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The Weight of Witnessing
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The Weight of Witnessing

When Widowhood Burns Everything Down, But You Keep Building Anyway

Carolyn Caple Moor's avatar
Carolyn Caple Moor
Apr 16, 2025
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Finding Shelter in the Storm

In the quiet moments between headlines, I find myself seeking shelter from the storm of voices—though "shelter" might be an overly dignified word for what is essentially me hiding under a metaphorical table with noise-canceling headphones and a pint of ice cream. The cacophony of opinions crashes against my consciousness like waves—relentless, erosive, and apparently unaware that my mental shoreline wasn't designed for tsunami-level hot takes.

I've learned to moderate my exposure to the news, closing certain windows to the world while leaving just enough open to avoid becoming the person who has lost herself. Yet somehow, the noise finds ways to seep through the cracks of my carefully constructed sanctuary. It's like playing whack-a-mole with anxiety-inducing information—except the moles are wearing tiny suits and screaming about the economy.

As someone who walks alongside the bereaved (occasionally stumbling, frequently getting lost, and sometimes accidentally stepping on toes), I've developed a peculiar lens through which I filter information—a human rights perspective honed by witnessing suffering. It's like having special glasses that make the world both clearer and harder to look at, a superpower nobody actually wants.

During those isolated pandemic days (remember when), when the world seemed both impossibly vast and suffocatingly small—like being trapped in an IMAX theater playing only apocalypse documentaries—I turned to education as an anchor. Signing up for a course I hoped would be useful, I embarked on taking Stanford U "International Women's Health and Human Rights" unveiled realities I both recognized and others that carved new wounds into my understanding of humanity's capacity for cruelty. Some lessons felt like finding out the monster under your bed has been there all along, just better at hiding than you thought.

Yet in this journey through darkness, I've discovered that compassion, like humor, can be a flashlight—not powerful enough to banish all shadows, but just bright enough to help us find each other in the dark.

The Women Who Disappear Twice

There's a special kind of invisibility that comes with widowhood—first, you lose your partner, then you lose your place in the world's narrative of who deserves care. I discovered this gap in the most academic way possible: footnotes. Or rather, the absence of them.

While pouring over human rights documents with my Stanford classmates—armed with highlighters and righteous indignation—I kept flipping pages, certain I'd missed the section on widows. Surely, between the meticulously documented atrocities and carefully categorized vulnerabilities, someone had remembered the women who lose everything when they lose their husbands. But no. It was like searching for a reflection in a mirror that isn't there.

The 2015 Global Widows Report reads like a horror novel you can't put down, except it's tragically non-fiction. I’m a bit in shock it’s been 10 years since its first publication and presentation to the United Nations.

“Widowhood creates the perfect storm of vulnerability—a category so overlooked that predators have essentially been handed an instruction manual. Without fathers, daughters become currency. Without husbands, women become ghosts in their own communities—visible enough to exploit but invisible enough to ignore.” - Carolyn Moor

The irony isn't lost on me that I've become an advocate for a group I never wanted to join. It's like being drafted into the world's least popular club with the most expensive membership fee: everything you loved.

Sometimes I laugh at the cosmic joke of it all—standing in conference rooms, explaining to powerful people that yes, widows exist, while being a widow myself. It's like having to convince someone that rain is wet while standing soaked to the bone.

The pain of this work isn't just in witnessing suffering—it's in witnessing the world's spectacular talent for looking away from it.

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