Widow Coach: COVID-19 Has Changed The Way of Helping in Times of Grief

Photo submitted.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Maggie Moore, Widow Coach notes changes in the grieving process.

HUNTLEY – Her business card reads, “Widow Coach.”

Maggie Moore has helped and healed others since 2015.

She’s not a doctor but a grief recovery method specialist.

Since COVID-19, demand for Moore’s services has definitely gone up. She’s helped people “from desolation to transformation” as a client once described Moore’s specialty.

In working with a number of clients in this COVID-19 world, Moore has quickly come to understand how COVID has affected our society.

“We have come face-to-face with our own mortality in a different way than perhaps we had historically.  So I think that’s changed the way some people think about the decisions they are making and the decisions they will make. The thing that makes COVID-19 so different from other types of pathogens, bugs, or viruses is that it actually hits the human race right in areas where we connect on a social level,” Moore said.

Moore is saying that COVID-19 has been disruptive of the way we interact with each other. So instead of possibly a number of casual social interactions whether these activities have you shopping at the supermarket, meeting friends for lunch, gathering with relatives, or even giving a friend a hug, your life’s activities are disrupted.

“It has caused a great deal of loneliness and can affect our mental and physical wellbeing long term. It’s also disrupted connections we have with our close knit family groups. It’s not been as easy to put intergenerational groups together like grandparents and grandchildren,” Moore said.

Although the way the pandemic has changed how people come together to share memories in the grieving process, Moore has adapted because she personally understands this evolution of grief.  Her story of becoming Widow Coach began in 2014. What started as a typical weekday morning for she and her husband, John, detonated quickly.  Maggie gave her husband a kiss before he headed off to work. That night, a police officer and assistant coroner came to Moore’s door and told her John had been killed in an auto accident near Lake-in-the-Hills Airport.

“ I thought that was the worst moment of my life, but it actually wasn’t,” Moore said.

John Moore was 43-years-old.  Maggie was 44 and the mother of a 10-year-old boy going on eleven.

“The worst moment came a half hour later when I had to tell my son his father was never coming back,” Moore said.

Moore learned quite a few things along the way. She described the process by “building her world up from the shattered wreckage of what it becomes when you lose a spouse.”

What worked for her several years ago in the throes of unrelenting grief works not only for people grieving the loss of a loved one but for many people whose lives are disrupted by COVID-19.  Moore suggested several tips.

“One of the things that I’d like to suggest that people consider doing is to maintain structure for you and your children that you are schooling.  It’s really important that you keep to a morning and evening routine even if your kids are going to home school or remote learning, they still should get up and get dressed, they don’t need to be perfectly dressed if they go to school, but the family should get up and stick to a normal routine before the kids show up in the classroom,” Moore said.

Give yourself plenty of time to care for yourself. Moore strongly suggests people should double or triple what has been their normal routine of care.

“Whether it’s trying to find a vaccine for yourself or your family, picking up groceries, or trying to shepherd students who are learning in your home, it’s really important for you as a parent or grandparent to slow down and prioritize some self-care.  Go out in nature, give yourself extra time during the week to just unplug, step away from the electronics, read a book, and allow your brain time to reset,” Moore said.

A good way to reset is one of Moore’s tips for people in stressful situations.  She suggests a way to bring the body back from a stressful state.

“Breath in for a count of four and breath out for a count of eight.  This will shift your body down from the stress cycle over time,” Moore explained.

Her tips for stress and grief developed from Moore’s career in Human Resources for multi-national and Fortune 1000 companies.  She did a lot of helping people early on in navigating the “incredibly complex world” into which they found themselves.

“If you think about widowhood, we are asking people at the moment when they are involved in one of life’s most stressful events that can compromise their ability to even make decisions that we are asking them to make consequential life decisions,” Moore said.

Because of COVID-19 or other factors that can quickly change lives, you may be faced with such decisions as  dealing with benefits, whether or not to stay in a job, who will be an emergency contact for any minor children, whether you’ll stay in your home, and things now important as you’ve become a single parent or alone. Widow Coach works with people facing these life changing questions.  But the list of new challenges doesn’t stop.

“They might not understand there are a myriad of options for how to handle things in their estate.  They might not know what questions to ask of an employer in terms of leave options,” Moore said.

You may think all of these things described as questions are typically asked by “older people.” But widows or widowers are not  necessarily older.

“The data actually shows a substantial portion of the widowed population are basically working professionals,” Moore said.

Moore has modified her techniques because of COVID to help people deal with the anxiety they feel.  She works with people online as a private network and invites them in.

“It’s not a perfect solution but a good interim one,” Moore said.

She helps families in getting them to brainstorm ways to provide support for a bereaved family member.  If they can’t come together in a funeral service or celebration of life, there are electronic tools she introduces to create a timeline of the person who is deceased and invite people around the country to go ahead and share memories and upload photos.

Moore works with the bereaved in trying to figure out a legacy in setting up the foundation for the rest of their life.

“The disruption people feel to their lives externally because of the pandemic is probably about 20 percent of the disruption that your average widow and widower feel when their personal lives are disrupted by death in normal times. So you think about how your normal life has been upended, that’s really the chaos that death can create,” Moore said, adding that the other thing she does with grieving is in creating some stability and structure for them. “Typically what happens and what’s exacerbated during the pandemic is that when someone is grieving intensely, this takes over a lot of their brain functions so they have trouble remembering or they have trouble getting organized,” Moore said.

She’ll work with people on several levels.  On one level, Moore will help manage the business of widowhood or grieving. The second level is to help with the grief itself whether it is putting in a set of habits and structures or grounding techniques to help them deal with anxiety.  The third level as described earlier is to create a new foundation for the rest of their life.

Maggie Moore, Widow Coach, Grief Recovery Method Specialist, can be reached through her website www.thewidowcoach.com or email [email protected].