“Your husband has expired”. These chilling words have stayed with Charlotte Tucker since one shocking morning ten years ago when she found her husband, Dewey, cold and unresponsive in their bedroom, leaving her a sudden widow at age 28.
Charlotte and Dewey met when she was 18. After years of friendship and long-distance dating through college, they got married, bought a house, and were working on having a baby.
Their hopes and dreams and plans came to a screeching halt that cold January day when Charlotte’s life partner did not wake up. One morning, at the tail end of a rough bought with the flu, Charlotte went into their bedroom to wake her husband. When he did not answer her, she reached for him. His skin felt cold and panic flooded her body. Rolling him onto the floor, Charlotte dialed 911 and began CPR on her 29-year-old husband. “It is an odd exhale that comes from someone who is not breathing,” she remembers. Charlotte screamed “you can’t leave me!” again and again while compressing his chest with her desperate hands, hoping he would breathe.
Charlotte says from the moment she touched him that morning, “I felt insane. I couldn’t stand and I was wailing… it was desperate cry and I thought just wake me up, please.. this cannot be real.” Somehow, in the numbed daze of the weeks that followed, their friends and family came to gather around her and help however they could. Mostly what Charlotte felt in those early months of widowhood was fear. She had never lived alone and suddenly faced so many things to manage all on her own.
Then there was the unexpected visit by a woman from the first time homebuyers’ program they’d worked with to purchase their house. She wanted to know how Charlotte planned to make the mortgage payments now that her husband was gone. The homeowners program strictly prohibited renting so Charlotte was not able to get roommates to share the expense. Her income as a case manager with homeless youth was not enough so Charlotte sought more and more jobs. She spent the next year working 5 jobs just to keep the house.
“I worked graveyard at shelter and all these other jobs in the day. I don’t even know when I slept… maybe in the truck between jobs,” recalls Charlotte. After Dewey died, their dog, Biscuit, did not want to be alone either so Charlotte took him with her as she drove the street outreach van, staffed the overnight youth shelter, and taught CPR classes. “The dog was a comforter. He was my husband’s dog…. he was the part of him that I continued to have,” Charlotte explains.
Six months after Dewey’s death, at the insistence of caring friends, Charlotte went to a grief counselor who referred her to a support group for widows. Attending the group left her feeling even more alone and out of place as she listened to the other women, all at least 20 year older, relating their shared experiences of managing husbands’ meds and illnesses, experiences that did not resonate with Charlotte’s sudden loss of her young husband.
She continued to work constantly to make ends meet. “That first year was just crisis mode and I thought I can’t let it go into foreclosure. I was so worried I would owe something or it would affect my credit. I told myself to just get through this. I was so worn out,” Charlotte recalls. At the end of that blurry year, Charlotte was given the option of leaving the homebuyers’ program and she took it. Exhausted, she rented an apartment and gave up the home she and Dewey loved. Unable to find a landlord who would allow her giant mastiff to live with her, she was forced to separate from Biscuit.
The next year, Charlotte made friends with Isaiah, a man her age who was grieving the loss of his grandmother. She found herself able to talk with him a bit, for the first time since Dewey died, about losing her partner. Isaiah, a gay man, invited her to go dancing with him at a neighborhood club. Charlotte calls this the beginning of her “therapy” and remembers that she “just started dancing and found this open and welcoming community,” When straight men would approach her, Charlotte describes feeling “repulsed” because in her mind, she was still married. But, within the gay community, she was able to form the first comfortable relationships with men she would experience after the death of her husband. Charlotte describes this process as “very healing”.
During that year, ironically, she met a straight widower who was similarly finding healing with his lesbian friends through weekly dancing at the club. They made a connection and “had an understanding that we were just looking for someone to be with but that we wouldn’t be emotionally available to each other andt we’d both found this wonderful outlet. We both found someone who wouldn’t expect much from us. It was important that I try to be close to someone but I wasn’t ready for another life partner. I was ready to have someone to hug and to hold. It was nice that we could give that to each other,” says Charlotte.
In the years that followed, Charlotte completed a master’s degree in Social Work, lost 100 pounds, became a long distance bicyclist, grew deeper in her spirituality and is no longer afraid to be alone. She now runs a well-known program for homeless youth in Seattle called to 45th Street Youth Clinic http://neighborcare.org
She recently moved into a new apartment and, for the first time, “made a conscious choice to not have a photo of him up…I have this box full of pictures and used to have a shrine in a dream catcher.. I put most of that away. It felt a little like one more step further.. I still check ‘Mrs.’ on forms.” Charlotte says she is “always hesitant to say anything about my spouse dying or being a widow…It’s something people wouldn’t guess about me. I hate making people feel uncomfortable. People don’t know what to say… they say ’at least you didn’t have kids’” and they say “‘too bad you didn’t have kids'.”
She wonders what Dewey would think about the people she dates and the life she is living. “I still compare every person I am with to him,” she admits. “I‘ll still talk to him sometimes. I’ll say, ‘I just can’t believe that you’re not here.’ Especially when something really good happens."
Now, a ten year veteran of widowhood, Charlotte says the passing of decade since his death makes her “think about what could have happened if he didn’t die and all the things I would have missed out on if he hadn’t died. His spirit is still with me.”
Thank you Charlotte, for sharing your Story with us!
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