A reflection on widowhood, Amsterdam, and the quiet ways love continues after loss. What happens when two men who grieved husbands they had lost in the same city—one deeply rooted, one completely uprooted—find each other in the steam?
We didn’t meet as widowers. We met in a sauna – two men in the steam, stripped of everything except the moment. No biography, no history, no catalogue of losses. Just two bodies in the same warm room, noticing each other without knowing why. Our pasts arrived later, quietly, when trust had already begun to take shape.
Only then did we discover that we had both grieved over lost husbands in the same city, but in very different worlds.
My first marriage and widowhood unfolded in Amsterdam, but in the fragile ecosystem of expat gay life – warm in good times, thin in crisis. My current husband’s widowhood, also in Amsterdam, was held by Dutch family, Dutch friends, Dutch steadiness. Two men widowed in the same place, but not in the same way.
His widowhood was rooted. Mine was uprooted.
His first husband had been part of a Dutch family network that closed ranks around him when illness came. Friends, neighbours, colleagues – the whole Dutch web of kinship that grows slowly but holds firmly. When he tells the story, there is grief, yes, but also a sense of being carried.
My story was different. My first husband and I were British in origin, but our life together was Dutch. When he died of ALS through euthanasia, the gay circle that had once been lively around us thinned almost overnight. A few stayed – the ones who mattered – but the wider circle evaporated. After the funeral, the phone went quieter than I was prepared for. Expat friendships are like that: bright, warm, and often temporary. Grief exposes how few roots you truly have.
And then there was the legal shadow. A British relative-by-marriage, shaped by a very English racism and a soldier’s certainty tried to challenge my status as next of kin, arguing that because same‑sex marriage wasn’t yet legal in England at the time, our Dutch marriage shouldn’t count. It didn’t work, but the attempt left a mark. It was a reminder that even abroad, the old country can reach out with cold hands.
So there we were: two men who had lived through widowhood in the same city, but in different worlds. One surrounded. One pared back to essentials.
When we eventually found each other – not as widowers, but simply as men – we didn’t compare losses. We recognised something in each other. A kind of steadiness. A kind of clarity. Widowhood does that: it strips away the trivial. It teaches you what matters and what doesn’t. It teaches you how to stay.
His widowhood taught me what it looks like to be held by a culture.
Mine taught him what it means to survive without one.
Together, we built a life that carries both truths.
We don’t dramatise it.
We don’t make it a banner.
But it’s there, quietly, in the way we move through the world.
In the way we hold hands on the sofa.
In the way we cook pies together.
In the way we understand, without needing to say it, that unless we die together, one of us will be widowed a second time.
That knowledge doesn’t darken our days.
It sharpens them.
It makes the mornings brighter, the arguments smaller, the shared life more deliberate.
It reminds us that love is not guaranteed, and that the ordinary is worth treasuring.
Two widowhoods in one city.
Two men who met in the steam.
Two lives that learned, separately, how to endure.
And one marriage that holds all of it: the rooted, the uprooted, the past, the present, the quiet, the everyday.
This, to me, is what queer elderhood looks like.
Neither tragedy nor erasure, nor even the lonely stereotype people might imagine.
But two men, after everything, building a home that honours the worlds that shaped them.
