Are you brokenhearted? 

Are you grieving the death of the love of your life?

Have you lost your husband to a blood feud? 

I see you.

“I haven’t had to bury my husband.”

I’m not in your shoes. I fell in my 20s, and my husband and I have been married for 20 years.

I haven’t watched his body waste away in a hospital. 

I haven’t had to bury my husband.

I’ve never woken up to an empty bed or cried myself to sleep because my husband was never coming back.

For those of you who have lost your husband, I don’t know your pain.

I want to cherish those of you in Albania and friends around the world who have lost your spouse. And today, I am sharing a special memory from the first year of MOPS. 

A Morning with Widows in Black

One day during that first year of MOPS in Albania, one of the ladies who had started coming invited me to visit some widows in a suburb of the capital. She had volunteered for years with an organization that provided various services for women who were widowed due to blood feuds. 

“Can you do something?”

In the Northern part of Albania, an ancient code of honor established centuries ago mandates that the closest male relative must avenge a murder by killing a male over 18 from the family who committed the murder. Some blood feuds have continued for hundreds of years. During the 50 years of communism, some blood feuds stopped due to the strong government restrictions. Then, after communism fell, the sons and grandsons picked it up, avenging the murder from 50 years earlier. 

One of our members asked me, “Bona, there are a hundred widows from 19 years old up to 65, can you do something?” 

“YES!” I responded with everything inside me.

I couldn’t do much, but I wanted to do what I could. She asked if we could bring something, so we arranged to have some small gifts.

“Even in their smiles, there was sadness.”

A few weeks later, my cousin Blerta and I were on our way to the town of Kamez for a meeting. I walked into the meeting hall where the women clothed in black were huddled. As I greeted one woman and then another, their eyes spoke of pain and hopelessness. Their lips would curl up into a smile, but even in their smiles, there was pain. 

The burden in my heart as I was with them was for the moms my age. I knew how hard it was to raise young kids with a supportive husband. Not only had they lost their husbands, but many of them were treated harshly by their in-laws. In Albania, a new bride traditionally moves in with her husband’s family. And when these women’s husbands were killed, they continued living with their husband’s families. That day, they told me that they were working hard to survive. 

When it was my turn to speak, I told them about the day Jesus walked on water. “He is with you in the storms of your lives,” I said. I knew this was true. It has been true for me. I knew it was true for these widows even though I had no idea what their storms were like. 

I looked over at my cousin Blerta. She had tears in her eyes. I wondered whether she was touched more by the plight of these widows or by the experience of being a part of the lives of these mothers. 

A Grief Observed 

As I said earlier, I have not grieved the loss of my husband. I would feel fake to act as if I understood this pain, this journey. I have met other women and men who have. I want to share quotes from a book called A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis.

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

“I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they’ll ‘say something about it’ or not. I hate if they do, and if they don’t.”

“I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting.”