Love Is Love, But Grief Is Different

 Like so many people who work in the grief space, I came to it through profound personal loss. When the unthinkable happened, I had two choices: be swallowed by the silence, or step into it to find purpose and meaning. I needed to make sense of what still seems senseless—and I now have a great desire to help others feel less alone when it happens to them.

On February 1, 2022, thinking it was food poisoning or perhaps gallstones, I took my wife, Dr. Wendy Koenig, to the emergency room. The hospital was still practicing COVID safety protocols, and I was not allowed in with her. I paced the parking lot awaiting her call. When it came, she said very matter-of-factly, “They’re telling me it’s cancer.” Our lives were forever changed.

We fought it. We did everything we could. I thought she could be the anomaly and beat Stage 4 colon cancer. But that all ended like a flick of a switch on October 10, 2022, just eight months after the initial diagnosis.

Afterwards, I quickly learned that lesbian grief is different from anything I had seen growing up among my heterosexual family and friends.

Most people don't understand the challenges or the marginalization from the more typical mourning process that heterosexuals experience. They can't wrap their heads around being disenfranchised like gays and lesbians, especially during such a difficult time.

Although Wendy and I had been together for 11 years and legally married for 10, I was questioned about our relationship at the hospital, by hospice, at the funeral home, at the cemetery, and by the organization that provided my wife’s work benefits. Some of her family members disconnected from me and I wasn’t allowed input on the words on her headstone because it was a family plot.

Like many in the LGBTQ+ community, I built my family from friends, having little support from blood relatives. But grief is heavy, and friends, unlike family, don’t always feel the same obligation to stay and help you carry that weight. Most painful of all, a few of the people Wendy and I respected most were the first to disappear.

In time, I found that I wasn’t alone in this experience. Several others in LGBTQ+ widow Facebook forums and in-person support groups shared that they also felt invisible and lost.

Research shows lesbians typically receive less support and experience prolonged grief. A 2016 study in Palliative Medicine even outlined “additional barriers and stressors… including homophobia, failure to acknowledge the relationship, additional legal and financial issues.”

I didn't need any data to know all that was true. I soon realized I was not the only one struggling to get out of debt. Other lesbians I’ve spoken with lost their homes, cars or joint possessions because they didn’t have vital legal paperwork and their spouse’s family took advantage of the loophole to claim what they suddenly realized could be theirs.

Why, I wondered, didn't anybody ever share this information in a more significant forum? Where were the books? Where were the stories? Couldn't someone provide some insight on how to handle something this earth-shattering?

And so, I have stepped up.

Spoiler alert: everyone dies in the end. So why are we still so afraid to talk about it? I want to confront the taboo of grief head-on. Not just to spark a polite conversation, but to be the record scratch at the party—the moment that stops the music and makes everyone pay attention. I want to say the quiet parts out loud and help move grief out of the shadows and into our public discourse, where it belongs.

I also want to help other lesbians and gays be prepared for the unthinkable. Widowhood is devastating on its own; it shouldn’t be compounded by secondary losses, financial complications and legal red tape. In the LGBTQ+ community, we often say that love is love. And it is. But truly loving someone also means protecting them—and yourself—for the day you may be without the one person who understood you when much of the world did not.

This is why I raise my hand to say, “I want to be a grief educator!”

When you’re a child and someone asks what you want to be when you grow up, no one blurts out, “A grief educator!” We dream of being astronauts, artists, athletes—something bright and aspirational. Not someone fluent in loss.

Yet during podcast interviews and storytelling events, I’m asked the same question: “How did you get into grief work?” The answer is simple. Grief found me.