Surprisingly, the US Census Bureau reports the median age for a woman to be widowed is 59.4 years for a first marriage and 60.3 for a second.
Three women, all connected through their widowhoods, realized that with so many women like them in the world, sharing their stories might provide hope and support for others going through this experience.
Rebecca LaChance of Tipp City lost her husband, Frank Lebeda during the COVID-19 pandemic when he was 73 years old. He had a massive heart attack at home and refused to go to the hospital because he was afraid of catching the virus.
“Essentially his death was out of the blue,” LaChance said. “He was one of those people who kept everything to himself. He never told me his symptoms.”
While growing up in Dayton, LaChance never dreamed she’d one day be among the estimated 258 million widows worldwide. She graduated from Patterson Cooperative High School in 1970 where she studied medical arts. She also worked as a nursing attendant at the former St. Elizabeth’s Hospital during high school.
“As a young girl I had a dream to be a doctor,” LaChance said. “After high school I went to Sinclair for an associate’s degree in nursing.”
Even as a young woman, though, LaChance inherently knew that she needed to position herself for the possibility that she might be divorced or widowed. She was married for the first time while attending Sinclair Community College and had son, Travis Everhart.
She went on to pursue her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Wright State University and had her second son, Devon Everhart.
“After I graduated with my master’s, we moved to Indiana,” LaChance said. “I was divorced in 1988 and decided to get my doctorate in health policy and healthcare economics.”
LaChance also joined the Army reserve nurses corps because they would pay for her doctoral program at Purdue University. Shortly after her graduation, she moved to Maryland and worked in medical research for infectious diseases for the Army.
“In 1995 I decided that the Army wasn’t an adequate description of who I was, so I decided to leave,” LaChance said. “I met my second husband Frank while stationed in Maryland.”
Always an art lover from childhood, LaChance found herself intrigued as an adult and began dabbling in iconography. Then she moved into photography and opened her own studio.
Her husband lost his life during the pandemic. Isolation has never been a problem for LaChance as she is neurodivergent and requires time alone, but she did have two long time friends who were also widows – Karen Justice and Karen Smith Racicot.
“They were worried about me being all alone,” LaChance said. “They started a group chat online for us.”
LaChance always saw herself as a strong and powerful woman, and at first, she was angry because she was struggling to get back to being that woman. As she moved through her grief process, her friends inspired her to review her life.
“It was essentially like having a spiritual awakening,” LaChance said.
Though her son lived nearby in Indiana, the bulk of her family remained in the Dayton area, and they were all urging her to come home to Ohio.
“My two friends helped me sell my house and move,” LaChance said. “I moved in with my sister in May of 2021.”
LaChance decided to buy a new home in Tipp City and remodel it to help work through her grief at losing her husband. She built a mudroom, loft and photography studio herself.
And she continued talking with her two close friends, both of whom had different ways of working through grief.
“We were travelling together in 2023 and sitting on a porch in February in Sedona, sharing our experiences,” LaChance said. “We started talking about how people don’t understand about widowhood, and we agreed we should write a book.”
That book, “Widows Among Us,” was published last month and includes the personal stories of LaChance and her two friends, Justice and Racicot. The stories of what LaChance calls “three wildly different women and how we grieved” ended up being not only different but also the same.
“There is a universality about it,” LaChance said. “It’s a life-altering event.”
The second half of the book covers things the women learned from their experiences as well as from the experiences of other widows they interviewed. It includes chapters on finances, home maintenance and repair and even creating a “black book” with passwords and other information.
“The final part of the book is all about what a new widow needs and how she can help care for herself,” LaChance said. “We use the philosophy of when something is broken, you repair it, and it became.”
For more information, log on to threewidows.com
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