Healing Grief: Interview with Natalie About the Death of Her Husband

The grief that accompanies the death of someone you love can smash you like a tonne of bricks and take away your ability to remember how to breathe. And regardless of who you are, it is undoubtedly something that you will most likely experience throughout your life.

It can be a challenging path to navigate, and it is important to remember you are not alone. In this ongoing series, we connect with our readers and discuss their experiences with loss, grief and healing. For this issue, I got to hang out with Natalie Lynch, Therapeutic Art Teacher, Talking through the death of her husband. How it shaped her future and her family and contributed to the work she does now.

Kim: Natalie, you lost your husband. I’d love for you to share your experience of what that was like with us.

Natalie: It’s 12 years now since I lost my husband. We’d been together for almost 23 years of marriage and about five years before that as well. It was a happy marriage, and we’d had two children together, so it was absolutely devastating. He was suffering from depression, and about three days before we settled our house and were ready to move, he took his own life. It was quite a whirlwind of grief and busyness because we had to move house and organise a funeral all in the same week. I’d spent one night in our new rental property with my daughter, and my son and my husband were still at the other house. Then the following night he was gone.

Kim: It must have been such a terrible time for you and your family. Are you comfortable to talk about what those initial weeks were like?

Natalie: It’s hard to remember. It was a really incredible time where people just came out of the woodwork to help. My parents were absolutely amazing. There were plenty of times where the kids were traumatized as well, and my parents, even at midnight, they’d get in the car, come over and just support us in any way.

Kim: How did you find having your own experience of losing your husband, and also having to manage being a mum?

Natalie: My kids were 15 and 18, and it was a terrible time. How do you know how much is trauma and grief when you’re struggling with teenagehood as well? The following few years were really hard, and I was in no place to be the best mum in the world either.

Kim: Can you talk to us about what those first steps of getting your life back together looked for you?

Natalie: I think I was lying on the bed listening to the kids yelling at each other, and I just thought, “Nothing’s going to change until I help them get back to some kind of routine”. So I just sort of made my mind up that I just have to get up, I have to make a proper dinner tonight, we have to sit together as a family at the table like we used to do. At some point you’ve just got to make a decision that enough is enough. Another thing I did is I bought a dog. It was just something that I thought would be very good for my kids to have a distraction. So it was only a week after my husband passed away that we went to the RSPCA, and we got a little 10-week-old puppy. I don’t know what the neighbours thought of our house during that time because we were certainly a family in trauma. I didn’t do a very good job during the first few months, but you get through it one day at a time.

At work, it was getting myself back into having some time during the day when I was thinking about work rather than just thinking about all my pains. So I think going back to work really helps you not to just wallow, and get stuck in the sadness.

Kim: Let’s talk about your own personal healing journey. What has that looked like over the years?

Natalie: Grief never leaves you. Even just last night I was watching TV alone and crying my eyes out because it was about a newly married person who lost her husband. So yeah, it still gets me even after 12 years. Luckily I’m an art teacher and I’ve had art in my life all my life. So I just started doing more artwork and I did a lot of it in the first 12 months. I was still struggling with my daughter, so I went to a psychologist. she heard my story and suggested I needed to start something for myself. So I started dancing and I loved it, and I’ve been going ever since. I really think it has been part of my therapeutic journey. It developed into a social life, good exercise, and it’s been a non-negotiable in my life for 11 years now and I’m now one of the instructors in the club.

I met my new partner through dancing as well. It was just a great way to re-engage with being social but in a really safe way. You could turn up alone and leave alone and not feel lonely, so it was wonderful.

Kim: You touched on having a new partner. Are you happy to talk about that and if there was anything that you needed to let go of or accept to step into a new relationship?

Natalie: It was very difficult, and my kids were a bit funny about it. At dancing, you meet a lot of men, and I was very cautious for a very long time. So, I knew my partner for about three years before we got together. It’s a different relationship to the relationship I had with my husband. But it’s lovely to have someone in my life too.

Kim: Would you have any guidance or advice for anyone who is experiencing grief?

Natalie: I think you have got to get busy. Your head is just in this mind spin; it’s just overloaded, and you just can’t turn it off. That’s why I think art is amazing because you can start an art project with a head full of worries, concerns and clutter. But within a few minutes of starting, you can’t help but be consumed by it. So before you know it, you’re being very mindful and giving yourself almost like an emotional rest. That happened in dancing too. I think you’ve just got to start finding what you love and do more of what you love because it is about building a whole new life.

Kim: How has your grief motivated you to show up in your life now?

Natalie: I’ve have since done an art therapy course and now I’ve opened a business where I teach adults art for the therapeutic benefits of it. So I get to spend my life now helping other people realize that art, or having a creative outlet, is so important.

Kim: Do you have anything else that you would love to share with our readers?