Losing a spouse is devastating, but for widowers, the journey through grief often feels isolated and uncharted. Are you a widower searching for a roadmap? Wondering how to navigate the overwhelming emotional and practical challenges, especially during the holidays? In this exclusive conversation, we sit down with Herb Knoll, a widower, author, and founder of the Widowers Support Network, who spent seven years researching and developing the definitive guide for men coping with loss.

Herb cuts through the silence and shares:

• A FREE 15-Step Action Plan to manage grief and recovery.
• The critical reasons why men need their own space to heal.
• Essential advice on health, dating, and avoiding common pitfalls after loss.
• Insights from his acclaimed book, “The Widower’s Journey,” and his international support network of over 3,000 men.

Stop feeling lost. This conversation offers practical steps, a powerful community, and the encouragement you need to move forward. Tune in now to get your action plan and start your journey toward healing.

I am sharing my experience of loving the same man for 32 years, a mother to two adult children, a retired military officer, a breast cancer survivor, and my connections with others.  

Anyone experiencing suicidal thoughts should reach out to a suicide hotline or local emergency number in their country: Psychology Today Suicide Hotlines and Prevention Resources Around the World.

—

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

A Widower’s Guide To Grief And Recovery With Herb Knoll

The Voices Of Widowhood

What if you could have fifteen steps on how to deal with grief for widowers? What if widowers had an action plan on how to manage their grief? This conversation with Herb is going to provide you exactly that. Herb is willing to share this with you for free. Herb is a widower. He knows how hard this journey is. In fact, he’s going to share a book that he’s written about the widower’s journey that he invested seven years of research into. There are more details. I want you to hear it all. Let’s get into this conversation now.

Herb, welcome to the Widowhood.

Thank you and congratulations on your many successes.

Thank you. When you think of Welcome to the Widowhood, what are your thoughts come to mind?

I like encouraging men who need it, and your work is very good and goes in that direction. I’m happy to participate and contribute in any way I can.

Thank you so much. I especially want to thank you for participating in this holiday mini-series, Voices of Widowhood Healing Through the Holidays. I am especially glad that we can have this conversation focusing more on our widowers and giving them a conversation about them. As we go into this conversation, can you share what brought you into this work of serving men in widowers?

Impetus For Serving Widowed Men

The year was 2008. My wife passed away after surviving pancreatic cancer for 39 months. She was 52 years old. I was a banker living in San Antonio, Texas. One of my staff members came up to me, a young girl, and she said, “The entire floor misses your laughter.” I realized for the first time that I wasn’t in very good shape. I decided to seek help.

I went to my church, and I went to the VA because I’m a disabled veteran. I went to Barnes and Noble, and I walked into Barnes and Noble, and I asked the young man behind the counter, “What do you have for a new widower?” He looked on his search engine, and then he looked up at me, and he said, “Mr., I don’t have a thing for you.”

We went to the bookcase just to be sure that there was not a title that was there that he missed. We found fifteen books, each of them written for widows and not one written for men. I knew before I left the Barnes and Noble store that I was about to quit my job. After 38 years in banking and having a very high post, I walked away from it, and I rededicated my life to helping widowed men. What I needed to do was I didn’t know anything about widowed men.

I’m a new one myself. I found 40 widowed men, and I asked them for permission to track their lives. I did so for seven years. Most books are written for the immediate impact of becoming a widow, but I wanted to know both the long-term and short-term impact. That’s why I went seven years, and my volunteer men used to tease me, saying, “Are you ever going to publish this book?” I published it, and it was released in 2017, and it’s still a hot book on Amazon.com.

What is your book called? What is the title?

The Widower’s Journey.

Literally seven seven-year journey, for real.

Creating The Widower Support Network & Men-Only Space

You see the pictures of the 40 men in here and their volunteer contributions. It’s the best thing that I’ve ever done. That’s what I claim. After that, I created the Widowers Support Network, which is a website and also a Facebook page. The Facebook page is only for men.

Say it again. It’s only for whom?

For men, not women. I don’t let women on it. I created one Facebook page, and all I was getting were women. I had to create a second one. This time I started screening everybody whom I admitted to it. It has about 3000 men living in 44 countries. It’s a terrific resource for widowed men. They’re of all ages. They’re even in their twenties, some men who were widowed, where the wife may have lost a baby and died in childbirth. One woman died in a motorcycle accident. One woman was murdered. There are all the different circumstances. There, when men realize that they’re not being listened to by women, they will open up. They help each other, and they continue to do it to this day.

Addressing Vulnerability & Dating Challenges

I want to pause right there, and I just want to interject. Men need a space of themselves. There is no insult to say they’re just not being listened to by women. There’s a sense of being vulnerable that men can have in the company with each other. Can you elaborate? Let’s say a man is thinking about joining a support group or connecting, and right now, they’ve been told, I’m supposed to hold back my tears. All that emotion stuff isn’t for me. Can you share the benefits of what a man would gain from participating in a community with other men?

I also have a podcast, and on my podcast number 23, I interviewed four men simultaneously. One from Australia, one from Scotland, one from England, and one from India. What we talked about was the cultural differences between how third nations treat widowed men and how the US of A treats widowed men. America pales by comparison. We do not sensitize our children to a man’s grief, but the girls are cascades of flowers cast upon women, and they have their girlfriends, but the men don’t.

One problem that widowed men have is that they don’t make new friends easily. If they’re retired, let’s say they lost their coworkers in their life, they lost their customers in their life. If their wife is now gone, and maybe the children are married and moved out. Now they’re alone, and they don’t make friends easily. They don’t even make neighbors across the street. They don’t even go over and shake their hand. It’s just the way American men are.

They feel that anything less than that demonstrates a weakness in their character. It’s not so. What we do, and I hear from my men every week about how pleased they are to be in this group, because the men have learned the culture of the group, and it is to give up myself to help somebody else. If a man posts a question, there is a man who has posted a question about dating sites. “Does that mean that I didn’t love my wife, or am I free to date somebody new?”

They’re always second-guessing themselves. Worst of all, men make bad decisions. They frequently date or marry the first girl they date. They fall head over heels in love because they got some attention, and they need to be a little bit more discriminating with women because some women have ulterior motives. I was at a church speaking one night, and I talked about predatory women. A man came out of the audience, and there are predator men too. Don’t get me wrong.

I know this is a new version. We’re good with this.

A man came out of the audience and gave me his phone number and said, “Call me.” I called him a couple of days later, and he said, “I want to contribute to your book, my story, because I fell prey to a predatory woman where the women spent $1.2 million from his retirement fund in two years. It was gone.” She set them up, and then she took advantage of them.

Now, there are good marriages, but over 50% of the widowed men will end up being married and divorced. That’s a high number. That’s why I encourage men by all means to date lots of different women. Don’t be in a rush. What you don’t know is what you don’t know. You don’t know. The same thing goes for ladies to men, but we’re not eighteen-year-old kids anymore.

That same question, the idea people are in the holidays, they want to date. They don’t want to be home alone. What are some challenges or some guidance you can give for someone if they’re starting, if they’re a widower and they’re looking to date during this holiday season?

First of all, I have remarried, and I used eHarmony as a dating site, and it worked great for me, but the thing is, you have to be honest about yourself. You cannot cover up little imperfections in your background. Now, to give you an example, when I was using eHarmony, I was 60 years old. One of the women who showed interest in me, surprisingly, was a 48-year-old beautiful woman. I asked her one day on the phone, I said, “Tell me, why would a 48-year-old attractive woman be interested in a 60-year-old man?” She said, “I’m not really 48.” I ended that conversation because if she’s willing to lie about her age on her application, she’s willing to do whatever.

Do you think that when men are dating or after being widowed, it impacts their self-esteem or their confidence?

Absolutely. I will tell you, my self-esteem suffered. I didn’t think I was marketable. Who would want me? I’m a banker. Those are boring people. It took a while for me to recover from that.

How did you do that?

The 15-Step Recovery Plan & Actionable Steps

First of all, you get off the couch. Men will close the drapes, and they hate weekends because they’re not out somewhere and they’re not being forced to interact with other people. They stay home on weekends, and they close the curtains they eat TV dinners. The house gets in to be in a disarray. They have to get off the couch. They need to volunteer. That’s what I recommend, and I don’t care if it’s your church. I don’t care if it’s a Little League baseball team.

I don’t care if it’s the Knights of Columbus or the Lions Club or Rotary Club, but get out with people because that’s where recovery can be found the quickest. They also need to take care of many other things, and it can get confusing and it can be overwhelming. Men think, “I’ll never recover from my grief. Other people don’t understand me.” They’re not any different.

In the book, The Grieving Brain, which you and I have spoken about, it details that people who are grieving can take a year or 2 or 3 or even more to recover. It all depends on the health condition of the human brain. This is new science. This is a discovery. Sometimes people get insensitive, and they’ll say things like, “How come he’s not over it yet? It’s been six months. How come he hasn’t come to visit us or called or inquired or done anything?”

It’s been a year, but maybe he’s not capable. Men get frustrated because they haven’t recovered. That just compounds the problem. The fact is that once the human brain recovers, then the person can recover, but it’s not going to happen by itself. You need to contribute. I suggest I recognized this some time ago. I created a document, which is a how-to recovery plan, and I’ll make this available to your viewers if they just write me at my email address. There are fifteen steps that I suggest people take.

Herb, can you share your email address? I know it’ll be in the show notes, but can you share your email address, please?

It’s Herb@TheWidowersJourney.com.

They could get the plan from you. What about the book? Would they be able to contact you to order the book, too?

Yes, they could. If they want an autograph copy or they can go right to Amazon.com and find it there as well. I’m proud to say that it receives four and a half stars out of five on Amazon, and there’s a whole load of endorsements so people can see what other people think about it. They’re going back to your holidays. They’re hard. They’re painful. People are lonely, and that’s why suicides always increase every year at Christmas.

It’s important that people be out and about just to protect their health. In my plan that I created, grief recovery rule number three, take care of your health. Now, men don’t do that very well because it’s the wives who send the husbands to the doctors, and the men will feel an ache or pain, and they’ll just try to ignore it. Don’t do that. It could cost you your life, and it’s not necessary. It just adds more grief to your other family members. Take care of your health. Have a doctor tell you you’re okay. Don’t assume you’re okay.

There’s another part to your plan. You talked about that earlier. Can you elaborate on that, too?

Which part did you like?

No. After going through the plan, the other spreadsheet that you would go to.

I will also make this available. This is my recovery plan, and there are four columns to it. I encourage men to fill out even if it’s just a couple of things, just to test the waters. In the first column, you’ll fill in what challenge you’re facing. Loneliness, self-esteem, your health, and your regrets may be what you might have about your relationship with your now deceased wife.

Whatever the challenge is, steps need to be taken. What steps do you need to take to solve that challenge? The third line is the desired outcome. How will you overpower the challenge that you’re facing and then the target date by which you want to achieve it? Now I will send you the template for this, and then you can make as many copies as you want. If you like, I’ll even entertain a phone call or whatever to help coach you through it.

You also mentioned a podcast. Can you share the name of your podcast, where they can find it, and how often it comes out?

You can go to the Widowers Support Network on the website, and then it has the podcast listed under services, and 48 episodes are up, and I’ve interviewed authors, and I interviewed widowed men. I’ve interviewed sociologists and psychologists, and you name it. It too is very well received, and it’s got a lot of attention from folks.

Thank you. One of the things that you talked about is being active. If someone has been in the house for a while, they’ve closed the curtains, they’ve gone to work, and they’ve just come home. They’ve not been engaged in the world. What are some soft steps in becoming active again that you could recommend?

It all depends on one’s personal likes and dislikes, but you can start with church. Every church I know is looking for volunteers, and whether it’s collecting the donations that week or if it’s maybe passing out brochures or maybe assisting the clergy with the service that’s being performed, or maybe it’s even helping with the annual lawn fate that the church is hosting to raise money.

You can start with the church, and as I said, you can join the Lions, can join the Kiwanis Club, you can join the Knights of Columbus. There are all sorts of organizations. You can join a hospice. What one man did, a man was that of a piano player, and he volunteered his hours. He played the piano in the hospital where his wife passed in. He did that in memory of her. You can pick your wife’s favorite interest. Maybe it’s the flower club, or maybe it’s a ladies auxiliary of some type, and donate your hours to them in the name of your wife.

That is beautiful. I’ve started to go out. I’m engaging the world, and now I’m starting to make these expectations. I’ve got the plan. I’m making this list. Do I get too enthusiastic? How do I balance that to make sure that I’m not creating unrealistic expectations for myself?

You’ll know if you get overwhelmed, but you can always call me, and I’ll coach you. I’ve done a lot of that. I do it every week for different folks, and I’m happy to do it. There’s no charge for that.

When you look at what you started this book, a seven-year journey, what were some of the benefits for you personally in going through this with the 40 men and watching them?

I’m a pretty gregarious gentleman, and I knew that I wasn’t anymore after my wife passed. It hit me pretty hard. When my colleagues started to notice, I realized I’d better get serious about my recovery. That’s what prompted me to look into it. Writing the book was therapeutic for me. Establishing the Widower Support Network was very therapeutic for me. I contributed articles every week. Plus, I recruited about another 50 different writers who contributed articles on a rotation basis.

On the Widower Support Network, there are approximately 600 or 700 articles covering a wide range of topics that are available for any man who’s a member of that group anytime. There’s a search engine so you can pick the topic, dating or cooking or loneliness, or whatever it is. It will sort them out for you and deliver you the articles that pertain to that.

That is more than just a couple of men getting together to chat. This is a real resource that you created.

I should tell you that I sold my resource to another gentleman about within the last year ago, but I’m still involved. I’m still contributing, and I sold it. After seventeen years of building this, I needed to do it because I have to get some other things done in my life. I have to get some things done. I agreed to sell it, and I agreed to contribute to it. The new gentleman who owns it, Chris Bentley, has gone even further in elaborating the different services that he offers. Last week I participated in a call that he had.

He services both widowed men and women. He brought them all together in a conference call. We broke up into two groups, men and women, and the men which I participated, had a very powerful, tearful session for about an hour. He has a newsletter. I encourage you to look at the Widowers Support Network, and you will be very impressed. I’m proud to be the one who started it. I found a good person to take it from me.

That is beautiful. More questions. I know the term widower is what’s used, but what if someone was a domestic partner, they were not married, or they had been living with a fiancee are they welcome to your group? Say welcome to our relationships, and people who are grieving the loss of a partner, does it just have to be somebody who was married?

They are welcome. We even have some gay couples. A gentleman actually registered a complaint that he’s due to my actions dating back about a year ago, but he offered him up verbally. It was that I asked him for a copy of his wife’s death certificate, and he thought that was an intrusion. About 20 men, maybe 25, commented, “No. I’m glad Herb does that. He sorts through. He protects our audience.” A lot of evildoers would love to have access to my database and my membership roster, so I’d protect them by insisting that they’d be without.

Our group does the same. At least at this point, taking technology, you could just send us a link, and we can go to that and see. You are right. Some people want to do misdeeds to stay in this group because they see you as prey. You’re vulnerable. You’re in a compromised mental state, and people can prey upon that. That is good that you take that extra step because it is important.

What’s interesting is I mentioned earlier that my membership is from the twenties to like maybe the 80s. When they post a question for the other members to read and hopefully contribute an answer, they never ask for the age. They never know is the man who’s asking the question is 70 or is he 30? I have never seen a man ask about the age. It’s just that if there’s a common thread throughout all of them, they’re widowed. That’s enough.

What are some overarching tips that you think about grief, holidays, and being a widower?

We have music that gets some people through the holidays. The holidays are tough, and they come right after another. The Thanksgiving, the Christmas, the New Year’s, and then the Valentine’s Day. It can be very hard. I would just tell the people to pray over it. I’m a man of faith, so I will not apologize for being that.

Listen to your heart, try to be with others, and be patient with others if they miscue or if they say something insensitive, because Americans, we don’t know what we’re doing when we’re talking to a widower. I had a woman come up to me many months after my wife died, and she said, “I really wanted to call you, but I didn’t want to bother you.” I said, “I wish you had.” They use it as an excuse that, “I don’t know what to say. I won’t call.” That happens more times than not.

That is a very good point. Do you think people are more concerned about how they feel in supporting you than making the focus about the person who is free?

I had a woman my first day back to work, which was like ten days after my wife died, and a vice president walked up to me, and she started asking me all these questions. She said, “I want to introduce you to my aunt.” I said, “That’s not going to happen.” Maybe she was being supportive. It’s her. Thought she was being supportive because she knew that I had a loss, and I have a shoe to fill with hopefully a new woman in my life. I took it to be offensive, and people don’t know what to say. They really don’t. They don’t talk.

They would rather console a woman than a man any day. They’re so afraid that men start to cry. What am I going to do? I don’t have any anchors or tissues on me. In fact, I will tell you the story. My first day back at work, I’m in my office, and I’m crying. The head of the human resources department walked into my office. He saw me at my desk crying. He turned around and walked right back out, closing the door behind him.

If he had a redo, what would you recommend he could have done?

He should have at least offered me a Kleenex. He should have come in, sat down and closed the door behind him, and offered his condolences to me this sympathies. He didn’t know what to say. The head of human resources. He just walked out.

What are some things people can say?

They can say, “I’m very sorry. I’ll hold you, your wife, and your family in my prayers. If there’s anything that I can do, I want you to lean on me.” Offer your services, even if you know he’ll never take them. Offer support and say anything you need. I do that all the time. I offer myself. I have a friend of mine right now who’s dying, and he needs to go to the doctor often. I offered to drive him, and it may be something small.

It may be just being someone that they can call in the middle of the night. I needed somebody when my wife was dying. I went out to the parking lot in the hospital, and I called a friend of mine that I hadn’t seen in fifteen years, but I knew he had lost his wife. At 3:00 in the morning, I called him, and he consulted me. You don’t know what the person’s going to need, but don’t withhold your services offer. Someday you’re going to need that.

Herb, this has been a really insightful conversation. Is there anything else you feel like we should have talked about that we didn’t mention that would be helpful for the gentleman?

Advice & Encouragement For Long-Term Healing

I would like to stress keeping your health in check. A 65% of newly widowed men will have a life-threatening illness within twelve months. It takes effort to be healthy, especially for us older gentlemen. Last week I went to five different doctors. One was a dermatologist, and one was a dentist, but the other one was a neurologist. The other one was a cardiac doctor. It takes effort to be healthy and watch your diet, and watch the substance abuse and the alcohol, because it’s not the answer. Give your grief to God is what I like to do. He will be there for you every single time.

What does it look like to give your grief to God? I hear the term, but what is the action of that for someone who’s tuning in and they’re trying to say, “How do I do that?”

You just have your prayerful conversation with the Almighty and offer. Just say, “I’m not going to search for answers. I’m waiting for them to come to me from the Almighty.” You’re going to do your best to take care of your children, to take care of your job, your responsibilities, so you don’t lose it. You can still pay the mortgage and not lose your house. That happens a lot.

The cars can be repossessed when people start losing their jobs, or they cannot focus. That’s why you have to go see a psychologist or a psychiatric ward or something. You can get through this. I have seen it time and time again, where men feel that there’s no hope for their situation, that they’re unique. Six months later, “I guess I’m okay.” I would encourage men to journal. If you don’t know what a journal is, write your thoughts down in a book with blank pages.

Every day, even if it’s just one sentence, but something that you will accomplish that day, some things that maybe upset you that day, and do it every day. In 30, 60, 90 days, look back at the beginning and see how far you’ve come. It can be done. Millions of men have done it before. Since the beginning of time, in their own way, they have recovered in the past, and then your audience can do it too. If I have to help them, I will.

Thank you, Herb. I’ve asked you a lot of questions, and I know you’re a podcaster. I’m going to give you the opportunity to ask me a question or two.

Do you want me to ask you a question?

Sure.

You were in the military, or you’re still in the military?

Retired Army CW, two logisticians.

If you were to be introduced to a widowed man. Would you hesitate to date a widowed man, or would you prefer a divorced man?

I am remarried already.

Then you’d better not then.

I’m going to say before I remarried, when I was dating, I actually had the mindset that it would have been easier to date another widower because they would have some sense of understanding of the emotional triggers. What is it like to always love somebody else but be open to loving someone new?

I tried that, but it just didn’t work out. My current husband is a divorcee, but I was more concerned about someone else. I am 59, about to be 60. I know you’re older. I wasn’t a spring chicken when I was getting married the second time. I never thought about being in this dating world. I had a lot of questions about maturity, communication skills. Just what I saw is this second version of a partner. I love my late husband.

I knew my expectations of someone I was going to share life with needed to be. I will say this, I did want somebody who had been married before, because if you’ve not been married at this age, I felt like that was going to be hard to learn how to share your life with someone. It was a divorce, or they passed. I thought having marital experience was going to be necessary.

I happen to agree with you that widowed men, at least in my group, I would encourage women to make themselves available to my audience because they loved their deceased wife, and they’re capable of that love. Some men question whether or not their love is called into question because they’re falling in love with a second woman. The human heart is able to love more than once. I know that if I ever made my mailing list available, I would get a fortune in bids because I have 3000 widowed men. I won’t do it. I won’t sell the list.

Thank you for the question. I’m going to say something to our audience, and then I’m going to allow you to close out this conversation. Thank you for joining us today. I am so sorry for the person who is no longer in your life who has driven you to this conversation, but I know the words that she shared are going to be helpful. Maybe you know a widower who is struggling or who feels like they’re alone, and this conversation would be helpful. I encourage you to share this podcast with them. Maybe that’s the way that you show up for them the very first time, saying, “I see you, this conversation resonated with me, and I want to share it with you.”

Very good. Tina, you are an extraordinary woman who’s doing extraordinary deeds that should be admired and applauded. Congratulations on that. I would tell the men, you’re not so unique. You can be happy. You can find joy again in your life. Let me send you my fifteen steps of recovery. I will take a phone call from your followers if they wish to talk to me, but write me first at Herb@TheWidowersJourney.com. I will leave you with this thought. “Celebrate your wife’s life by living yours.”

Thank you so much.

You’re welcome.

Important Links

• Herb Knoll
• Herb@TheWidowersJourney.com
• The Widower’s Journey: Helping Men Rebuild After Their Loss
• The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss
• Widowers Support Network on Facebook

About Herb Knoll

Herb Knoll is an author, speaker, and retired banking executive whose life took a profound turn after losing his wife, Michelle, to pancreatic cancer in 2008. Shocked by the lack of resources for widowed men, Knoll redirected his career and spent nearly a decade researching the emotional, physical, and social impact of widowhood. His work culminated in the release of The Widower’s Journey in 2017, a highly rated book that has become a valued guide for widowers seeking healing and hope.

Driven by his mission to support grieving men, Knoll founded the Widowers Support Network (WSN) in 2014 to “serve, comfort, and assist widowers and those who love them.” His advocacy inspired the award-winning play I’m Fine and led to the creation of the Widower’s Journey Podcast, which earned top rankings among programs for widowed audiences and developed a global following across 44 countries. In recognition of his contributions, the Florida House of Representatives honored Knoll with a formal Tribute in 2021.

After 16 years of dedicated service, Knoll transitioned leadership of WSN to WidowWise LLC while continuing to support the organization as its founder. Looking ahead, he plans to focus on writing additional books and delivering live presentations to widowed men and women across the United States.

Knoll’s multifaceted career includes serving as a columnist, magazine contributor, and senior banking executive with leadership roles at Marketplace Bank, Farm Bureau Bank, Bank of America, and KeyBank. His earlier book, The Total Executive, earned him the inaugural Piero DiMitri Executive Image Award, and he later hosted the PBS business series Today’s Executive. Over the years, he has been recognized by the Buffalo/Niagara Sales & Marketing Executives Hall of Fame and served on numerous nonprofit and civic boards.

A former U.S. Army Reserve Senior Drill Sergeant and a Fourth Degree Knight of Columbus, Knoll now lives in Lake Mary, Florida, with his wife, Maria C. Knoll, Ph.D. He continues to speak, write, and lead workshops—offered at no charge to community groups, faith organizations, and support networks—providing guidance and encouragement to those navigating life after loss.