Grief 08: Widowed & Single Motherhood—An Interview with Lisa Appelo Transcript

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

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Laura: Hey, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Risen Motherhood. I'm Laura, and my sister-in-law, Emily, will be joining me in a moment. If you're just joining us, we're in the middle of a series on grief at Risen Motherhood, where we're exploring various sorrows and hardships that moms experience. Today, we'll be discussing the topic of widowhood and single motherhood with Lisa Appelo.

Lisa is a single mom to seven and, today, you're going to hear her story of losing her husband and how she processed through the grief and the realities that came with being a single mom. Lisa is the author of Life Can Be Good Again: Putting Your World Back Together After It All Falls Apart. She writes at lisaappelo.com and founded a team of writers at hopeingrief.com and serves on the executive team for COMPEL with Proverbs 31 Ministries. You could find Lisa at lisaappelo.com and on Instagram @lisaappelo.

Well, hi, Lisa. Welcome to Risen Motherhood.

Lisa Appelo: Hey, thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here.

Laura: Absolutely. We love having you here. Can you give us just a quick overview of who you are in case anyone is maybe not familiar with your work? Just tell us a little bit about what your days look like and what work you're up to right now.

Lisa: Well, I am a single mom of seven. However, I will say that five are launched, so days look a little different now than they did even five years ago. Once they start a little fledging the nest—the older five were pretty close together, so they left the nest pretty early together. I have seven kids. Five are launched, and two are at home. I homeschooled the younger two. I'm a writer, speaker, and I love to meet with women over coffee in ministry—even in online groups—who are broken over circumstances.

Emily Jensen: Well, thanks for coming on today to share a little bit of your story because, as you mentioned, you are a single mom. We know that that comes with a whole backstory. Would you be willing to share that with us? What were the events leading up to that? How did you lose your husband? I know that that would be helpful for our listeners to hear.

Lisa: Well, that part of my story started ten years ago, which sounds like a long time when I say that, and yet grief is weird. It warps time, and it can seem both a long time—like a lot of life has happened—and like I could go back there in a minute with all the details that are just frozen in time. I woke up on a Friday morning. It was still dark out, and I wasn't even awake enough to perceive everything, but I had woken up to my husband's funny breathing on the pillow next to mine.

I just instinctively reached out my hand and nudged him and said, "Hon, it's just a nightmare." I thought that he would turn over and that we'd go back to sleep and wake up to his alarm in a couple of hours. He didn't stop that breathing. He didn't turn over. As I woke up fully, I jumped out of bed. I flipped on the overhead light, and I could see immediately that something was very wrong.

He was non-responsive, and so I just went into crisis mode. Honestly, this had come from nowhere. He was not sick that we knew of. There was no sign, no symptoms, no warning that anything was going on. This just landed in the middle of an ordinary Friday morning for us. My older kids—they were all actually sleeping on sleeping bags outside of our room. Our air conditioner upstairs had broken—just these details.

And so, they were all right there. They heard me crying out. They came rushing in. Our four-year-old had crawled in between the two of us as she did every night for years. She would leave her bed and come down. I just went into crisis management mode saying, "Rachel, take the little ones upstairs. Seth, go down and get our fireman neighbor. Nick, call 911." The operator began walking me through CPR.

I got through almost two rounds and the paramedics came, so I felt like they were there quickly. I thought, "Okay, he is in good hands," and they shushed me out of the room. I was pacing the floor. Kids were upstairs at this point, and I'm just pacing that dark living room audibly crying out to God, saying, "God, have mercy on us. God have mercy on our family." They took Dan by ambulance to the hospital room. I was going to follow. I went upstairs to go see my kids before I left. I will never forget walking into the boys' bedroom where they were all on the floor huddled together, crying, holding each other.

I wanted to say, "It's going to be okay." As those words formed on my tongue, I realized I can't promise them that. I did the only thing I could. I knelt with them. I prayed with them, and I said, "I will be back. I will be back," and went to the hospital. When I got there, it was not long before I was called back. A very kind ER doctor told me that they had worked on Dan for over two hours, and they had never been able to revive him. That was it. One night's sleep, life just shattered in every way possible—and not just for me. I felt like, "I'm a big girl. I've had a lot of life with him," but for my kids, I couldn't fix it.

Laura: Wow, thank you so much for being willing to share that story with us and just letting us have a peek into what that must have been like for you. Can you share with us a little bit about what the following days looked like, especially for any mom who has gone through grief? What does it look like to learn to grieve your husband, your child's father, and to live as a single mother? I know there are so many layers, so we can start to chip through some of the different areas because it's impossible to encompass on one podcast episode, but I'll let you pick where we might start for that.

Lisa: It is complex. For that reason, it won't look the same in any household. We all bring our own experience and even the relationship, the family dynamics, and that affects how we grieve. Even, I think, our own tendencies, our own personalities can affect how grief shows up for us. I know, for me, after the funeral, after everybody went back to their lives, and the house quieted, my kids were all sitting around the living room on chairs and cushions on the floor. I just said, "We're going to need a lot of grace with each other."

That's really all I knew about grief. I was so grief-naive. Honestly, I just continued. I was desperate for the Lord. I don't think that we have to know a lot about it. We just need to keep going to the Lord. I was doing what I later found out was lament, which is taking our very hard questions and our very raw emotions to God. We don't have to fake that we're fine. We don't have to act like everything's okay or put on a smile like, "I'm a believer. I should be happy he's in heaven and rejoicing."

Listen, that does not take away the very real pain of loss. I think one of the things that I know anchored me and then, in turn, I was able to anchor my family, is taking those emotions to God. 

The other thing that we can talk about is that grief looks different for our children than it looks for an adult. An adult will hold that grief and move through it, whereas kids go in and out of that. It looks sometimes like they're not grieving. I think it's under there.

It's just that they can look like a normal kid playing with the other kids in the neighborhood. Then, for my six-year-old at night on his pillow, we were saying prayers. That's when the tears would come. That's when the hard questions would come. For my four-year-old, she was trying to wrap her mind around the permanency—what death meant—and the permanency of loss of her dad. Every day for over a year, just randomly in her car seat, she would say, "I miss Daddy. I miss Daddy."

I would say, "I know, baby." I'd have to turn off the music and reach back and hold her hand. We would have the same conversation every day for over a year. I had to coach myself, "Lisa, do not ever get frustrated with this. She is trying to understand this." 

Teens are a little bit different. They want life to look like normal. They don't want to be that kid whose dad, whatever—on the sports field, at church. Making our home a safe place where they can ask questions and cry the tears is huge.

Emily: You were mentioning the complexity of it in the way that was affecting your relationship with God in the midst of that and how you were lamenting. Were there specific doubts or questions that you were wrestling through with the Lord after this happened? Were there some specific truths in the gospel that gave you hope that you clung to in the midst of that?

Lisa: I think anytime life shakes us like this, we're going to have questions. Because it's one thing to sing on Sundays about God's faithfulness. It's one thing to teach our kids to read the Bible and memorize Scripture, and then when life falls apart, to be walking that out. One of the questions for me—and I don't think that's a bad thing. I don't think it's a bad thing to have those questions because God—we're okay bringing those questions to him.

If you look at the Psalms, we see David, we see the minor prophets bringing these questions like, "God, how long?" or "Why are you letting this suffering happen?" They're asking these questions, and we are safe to bring those questions to God. We may not get an answer. We probably won't get an answer, right? Honestly, I don't think we would agree with the answer or understand it if he even tried to answer our hard questions.

One of the questions for me was about God's goodness because I never doubted God. I never doubted that he was God or that he was in control. I had memorized with my kids Psalm 139. That verse—I think it's Psalm 139:16 that says, "All the days were written for me" or "were recorded in your book before one of them came to be." That just came back to me. That Scripture that I had memorized that I thought was "for my kids"—I'm using air quotes—came back to me and held me in.

I cannot tell you how it anchored me all through this. I had already wrestled through that God is the author and the finisher of life—that he authors our days and that if he wanted Dan to live longer, he could have made that happen. If he wanted to revive him, he could have made that happen. But one of the questions I wrestled with was God's goodness. Because if you had asked me, "Is God good?" I would've said, "Yes, absolutely. I believe that theologically."

The question was not "Is he good?" but "Is he good to me in this?" Because life felt really bad, and I had to basically go on a hunt for God's goodness. I was desperate to see it. I just opened a journal. This was not early in my grief. This was not some altruistic—like, "Let me just use this for my own good and growth." I was desperate to see God's goodness and to know that his goodness was still for me.

I would open up my journal every morning, and I would number one through seven. I would think back over the day before, and I would find seven things. Sometimes very small, sometimes very ordinary. Things that I would've rushed past. Sometimes they were huge things. That practice changed me in so many ways. It showed me that God's hand was on us, around us, working in us, and it helped me connect the dots of what he was doing for us.

Laura: Wow, that's so powerful for you to just take time and to write down these ways that God is good to you. I know that it can be so hard to find those things. But when we stop and pause and take a moment to do that, it is a wonder that, even in our deepest griefs, we can find so many things—ways that God has been kind to us. I love that. For any mom going through any type of grief, that is probably an incredibly helpful practice.

I want to talk a little bit more about some of those ways that the grief did impact you as a mom specifically, especially physically and mentally. Are there any things in there that you would encourage a mom who is going through this to look for or to perhaps consider that it might happen or to expect? Again, I know the roadmap is varied and wide, but we'd just love if you could shed any light on that.

Lisa: Grief consumes so much time and space for us mentally, physically, emotionally, and even spiritually. I think for that single mom or the grieving mom who is exhausted, there is a reason why. There is a reason why you are physically and mentally and emotionally exhausted because so much goes into processing loss and to trying to wrap our mind around this sudden shift—even if it's not been sudden, even if you've been a caregiver for somebody or there's been a long illness—to wrap our mind around this change and the way life is now.

I would say, first of all, to understand that exhaustion is—every mom is going to deal with that, but you're going to deal with it on a whole new level. Because of that, I think it's so wise—I wish that I would've coached my own heart like this back in those early days. It's okay to say no to things you used to say yes to. It's okay to say, "No, I can't volunteer for that school thing," or "I can't help with that thing that I have always helped with," or "I can't make dinners and homemade bread like I used to. We're going to eat on paper plates tonight or for the next month and a half."

You have to do these things because your mind and your emotions and your—physically, you're processing so much loss—and so to give yourself that grace and to give yourself that margin and space to navigate that. Then the second thing—and this is huge—is that there are no shortcuts in grief. I remember saying to a friend of mine, "I just want to be ten years down the road because I know God will be faithful, but it's excruciating to walk this." She said to me so wisely, "But you will not be who God wants you to be unless you walk this out."

And so, knowing that we can't mask this pain, we can't escape it, we can't go to Disney World to make it go away or shop it away or do anything else to make it go. We have to walk through it. That is painful because the ache and the loneliness and the regret and sometimes the anger—all of those emotions that come with loss, we have to process them. Those emotions are not bad. We hear them like they're negative emotions. They're not signs that we're grieving wrong. They're signs of circumstances gone wrong. It's what we do with those emotions. What we do is we take them to God and we just say, "Look, I am hurting. Are you here with me? I do not understand, but I trust you."

Emily: You were mentioning there, Lisa, about pain and just how the pain has to be gone through in grief. We know that anytime there is a grief that is connected to a specific moment in time, that can be re-experienced over and over and over again as that date reoccurs—or I heard you talk about and write about before things like holidays that come up and how that impacts. Can you walk us through what it’s looked like for you to handle those difficult dates or milestones?

Lisa: Yes, some of the triggers we can't anticipate. I remember being in the grocery store early and passing the bottled water aisle—this one that I always got for him. Just my heart sank because I loved splurging on our grocery budget and getting that and bringing that home for him and knowing that it was just a little splurge for him. The grocery clerk saying, "Did you find everything?" and me thinking, "My heart broke all over again on aisle ten."

We can bump into those triggers all throughout the day, but the milestone days are huge. The date of death, the date of anniversaries, birthdays, holidays—those are all hard. If we can anticipate that they are going to be hard days, that goes a long way toward helping us navigate them because, again, we can't just go to bed for twenty-four hours and wake up and it's all done. This is going to be very personal.

Everybody is going to find a way to work through that day. For some people, they want to do a very special remembrance. They want to let off balloons or go to the grave site or do acts of kindness in honor of that person. Some people just want to tuck in and  have time to think and remember and cry. Crying is so healing, and our tears have been given to us as a gift from God to cry through it. And that is okay.

I think one thing, too, to be aware of is: sometimes we make it through like, "Okay, I made it through Christmas," or "I made it through Thanksgiving." His seat was empty at the table, or we made it through this anniversary, and then we fall into this pit of grief afterward. Sometimes leading up to it—it’s that whole adrenaline, and we're ready for it, and we're bracing for it, we've prepared for it, and then we get side-smacked by falling into it afterward. It's that whole post-holiday, post-day hard. Again, part of the comfort in grief comes in knowing that what we're walking through is okay and normal, because we can think, "I should be doing better. I shouldn't be feeling like this." And so, just to know, "It's okay. A lot of people experience this. It's normal." And this is huge: "It won't always feel like this."

Laura: Yes, I would imagine that many of those milestone dates are also really hard for your children. I can't imagine what it must be like to be a mom who is processing and dealing with your own grief of your husband and your partner and then to also have to walk your children through that. Can you give us just a little bit of insight on ways that you found to be helpful as you processed your own grief and then also came alongside your children? I know you shared a little bit about the beginning, but I'd love if you could expand from the perspective of a mom and how you really help your children cling to truths of the gospel.

Lisa: One of the big things we did early on was we read books together. For my little ones, we read picture books on heaven because they had a lot of questions on heaven. For my big ones, I pulled out this big tome on heaven, and we went through "What is heaven like? What does Scripture say about heaven?" I read a lot of fiction books about families who had lost a father. I don't think my kids realized I was doing it, but I was very much showing them these patterns of these families.

One was Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. That's an old book. The father is deceased in that book and that family goes through all these hard times, and they still flourish as a family. It was very important for me to have that—to create that conversation. Another book we read together was Hinds' Feet on High Places, which is a beautiful allegory of suffering and joy. There's a children's version—illustrative version that is just beautiful.

We read two pages a day, and then we'd close it, and that was our devotion. We would talk about it. When hitting the milestones, it looked different over the years as my kids have grown and our grief has even softened. One of the things I did was—so my husband actually died on Father's Day weekend. Father's Day weekend is not just hard because my kids are missing their dad, but it's also the anniversary of his death.

I found early on that we just wouldn't go to church that day. Sometimes we would go to the service but not to Sunday school because the kids were all making crafts for their dads. The first year, they were having to put their grandfather's name or an uncle's name. It was too hard for them to have to walk through that. One of the best things that we did—and this came for Christmas for us—was we started a new tradition called "Days of Joy" because Christmas was so hard, and I desperately again wanted joy.

It was not something big and organized. It was really kind of organic. I said, "Every day, this month of December, we're going to see who can we bless? Who can we give something to? How can we bless somebody else?" Every day, we would look for a way. That might look like a cooler of drinks on our front porch for the delivery guys. It might look like donating coats for the coat closet at church.

It might look like a Salvation Army toy at Chick-fil-A. Every day—it might be buying dinner for somebody in the line in back of us at the fast-food place. Every day, we would just look for one way to give somebody else joy. What I found was that joy is contagious. You cannot make somebody else smile without feeling that yourself. That was a sweet practice that we still do. It wasn't like a big organized list of things. Just—let's look for somebody to give joy to today.

Emily: That's so encouraging to hear how you and your family are also taking the comfort that you've received from the Lord and the joy that you have in Christ and then comforting others and giving that joy to others. It's just amazing how those two things can be held together: the deep grief and yet the very true and real joy. Lisa, before we close here, what final encouragement would you give to a mom who might be listening that is a single mother or widowed? What encouragement would you share with her?

Lisa: Somewhere in the second year of my loss, I was in my minivan. I say—some people have a prayer closet. I have a minivan where I get alone every day with the Lord. I was in that minivan, and it's where I can just be authentic with the Lord. I can cry. I can journal. I can just pray, read Scripture. On this particular day, I was like, "I don't like my life. This is not what I ordered." On the heels of that very real thought came this: that while I did not expect this, God knew that this was coming and had allowed it.

As such, it was not a Plan B. God does not give us Plan B. I think, for so long, I had thought, "I will just do the best with the leftovers of the life I wanted. I will just make the most of this second-best life for my children." Really, the thought came that God does not give us the leftovers—that he had ordained this and allowed this. As such, there was, by definition, as much joy and good and abundance this side of loss as there was all the days before.

I didn't immediately feel better. It wasn't like I immediately was like, "Oh, well then, I'm all better now," but it realigned my heart and my mind to the truth. And so, as I grieved and as I processed, I could lean on the truth that God does not give us Plan B—that he gives us a very intentional, purposeful Chapter 2. That is actually my encouragement: that you will not forever live out the leftovers of the life you wanted.