110. Lisa Bain: The Wandering Widow

The Death Dialogues Project Podcast

Hi! I’m the real Lisa Bain, the blogger behind The Wandering Widow and author of Heart of a Kingdom.

A few years ago, I was just like everyone else I knew. I was on the corporate career track at a company I loved, caring for my aging parents, and taking life’s adventures one day at a time with my soul mate at my side. I had a plan. I knew where I was going, how long it would take to get there, and had the action items to propel me towards my life goals.

All that came screeching to a halt in 2016, when my husband died of a very aggressive and rare form of cancer, just nine months after my dad died of Advanced Parkinson’s Disease. I couldn’t hold it together and watched in horror as my carefully crafted life imploded. The loss of the two men I loved most in the world ripped off the cover on every other loss I’d buried deep inside, forcing me to face them all. I couldn’t function, and the people in my life didn’t know how to help me.

With THE WANDERING WIDOW I started writing to work through my grief. I had been in corporate sales and marketing. Creative writing had been on my radar but became a saving grace as I tried to figure out who I was in this new widow life. I started my blog The Wandering Widow as a way to express the feelings I couldn’t verbalize amid my raw pain. I always wrote for myself, but the feedback I received from other widows encouraged me to share my blog to a wider audience. I committed to share all the ugly and beautiful bits of my grief journey as a way to both stay on track for my healing and also to help others. We live in a grief phobic society. If my snarky accounts of my story can help shed light on the needs of the grieving, help the bereaved feel less alone, and help family and friends with suggestions on how to help, then I’m in 100%. And a journey it became. I left that corporate job, my home, and my friends and family and set out to travel the world by myself for a year. (That year never ended, in case you were wondering.) By this point, I’d added short stories and angsty poetry to my journaling but never planned to write a book. Traveling alone had its lonely moments, and I often took my laptop to a coffee shop and just wrote what I saw. I didn’t want to be a travel blogger but did want to share the things I learned on my travels as The Wandering Widow. And everywhere I went, I encountered my fellow bereaved. I learned that most countries struggle with providing adequate grief support. I connected with widows and widowers who were desperate to share their stories and say aloud the names of the ones they lost. I’m grateful to now call many of them friends.

While my grief will always be her cornerstone of my writing, I've moved further afield and am now and internationally published poet and working on my second novel.

Find Lisa on social media @thereallisabain and @lisanainwrites and her website www.thereallisabain.com.

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