SEXUAL BEREAVEMENT: THE GRIEF WE DON’T TALK ABOUT

When Alice Radosh’s husband of over 40 years died in 2013 following a serious illness, she turned to books in an attempt to better understand the immense pain she was feeling. Unflinching memoirs about the death of a partner such as Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking or Joyce Carol Oates’ A Widow’s Story were cathartic reads but Radosh’s overpowering feeling was that something was missing. In the swirl of overwhelming emotions that accompany grief, she felt blindsided by the realisation that the sexual intimacy between her and her husband Bart was gone for good. “It was absolutely amazing to me that there were hundreds of pages about these very close, wonderful relationships but not a single word about sexuality,” she says.

Silence around sexual bereavement—the immense loss of sensual enjoyment and shared intimacy