Going It Alone

John and Maxine Cail had been happily married for 53 years when Maxine died after a stroke earlier this year. "Her death wasn't a surprise, and I handled everything right after the funeral with ease," says John, 74, a retired health-care worker in Nashville, Tenn. But five weeks later, he woke up one morning and began to sob. "My world had caved in, and I wanted to die," he says.  As the tears flowed, he wondered how he could go on without his best friend and the love of his life.

It is almost always an anguishing experience to lose a spouse, and it would seem even harder to lose a partner after you have shared a particularly close and successful marriage. So it may come as a surprise to learn that while the initial grief can be profound, people who have had happy relationships often find it easier to go on with the rest of their life once they have mourned their mate. At least those are the findings reported in Spousal Bereavement in Late Life, a book based on a longitudinal study of 1,500 older married couples. "We found that almost half the people who reported satisfying marriages grieved--sometimes devastatingly--immediately after the loss but by six months later had few major symptoms of grief," says Deborah Carr, a researcher at Rutgers University and a co-editor of the book.

Experts agree that a major contributor to resiliency during grief is the same strong interpersonal skills used to build a successful relationship in the first place. Unlike survivors of conflicted relationships, who may experience relief on the death of their spouse but find themselves mired in guilt and regret about what might have been, researchers say, widows and widowers often find it easier to move on from a happy relationship because they feel as though they and their partner had fulfilled their dreams and goals.

Grief, of course, varies from individual to individual, but "in good relationships, couples tend to talk about their lives together, their hopes for each other, even end-of-life issues," says Paul Metzler, director of public education and community bereavement services for Hospice of Visiting Nurse Service of New York. "There's little left unsaid, so there's no confusion about what someone would have wanted or hoped for the surviving spouse." Also, it's often easier for widows and widowers with good social skills to seek and accept help from friends, work or church colleagues, adult kids or even a professional therapist--a critical component as the bereaved moves from grief to a new identity as a single person.

Patty Limerick, 55, director of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado in Boulder, found solace in friends who surrounded her in the small hospital room the night her husband Jeff died suddenly of a stroke in 2005 and who stayed by her side in the weeks and months afterward. But she found she still needed time alone to grieve not only the death of her husband but also the end of their happy 26-year marriage. "For almost two months, I lay on the floor at night sobbing while listening to Marty Robbins sing At the End of a Long Lonely Day," she says, referring to the song played at Jeff's funeral. But as the weeks went by, the tears subsided. "It was gradual," she says, "but at some point, I realized I was listening to the song without crying."