"I just can't imagine," Sarah said, her hand fluttering to her chest like she was having a cardiac event herself. "I mean, losing your husband and raising two kids alone? I would never survive what you've been through."
We were standing by the coffee machine in my old corporate office a few years back, and I'd made the mistake of mentioning that Connor was headed to New Zealand for study abroad. Somehow that led to Mike, which always led to this.
"You'd be surprised what you're capable of," I said, the same response I'd been giving for seven years.
But Sarah wasn't done. She shook her head like I'd just told her I'd survived being struck by lightning while wrestling a bear. "You're just so strong. I don't know how you do it."
I smiled and grabbed my coffee, mumbling something about getting to a meeting. But walking back to my office, I felt that familiar exhaustion settle in my chest. It wasn’t sadness. It was the weight of being misunderstood. I was tired of being either a tragedy or a superhero in the eyes of others who are too overwhelmed by their experience of my experience to actually see me.
This is the problem with how we talk about loss in our culture. You're either a broken victim whose life is essentially over, or you're a superhuman inspiration whose strength defies all logic. Both stories are b******t. Both make it harder for everyone else to face the inevitable losses coming their way. And both leave those of us who have been through loss feeling like aliens trying to explain our planet to confused tourists.
I now spend 20 hours a week working to counteract this narrative — writing this substack and trudging through edits of Do Loss — but sometimes I’m not doing it for everyone else.
Sometimes I just want people to stop looking at me like I have three heads when they find out I’m a widow who doesn’t hate her life.
> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.
In 2021, I heard that the show Sex and the City was making a comeback. The reboot would feature an eerily familiar storyline: lead character Carrie's husband dies suddenly of a heart attack.
I'd never watched the original series. Too much about fancy clothes and endless dating in a city I never lived in.
But a widow trying to figure out her life? I pulled out my credit card and subscribed to HBO.
I needed to see how someone else would tell this story.
Turns out, they got A LOT right. Not the designer shoes or Manhattan real estate — God knows I'll never relate to that. But the messy, contradictory reality of loss? The way grief makes you both more fragile and more fearless? How life doesn't stop, it just becomes different?
There was Carrie, scream-crying in despair one minute, laughing with her friends the next. Getting overwhelmed by people's pity, then strategically mentioning her dead husband to escape uncomfortable conversations. Making new friends who never knew her husband, creating bonds with people who couldn't define her by who she was in the "before times."
For the first time, I saw something close to my actual experience on a screen. The version where widowhood doesn't mean the end of your story, but rather a plot twist that changes your life.
Which made it even more annoying when I read my favorite Financial Times columnist Jo Ellison tearing the show to shreds week after week. Too woke, she wrote. Trying too hard to be relevant.
She wasn’t entirely wrong. Yet, I felt protective of Carrie. Like it was my job to point out to the non-widows of the world just how uncannily she and the show were reflecting what it’s actually like to be us.
I sat down at my laptop and fired off a letter to the editor without a second thought:
The show’s depiction of loss and its aftermath rang deeply true for this mid-50s widow.
I am not a New Yorker with a closet full of designer clothes, but a business executive raising two teenagers in suburban Virginia.
Still, the experiences were mine — ugly funeral homes, awkward conversations, filling some of the hole by meeting new friends, a loss of tolerance for the pettier parts of life, playing the dead husband card, and opening to the mystery of life.
The show may have got many things wrong, but loss, in all of its dimensions, it got right. Couldn’t we all use a common, yet light-hearted viewing experience telling a story with death at its centre? We rarely personalise this inevitable part of life, despite the last two years of the pandemic and millions of people gone. This show starts that conversation.
The editor wrote back within 24 hours. They wanted to publish it.
That letter became the precursor to everything I've written since — The Luminist, the book, all of it. Turns out I'd found my calling defending a fictional widow's right to complexity.
Fast forward to August 2025 and I'm watching the series finale. Carrie, alone in her light-filled brownstone, walks from room to room taking in her carefully chosen art, her stacks of books, her cozy corners. She's just spent Thanksgiving delivering pies to her beloved friends and running interference at pal Miranda’s dysfunctional family gathering. Now she's savoring the quiet aftermath in her own space.
Barry White’s rumbling bass fills her living room as she surveys what she's built. Not what she'd dreamed of or planned, but what she'd created from the pieces that remained.
She picks up a spoon and eats pie straight from the dish.
As the credits rolled, I turned off the TV and walked through my own house — my carefully chosen art, my stacks of books, my view of the trees and stream out back. The life I'd built that Sarah at the coffee machine “couldn't imagine surviving”.
For years I'd been fighting to rewrite the story of loss. Through every Luminist post, every conversation, every time someone looked at me with that mixture of pity and fear. Trying to show the world that devastation doesn't have to mean diminishment. That grief can coexist with joy. That life after loss can be not just survivable but luminous.
And there on my screen was someone else telling that story. Finally, I wasn't the only one making the case that widowed life is complex, but still beautiful.
It’s a different kind of great.
I’ve never needed permission to reimagine my unchosen life into the vibrant collage it is now — international trips, writing retreats, a thick-as-theives bond with my college kids and friends. But damn, it feels good to have my truth reflected back to me on the screen.
To know there is at least one person out there who understands that as a widow, the entire world tells you to ask for less, to take up less space, to protect the world from the pain you’ve felt, and settle for whatever crumbs of happiness happen to fall through the cracks into your basement lair.
Not Carrie, and not me. Our lives may look different because we are widows, but they are not smaller nor duller nor less full of love.
"You are so fabulous!" Charlotte had said to Carrie earlier in the episode.
"Well, that was never in question," Carrie replies without an ounce of apology.
That's me, I thought, watching her twirl in that frilly pink dress. I may be in monochrome athleisure, but I couldn’t have said it better myself.
To fabulous widowhood,
Sue
> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.
