Saturday Night Widows

Six marriages, six heartbreaks, and a shared new beginning.

At the age of forty-seven, Becky Aikman became a widow. Married for twenty years, she found herself adrift both in the world she and her beloved husband Bernie had made for each other, and in the larger world of widowhood and mourning. In this transcendent and undeniably wise memoir, Saturday Night Widows, Aikman convenes a group of five widowed women who together change their lives.

Meet the Saturday Night Widows: ringleader Becky, an unsentimental journalist who lost her husband at the conclusion of his two-year battle with a rare cancer; Tara, mother of two, whose alcoholic husband died in the midst of divorce proceedings; Denise, a widow of just five months when the group first meets, who now finds herself struggling to stay afloat financially; Marcia, a hard-driving corporate lawyer and grown-up tomboy; Dawn, a voluptuous self-made entrepreneur whose husband and father of their two children was killed in an ATV accident; and Lesley, who stepped out one day on an errand and returned to find her husband had committed suicide, leaving her with two college-age children.

The Saturday Night Widows agree to meet once a month, beginning in January, and over the course of a year they learn to live past the worst thing that can happen. And they do it together. Using their monthly city meetings and later farther afield adventures as an anchor, Saturday Night Widows tells the story of six love affairs, six heartbreaks, and countless--and often very funny--attempts to honor grief and celebrate life. Through it all is the story of Becky Aikman's own happy ending: her love affair with her now-husband, Bob, and her commitment to help her fellow widows reach the other side of grief, where life and possibilities return. In a transporting story of what women can achieve when they hold each other up, Saturday Night Widows is one of those rare books that will make you laugh, think, and remind yourself that in spite of life's utter unpredictability and tragedy, it is also precious, fragile, and often more joyous than we recognize.