About Me
Hi, my name is Alisa, and when my husband, Pat, died suddenly of a heart attack in October, 2018, I was 44 and our daughter was 7. At the time, I worked from home in Connecticut at a corporate job in information technology, while he was a stay-at-home dad in charge of getting her to school, after school activities, etc. Suddenly, I had to figure out how to do both our jobs, while grieving and trying to support our daughter emotionally.
After somehow getting through the funeral, which was a blur, I quickly found out that when your spouse dies, there are a huge number of tasks that come your way. Some need to be taken care of right away, while others can be done over several years. I jumped into them head first to distract myself from the grief. For me, this included:
- Researching therapists and local grief support groups;
- Going to the social security office to figure out what benefits my daughter and I might be eligible for;
- Contacting the financial institutions that held Pat’s assets to find out the predictably cumbersome process for getting them transferred to me;
- Figuring out what subscriptions, memberships and credit cards he had that I needed to cancel and notifying companies about his death;
- Adjusting all of our health, life and car insurance policies and beneficiaries;
- Going to the local probate office again and again and again to find out what forms to fill out and how to fill them out until I finally gave up and hired an estate lawyer;
- And the list goes on.
I was a project manager for most of my career so used to planning and organizing tasks and information. Yet, I was completely overwhelmed by the amount of work in front of me, some of which was very complex and confusing. I started wondering why there wasn’t any guidance on what you need to do. It would’ve been overwhelming for a non-grieving person to take on this work, but was even more challenging to take on at a time when it’s difficult to get out of bed, let alone think clearly, and you’re trying to do the job of two people.
After spending at least a year on “post death tasks,” I decided to pull together all the information that I had found into a website to help other widowed moms and dads, and the idea for The Widowed Parent was born. I’m now working on my certification to be a financial planner so much of my recent content is focused on finances. Please contact me if you have any feedback on the website or suggestions for future content. I would love to hear from you!
Disclaimer: I’m not an attorney or financial planner (yet) or tax accountant, so please check with a professional on all that stuff.