The oncologist told us we had time. Maybe another year. Maddy Gold, well-known Philadelphia artist and long-time design professor at Drexel University and University of the Arts — and my wife of 23 years — was not in hospice. She hadn’t even made a will. For six months, she had gone to Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson Health and endured grueling chemotherapy for three days every other week to fight a rare aggressive stage-4 metastatic cancer with which she had been diagnosed on May 9, 2022.
She died in my arms, in our bed, suddenly at 4 a.m. on Nov. 12 that same year from cardiac arrest. The EMTs worked on her for 45 minutes, but we knew she was already gone. It was just six months after she’d been told without immediate intervention she would be dead in two weeks.
The initial shock was gutting. The EMTs had laid Maddy back in our bed after they were done working on her. And there she lay, me holding her soft, still-warm hand for hours. Her best friend came and bathed her. Prayers were said over her by a local woman rabbi. It was night again before I was able to call the funeral home to have them come for her. Another friend came to the house to be with me — she had lost her wife a decade earlier — and was stunned that Maddy was still there with me and I was still holding her hand.
Nothing prepares you for widow(er)hood. Nothing prepares you for the sundering of a life built around a unit of two — for an inextricable interwoven unit to come undone like a thread pulled on a sweater that unravels the entire garment, leaving only a pile of frayed deconstruction in its place. Maddy and I had first been lovers in high school. We had shared a whole life from adolescence to middle age together. We were supposed to grow old together.
I have replayed the scene of Maddy’s sudden death countless times, trying to imagine a different outcome and a way in which I could have saved her life one last time. I have written dozens of threads on Twitter/X about loss and grief and how we find a path through the harsh realities of widowhood and losing a spouse. Those threads have resonated with my 159,000 followers as the silence around grief in America is crushing to so many who have lost spouses, parents, children or siblings. I know I would have drowned in grief without a few close friends and a couple widows and widowers who helped me navigate the early days.
I know that in telling my own story, I have opened a door for people to share their grief and the response has been overwhelming.
Yet for me, the specific isolation and problems that come with being a queer widow cannot be ignored nor overstated and the queer people who have reached out to me on Twitter/X have only underscored that reality to me. While straight widows spoke of all the people who supported them after their spouses’ deaths — a straight community of family, neighbors and church/synagogue members bringing food and comfort — gay and lesbian widows/widowers had no such support.
What’s more, for gay men, the lack of supportive community was often both a generational issue and one of deeply embedded homophobia. Henry Thompson was one of many widowers to reach out to me on Twitter/X to tell his story of losing his husband of nearly 30 years after they returned from a trip to Costa Rica. His husband Jim Russo’s sudden death from a pulmonary embolism was only part of the tragedy for Henry. He was stunned to discover he would lose his extended family of in-laws as well and also have to fight for his husband’s estate as Jim died without a will.
“I didn’t just lose Jim, my husband and partner in life,” Henry said, “I lost the family that I thought we had together. It was all suddenly gone. Not just him, but all of the people who I’d thought of as my own family for nearly three decades. You cannot fathom the pain it caused me — it was another death for me to grieve when I thought they would hold me up. Instead they just dropped me like I never existed — like Jim and I as a couple never existed.”
Henry said he and Jim’s family were often together — not just for holidays but for casual get-togethers.
“We had spent so much time with his family and they just ignored me after,” Henry said. “I used to talk to my mother-in-law on the phone every week. I would take his nieces and nephew to events. My mother-in-law never even called me after he died. I never heard from her again. I didn’t see the kids again. Not a day goes by that I’m not shocked and hurt by that. I thought I was a second son to her, an uncle to those kids. But apparently I only was part of that family because of Jim.”
Henry said that he has had to go into therapy to deal with the loss of that familial connection, which he said was “devastating.”
He said, “It was eating me up, emotionally. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I kept thinking I must have done something wrong — why else would these people who had known me for decades just abandon me when I needed them most? But once Jim was gone, they saw no reason to continue our relationship. I’m trying to accept it, but I know I will never get over it. And I think Jim would be heartbroken at how they have treated me.”
What Henry and many other lesbian and gay spouses discover when their partner dies is how homophobic the world still is and how little support there is for queer widows and widowers. During the AIDS crisis, stories like Henry’s were the norm. Gay men were often shut out of their partners’ final illnesses — banned from hospital rooms, kept from funerals, erased from obituaries.
That legacy is deeply embedded in the fight for marriage equality. When Edie Windsor’s partner of 42 years, Thea Spyer, died in 2009, Windsor filed a lawsuit to recognize their Canadian marriage and recoup the inheritance taxes she had been forced to pay on Spyer’s estate. In 2013, United States v. Windsor became landmark civil rights legislation. The U.S. Supreme Court held that Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which denied federal recognition of same-sex marriages, was a violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.
In another case, John Arthur, was terminally ill and suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), they wanted the Ohio Registrar to identify the other partner, James Obergefell, as his surviving spouse on his death certificate, based on their marriage in Maryland. Obergefell v. Hodges was the resultant landmark decision of the Supreme Court. Obergefell ruled that the fundamental right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples by both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.
Dr. Jennifer Goldenberg is a practicing therapist and social worker and a senior researcher for the Transcending Trauma Project at Council for Relationships in Philadelphia. Goldenberg does significant work on grief and with LGBTQ+ patients. In an interview with PGN, Goldenberg spoke to the unique losses and isolation faced by widows and widowers.
Goldenberg said, “Gay and lesbian couples deal with discrimination, stigma and micro and macro- aggressions every day. Yet they have each other to come home to, to share the pain and difficulties, as well as the joys and happiness. When a partner dies, the grief can be extraordinary. Not only is the loved one and major support person gone, but the isolation in the wake of the loss can be overwhelming.”
Goldenberg noted that the closet is still an issue, particularly for older couples. “Among gay and lesbian couples, sometimes the relationship is not known, or is not recognized — and not supported and valued — to and by family members and friends. It’s important to recognize some of the differences in the experience of bereavement between heterosexual and gay and lesbian couples — and stigma, invisibility, lack of recognition and honoring of the couple add to the burden of grief.”
But Goldenberg notes that the problems of where one lives can compound this isolation, as it did for Henry, who lives in a suburban community in the South. Goldenberg said, “Many gays and lesbians don’t live in such communities, don’t have access to them, and in addition, won’t seek professional help. The grief of the loss of this partner can be compounded because of previous losses — including loss of family members who have cut off the bereaved, the grief of living with ongoing homophobia, exacerbating the feeling of abandonment.”
Goldenberg spoke to the larger societal issues around homophobia and noted that as a clinical social worker, she’s uniquely aware that there are many forces — cultural, religious and political — that form a barrier to seeking treatment. She said, “Bereaved folks need help with their complicated grief, and can get help finding meaning after the terrible loss, help accessing resources and support, help reconnecting with or making new rituals and traditions that can be a comfort.”
Outreach by and to grieving people is essential, said Goldenberg: “If you see a grieving friend in the gay or lesbian community who is abusing drugs or alcohol, not caring for themselves, isolating themselves, or certainly if they are contemplating suicide, it’s important to help them access a mental health provider at the soonest opportunity. Grief is a process, and its length and intensity differs among individuals. For LGBT folks, grief is often compounded by the societal stigma of being gay, the isolation, the lack of recognition and honoring of the relationship, and prior losses and trauma can reverberate in the present, making it seem unbearable at times.”For mental health help for grief in Philadelphia, Council for Relationships offers a range of therapists, including LGBTQ+ therapists and allies who specialize in LGBTQ+ issues at several locations. A list of therapists is on their website councilforrelationships.org.