What Being in Business Taught Me About Becoming a Widower and Vice Versa (Part 2)

In Part 1, I wrote about how losing my wife and business partner of more than two decades changed the way I look at business. But the flip side is true too.

For the past 30 years, I’ve helped organizations navigate change. I never imagined I'd someday need those same skills I developed in business to navigate my own life.

First, in case you missed Part 1, my incredible wife Andrea Tyler Evans passed away last year after a 13-year battle against a rare form of cancer. She was the woman I loved, the mother of my children and — importantly, for the purposes of this discussion — my business partner in the two businesses we owned together over the years.

As I said in Part 1, if there was anything about the situation that ended up being a positive, it’s the fact that her 13-year battle not only gave us as much time together as her health would allow, it also meant I had time to mentally process and prepare for the worst thing that has ever happened to me. And again, if I am matter-of-fact, I’m merely focusing on the business aspects for this particular piece. The personal side is personal, and something I will never fully recover from.

But my 30-year-plus career actually helped me develop some skills and approaches that would become invaluable in navigating the path of being a widower, both personally and professionally. Here are some of the things I learned.

• I have the ability to do things that are hard. I have used this philosophy often in business as I have worked to help clients solve complex problems, and built our own businesses from scratch. I’ve developed an appreciation and a tolerance for hard work, and I understand that it’s part of any rewarding or necessary process. Losing my wife is the hardest thing I have ever endured. But knowing that I have the ability to do things that are hard — that I can step back from the massiveness of the problem and start to do the work needed — has been an incredibly useful north star in my process.

• I have the ability to reform and restructure. Every system in my life — personal, family, business, financial — was thrown into turmoil by her loss. Every aspect of my life experienced some sort of significant change. But I was able to draw from my own experiences enough to know that change is part of life, and is often necessary to position for the future. I have a massive rebuilding project in front of me. But I have the tools to accomplish it. 

• It’s a marathon, not a sprint. One thing I learned early in the cancer process — and something I frequently advise clients in crisis — is not to make decisions under duress if you can avoid it. Andrea and I had a policy early on in her cancer journey that during the treatment process, we would never focus on more than five things at a time. After her passing, even as I have worked to build the new structure that would become my life in widowerhood, I have also kept in mind that I’m in no hurry. There’s no clock that I have to adhere to. I just need to ensure the results are what’s best for the future for myself and my loved ones.

• How do you eat an elephant? Ah yes, one of my favorite sayings. The answer, of course, is “One bite at a time.” The saying is meant to be a reminder that no matter how massive the scope of a complex problem may be, solving that problem starts with a single action. Then another. Then another, until finally you start to feel a sense of momentum.

• You find out who your friends really are. I always prefer doing business with good people, and in those rare instances where I was involved with people whose motivations I didn’t trust, I tried to remove myself from that negativity as soon as I could. I used to have a line in my marketing materials that said “We have lots of friends who are clients, and lots of clients who are friends.” The process of becoming a widower shows you who will be at your side in the toughest times, and who may be more expendable in your social circles. It’s not unlike working with people you admire. They’re part of your process, and you may be part of theirs.

There’s an enormous body of work about grief, and one of the themes you see over and over is that grief is something you have to go through, not around. It’s work, it’s a labor of its own, one that no one ever asks for or wants.

But it is work. And I’m fortunate to be able to draw from past work experiences and apply them in a different way in rebuilding the world around me. I hope you don’t have to use these life tools in the same way I am, but I do hope you use them. They can make even the most complex problems more bearable — and even rewarding — to solve.