Sex After Grief: Navigating Your Sexuality After Losing Your Beloved (Healing After Loss, Grief Gift, Bereavement Gift, Senior Sex)

By Joan Price

#1 New Release in Sacred Sexuality, Winner of the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) Writing Award in Service/Self-Help ─ Reclaim Your Sexuality After Loss

An Honest Approach to Hard Questions: Sex is complicated at the best of times—but when we’re overcome by grief, it’s especially mysterious and confusing. How do we nurture ourselves as sexual beings when we’re grieving the death of a partner? Why does taking care of ourselves sexually matter at a time when we’d rather hide under the covers and wail? How do we know when it’s time to open ourselves to the sexual phase of a new relationship? And how do we do it?

A Grief Book like No Other: Sex after Grief is the first book to address sex and grief together and treat sex as a normal, positive, life-affirming part of emerging from such a difficult time. Joan Price, the top expert on senior sex, draws on her own experiences as a widow since 2008, when she lost the love of her life to cancer. She shares her raw grief journey, sexual reawakening (and the many stumbles along the way), and attempts to dip back into dating, along with excellent advice on handling each step.

Recovery on Your Own Timeline, in Your Own Way: As Price says, there’s no right or wrong method or timeline for bringing our sexuality back into into our lives, whether it’s with our own hands, a friend with benefits, a hook-up, a new companion, or any combination. Sex After Grief includes a variety of people’s personal stories from folks of all genders and orientations. Some jumped into sex quickly. Some took years. Some withdrew from sexual possibility. No one was wrong, and no choice is defective or shameful.

Sex After Grief includes:

• Inspiring tales of how different people brought sex back into their lives after the loss of their spouse or partner
• Guidelines for dating again and getting sexual with a new person
• Reasons that solo sex is healthy and can be the path to feeling sexual again
• Advice from therapists, grief counselors, and sex coaches
• Self-help takeaways for creating an action plan

Readers of Modern Loss, The Grief Recovery Handbook and Second Firsts will grow from and appreciate Sex After Grief.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mango
• Release date: Aug 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781642500349

Book preview

Praise for Sex After Grief

Joan Price has crossed taboo boundaries again—this time about the impact on sex of loss and grieving. All of us who cope with rebirthing sex after facing loss of a beloved wish we had a roadmap to follow. This book lights a path that sets us on the journey to recovery, with content that is relevant, necessary and inspiring for grievers and the helping professionals that serve them. It is truly a gift to humankind!

—Patti Britton, PhD, co-founder of SexCoachU.com, known worldwide as the Mother of Sex Coaching

"Price’s latest book begins a much-needed conversation on what

has long been considered a taboo question: what happens to your sex life after the death of a partner? Price offers valuable advice

and guidance in an accessible writing style that brims with passion and compassion."

—Dr. Justin Lehmiller, author of Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life

Joan Price is one of the smartest thinkers around about sex, regardless of your age—or hers!

—Dan Savage

"With her characteristic clarity and insight, senior sexpert Joan Price zeros in on an experience that many people navigate but very few discuss: the experience of reclaiming sex after the death of a beloved. Sex After Grief is a profoundly compassionate, deeply personal, and exceptionally practical guidebook for moving forward after loss with both purpose and joy."

—Lynn Comella, PhD and author of Vibrator Nation: How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure

Deeply, honestly sourced in her own experience but aware that other people’s mileage may vary, this wise, compassionate, moving, sex-positive, and so necessary book breaks silence and lucidly tackles an all-too-common source of pain and shame. Author Joan Price has stitched ‘patches of [her] grief quilt’ together with other bereaved lovers’ insights and experiences woven throughout. It will prove a source of comfort for those who are grieving, and advice and support for those who are ready to open back up to sex, pleasure and love.

—Carol Queen PhD, Good Vibrations sexologist, co-founder of Center for Sex & Culture, San Francisco

"I always love Joan’s books because they are real, honest, inspirational, and audacious. Sex After Grief will advise and surprise you, whatever your age, gender, or orientation."

—Betty Dodson, PhD, author, artist, sexologist, orgasm educator since the early 1970s

Copyright © 2019 by Joan Price.

Published by Mango Publishing Group, a division of Mango Media Inc.

Layout & Cover Design: Elina Diaz

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Sex After Grief: Navigating Your Sexuality After Losing Your Beloved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication number: 2019938544

ISBN: (print) 978-1-64250-033-2, (ebook) 978-1-64250-034-9

BISAC category code: 2019905277

Printed in the United States of America

I dedicate this book to:

•My great love, Robert Rice, who lives in my memory and in my heart.

•Mac Marshall, who shows me that joy is possible after grief.

•All the grievers who generously shared their stories and opened their hearts so that this book could happen.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Why a Book about Sex and Grief?

Chapter 2: Myths about Sex and Grieving

Chapter 3: My Own Struggle with Sex after Grief

Chapter 4: Solo Sex

Chapter 5: Dating Again

Chapter 6: For Non-Grievers Who Want to Date Us

Chapter 7: It’s Okay If You’re Not Ready

Chapter 8: Your (New) First Time

Chapter 9: It’s Not All or Nothing

Chapter 10: The Pilot Light Lover

Chapter 11: Friend with Benefits

Chapter 12: After Caregiving Your Partner

Chapter 13: Massage or More?

Chapter 14: Sex of Many Stripes

Chapter 15: Journaling Your Journey

Chapter 16: Grief Counselors, Sex Coaches, and Support Groups

Chapter 17: What’s Next?

About the Author

Chapter 1

Why a Book about

Sex and Grief?

I started to search for confirmation that my feelings were not inappropriate. What I found instead was a culture of silence. I read Joan Didion’s and Joyce Carol Oates’s classic memoirs about mourning a beloved husband. They are lauded as unflinching, but in their combined nearly seven hundred pages, there is no mention of the type of sexual bereavement I was experiencing. The unspoken message, as I received it: Keep your mouths shut about sex. I turned to self-help books for widows, and found that there, too, discussions about sex were pretty much nonexistent.

—Alice Radosh, Taboo Times, in Modern Loss: Candid Conversation about Grief. Beginners Welcome by Rebecca Soffer and Gabrielle Birkner

There are many books about grief after loss of a beloved, but they almost never talk about sex. As research for this book, I read or perused dozens of contemporary books specifically about grief after death of a spouse or beloved partner. Almost none of them mentioned sex, and of those that did rarely more than a page was about this important part of life. It’s time to talk out loud about sex and grieving.

My love affair with Robert Rice was the reason I decided to write about sex and aging at age sixty-one with Better Than I Ever Expected: Straight Talk about Sex After Sixty. Over fourteen years, one book turned into four—and this one makes five. Senior sex education in its many forms—books, articles, my blog (www.nakedatourage.com), speaking engagements, Q and A column, webinars, a newsletter—became my mission and my life.

But when my second book, Naked at Our Age: Talking Out Loud about Senior Sex, was just a glimmer in my eye and two pages of notes, Robert—by then my husband—died. Died. Died. Died. That word insists that I write it again and again, as if the word is animate and claws repeatedly at my heart and my tear ducts.

My grief journey has lasted more than ten years as I write this book at age seventy-five. I’ve gone from such intense wailing, sobbing, and keening that I couldn’t leave the house to living with joy again, becoming capable of laughter and intimacy once more, and letting a new, dear person into my heart. During that time, I cycled through a roller coaster of despair before learning to be a fully alive, sexual being again.

Many people helped me in my grief journey. I pay it forward by helping others. Part of that debt repayment, I realize, needs to be a book with this narrow focus: How do we become capable of sex and intimacy when the person we want most to share this with is dead? How do we find our way to letting someone else in? How do we know when we’re ready? Is there one way that works for everyone?

The easy answer to that last question: No. We all experience grief in our own way, and that includes the myriad ways that we invite sex into our lives, or don’t, and we change along the way. We all respond differently, and, as you’ll hear me say throughout this book, however you respond is normal.

Some people feel frenetic sexual energy and yearn for a sexual outlet right away. Some start dating immediately, some gradually, some not ever. Some withdraw from sexual possibility. Some share their bodies but not their hearts. Many give themselves sexual release to the fantasy of their lost loved one. You’ll meet many of these people in this book, whom I’ve named Grievers, as they open their private lives and thoughts to you. I hope you’ll come away realizing that no one is wrong and no choice is defective or shameful. You’ll learn many options, and you will choose for yourself.

You’ll read about some options that are clearly not your style or don’t fit your beliefs. Please avoid condemning others who choose those paths. There’s a difference between saying, This would not be right for me, and You shouldn’t do this either.

As a writer, I documented most of my own changes as I struggled in grief, sometimes as public writing, often as private journaling. Other grievers shared their stories with me and continue to do so, and I know