Bereavement: A Life Passage

We call widowhood an expected life event for several reasons. When we're younger, widowhood seems distant and abstract but as we age, it starts to appear more concrete: friends or siblings are widowed, our spouse becomes seriously ill, we reach the age said to be a Canadian's average life expectancy.

Most marriages end with the death of one of the spouses, usually when both partners are in their senior years. Widows and widowers accounted for 6.4% of all Canadians age 15 and over in 1996 but for 32.5% of everyone age 65 and over.¹

A woman's story

Widowhood can happen to both men and women at any age, but because women generally live longer than men, 80% of the 1.5 million widowed people in Canada are women. More than 75% of them are age 65 or older. The absolute numbers are just as striking: more than 1 million widows over age 60 and 208,000 widowers.

Along with their longer life expectancy, women tend to marry men a few years older than themselves and are less likely to remarry after being widowed or divorced.² Women's average age at widowhood and average duration of widowhood are also rising.

Not only are the numbers different for widows and widowers, so are the lifestyles. Barry McPherson studies individual and population aging. He reports that women are more likely than men to have a large peer group for social and emotional support. They also tend to have closer ties with their children, especially daughters. Though men are no less vulnerable to grief, widowers are more likely to be isolated from their families. Widowed men are generally older and in poorer health, but they also tend to have greater financial resources and opportunities for remarriage if they choose. These differences may narrow as women with higher levels of education, job experience, and financial resources age and become widows.³

Bereavement experiences vary widely. Adjusting to widowhood usually involves an initial period of shock and numbness, then a time when pressing practical matters are a priority. Working through the grief process may take two years or more, while redefining an individual and social identity and settling into a new way of life often take a few years longer.

1 Except where noted, all figures are from Statistics Canada, The Daily, 14 October 1997, "1996 Census: Marital status, common-law unions and families"; and Catalogue no. 93F0022XDB96005, the Nation Series (1996 Census data).

2 Martin Matthews, A. Widowhood in later life (Toronto: Butterworths, 1991), p. vii.

3 McPherson, B.D. Aging as a social process. An introduction to individual and population aging, third edition (Toronto: Harcourt Brace & Company, Canada, 1998), p. 215.