A few months after my husband passed away, I hit a wall. The initial shock had worn off. The numbness had started to lift just enough to let something darker in. I wasn't living. I was existing. And some days, barely that. I knew I needed to find a reason to get up. Not for my children—though of course they needed me. For myself. Because a mother running on empty is not really present for anyone. So I started building again. I am a builder by nature—I always have been, even as a child. I create things, connect people, and make things exist that didn't before. It's not what I do. It's who I am. And going back to it was my way of finding the thread back to myself.

But here's the thing about grief. It doesn't just take the person. It takes your sense of yourself, too.

I realised this when I was trying to introduce myself in a Facebook group and completely froze. Everyone else seemed to know exactly who they were. And I had nothing. Not because I'm nobody—I have built businesses, raised four children, lived across countries, and survived things I never thought I'd survive. But I had spent so long being someone for others—wife, mother, daughter, friend—that I had never asked the question for myself.

.In the UAE, the women I see who are widowed, or newly single, or separated from their support networks, are doing something extraordinary and almost entirely invisible.

In the UAE, widowhood has a particular effect on identity that goes beyond the emotional. It is also legal and practical.

Your visa may have been tied to your husband. Your name may be on accounts jointly but not independently. Your financial identity may be, in part, constructed through him. When he is gone, all of that has to be rebuilt — in your name, on your own terms, through a system that is genuinely not designed for simplicity in these circumstances.

Grief is not one feeling. It is the absence of someone threaded through every ordinary moment of your day. I have been a widow for…