middle of the store, but felt she had no choice: "I said, 'I guess I need to share with you, Brady passed away a couple of weeks ago.' And she looked at me and said, 'I know, I just didn't know what to say to you.'"

"I love her, but...that was probably the tipping point [when] I thought, why am I the one that has to make everybody else feel better? Why do I have to figure this out? I can't find any guide that tells me what to expect."

For Sara, that interaction became a catalyst that led to the launch this month of the website New Chapters, a collection of firsthand accounts of surviving spouses.

"I know I have to find a funeral home. I know I have to bury him and all that stuff. [But] the experiences that I had—that I did not know that I would have—after his passing kind of started to pile up and stuck with me because they weren't what I expected or things........

© Psychology Today