Episode 2: Learning to Carry the Weight Alone
The morning after I made that prayer, nothing had changed. The bills were still waiting. The children still needed to be fed. My husband was still gone.
For weeks, I kept expecting life to pause long enough for me to catch my breath. Instead, it moved forward without asking whether I was ready. Every morning, I woke the children for school, packed their lunches, helped the youngest tie his shoelaces and watched them walk to the gate. The moment they disappeared from sight, the smile I had worn for them disappeared too.
Grief is strange. It doesn’t announce itself. Sometimes it hides quietly while you’re washing clothes or sweeping the compound. Then, without warning, something as simple as seeing your husband’s favourite cup on the kitchen shelf can reduce you to tears.
One Saturday, I found one of his shirts hanging behind the bedroom door. I had forgotten it was there. I picked it up and held it against my face. It still carried the faint scent of his aftershave. I sat on the edge of the bed and cried until my chest hurt. When I finally folded it and placed it inside the wardrobe, I realized something painful. The smell would disappear one day. And with it, another small piece of him.
A month later, I started looking for work. Before I got married, I had worked briefly as an administrative assistant. After our first child was born, we agreed that I would stay home for a while. One year became five. Five became ten. Before I knew it, I had spent most of my adult life raising children and supporting my husband’s career.
Now I was forty-one years old with a long gap in my employment history. Every interview seemed to end the same way.
“We’ll get back to you.” They rarely did. Some employers wanted younger applicants. Others wanted recent experience. Each rejection chipped away at my confidence. There were evenings I returned home so discouraged that I locked myself in the bathroom for a few minutes before greeting the children. I refused to let them see how frightened I was.
Money was disappearing faster than I expected. I stopped buying things that weren’t absolutely necessary. The children noticed.
“Mummy,” my daughter said one evening, “we haven’t had chicken in a long time.” I smiled.
“We’re trying something different for a while.” She nodded without complaining. Looking back now, I realize they understood more than I gave them credit for. One afternoon, my neighbour knocked on the door carrying a tray of chin chin.
“I made too much,” she said. I knew she hadn’t. She was simply trying to help without making me feel embarrassed.
As she was leaving, she turned back.
“You know… people have been asking if you’ve considered starting a small business.”
“I’ve thought about it.”
“So what’s stopping you?” I laughed softly.
“Capital.” She laughed too.
“There’s always something.”
That conversation stayed with me. Over the next few days, I looked around the house differently. I wasn’t searching for what I had lost anymore. I was searching for what I still had. I could cook. People had always praised my soups.
My meat pies disappeared first at family gatherings. My puff-puff recipe had become famous in our church long before I realized it. Perhaps that was enough to begin.
The following Monday, I used part of our remaining savings to buy flour, sugar, cooking oil and a few other ingredients. As I carried the bags home, fear walked beside me.
What if nobody bought anything?
What if I wasted the little money we had left?
That first batch produced only a few dozen meat pies and some chin chin. I packed them neatly and asked a friend who worked in an office nearby if she could help me sell them. By lunchtime, she called.
“They’re finished.”
“Finished?”
“Completely.”
“When should I bring more?”
I stared at my phone after the call ended. For the first time since my husband’s death, I felt something I hadn’t experienced in months. Hope. It wasn’t much. The profit barely covered household expenses. But it was proof that I could still build something with my own hands. Every morning after the children left for school, I baked. By afternoon, I delivered orders. At night, I prepared ingredients for the next day.
The work was exhausting, but unlike grief, it gave me something in return. Purpose.
The children began helping in little ways. My daughter learned how to package snacks neatly. My middle child kept simple records of orders in an old notebook.
The youngest proudly told anyone who visited, “My mummy makes the best meat pies.”
Their confidence became my strength. Then came another challenge. One evening, after returning from church, I found three elderly relatives waiting for me in the sitting room. After exchanging greetings, one of them cleared his throat.
“You are still a young woman.”
I knew where the conversation was heading.
“It has been almost a year.”
I remained silent.
“You shouldn’t spend the rest of your life alone.”
Another relative nodded in agreement.
“The children also need a father.”
I listened respectfully until they finished.
Then I answered quietly.
“My children have already lost one parent.”
They looked at me.
“I don’t want them to lose the little stability they still have while I’m trying to replace what cannot be replaced.”
They didn’t argue. But I could tell they thought I was making a mistake. When they left, my eldest child came into the living room.
“I heard everything.”
I looked at him. He hesitated before speaking.
“You won’t leave us, will you?”
That question broke something inside me. I walked over and hugged him tightly.
“There is nowhere in this world I would rather be.”
Years later, I would understand that he wasn’t asking whether I would remarry. He was asking whether our family was still safe. Whether the only parent he had left was going to disappear too.
That night, after everyone had gone to bed, I stood outside looking up at the stars. The pain of losing my husband hadn’t become smaller.
I had simply grown stronger carrying it. For the first time since the funeral, I allowed myself to believe that perhaps we weren’t just surviving anymore.
Perhaps, little by little, we were beginning to live again.
