Widowhood effect
The raised chance of dying in the months after a husband, wife or partner dies, found in many studies over decades. It is largest in the first six months and in men, and it fades with time.
What drives it
Loss strains the body as well as the mind: sleep, eating, medication and heart health may all slip, and often the person who shared that care is the one who has gone. Useful for identification because it treats the months after a partner’s death as a time of physical strain, with the body’s signals as part of grief.
How it shows
Work
A recently widowed colleague comes back to work looking gray, says they are fine, and has stopped going to the doctor about their blood pressure.
Relationships
The partner who kept the diary of appointments and tablets is the one who died. Adult children notice an empty fridge and missed check-ups in the months after the funeral.
Self
Notice what has slipped since the death: sleep, meals, tablets, the check-up once booked for the two of you. Notice whether chest pain or breathlessness gets put down to ‘just grief’.
What tells it apart
Takotsubo cardiomyopathy (broken heart syndrome): Takotsubo is one specific heart event that can follow a shock. Widowhood raises deaths from many causes across a population, heart disease among them.
Grief trajectories and resilience (Bonanno): Most widowed people follow a resilient path (Bonanno). The raised risk after widowhood is an average across a group, and it may not apply to any given person.
Health anxiety: A fear of dying soon after a partner, with constant checking and seeking reassurance, may be health anxiety. The raised risk after widowhood is a measured average, which the fear may or may not match.
A test
Compare the person’s health habits before and after the death: sleep, meals, medication, appointments. If several have slipped at once, the strain that goes with raised risk after widowhood may be under way.
Questions to carry
- Which part of my health did they look after that nobody looks after now?
- Which of my body’s signals have I been putting down to grief?
Go deeper
- Read: The Other Side of Sadness, George A. Bonanno, 2009, revised 2019. Written for readers by a psychologist who has followed bereaved people for years. He questions the idea that grief moves through set stages and argues that most people come through a loss with more resilience than expected. Much of it rests on his own group's studies.
How strong the research is
strong. In 4,486 widowers aged 55 and over, deaths in the first six months were about 40% above the rate for married men of the same age, mostly from heart disease, and then fell back (Young, Benjamin and Wallis, 1963. Parkes, Benjamin and Fitzgerald, 1969). A meta-analysis of 15 cohort studies and 2.26 million people (Moon, Kondo, Glymour and Subramanian, 2011) found risk was highest in the first six months (relative risk 1.41) and raised in men (1.23) more than in women (1.04, not significant). In 373,189 older US couples followed from 1993 to 2002 (Elwert and Christakis, 2008), the effect varied with the causes of death of both spouses. These are averages across groups and say nothing certain about any one person.
Where it comes from
M. Young, B. Benjamin and C. Wallis, The mortality of widowers, Lancet, 1963. Colin Murray Parkes, Bernard Benjamin and Fitzgerald, Broken heart, BMJ, 1969. Felix Elwert and Nicholas Christakis, American Journal of Public Health, 2008