When Judith Fox was 50, her husband, Jerry Fox, was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. Exactly one month after his diagnosis, he was dead.
\nThe tragedy was a total shock to Fox, who wasn\u2019t sure where to turn when she found herself a 50-year-old widow. She didn\u2019t know anyone who had been widowed, let alone anyone her age.
\n“It was a major struggle, on top of the pain of his death,” she said. “I turned to some books that were available at the time, but they were all basically written by the same person. They were helpful up to a point, but they were only from one perspective.”
\nFox said she felt the process of mourning her husband\u2019s death would have been made much easier if she could have had access to similar stories of struggle. “We need stories to help frame our experiences,” she said. “It\u2019s how we\u2019ve always done it historically.”
\nFox, a photographer and writer who published a book about her second husband, Edmund Ackell, and his struggle with Alzheimer\u2019s in 2009, decided that, though she couldn\u2019t help her 50-year-old self deal with widowhood, she could help those struggling now. On Sept. 3, Fox\u2019s newest book, “One Foot Forward: Stories and Faces of Widows and Widowers” was released. Though she essentially wrote a book that she said would have helped her when dealing with the loss of her first husband, the process of writing “One Foot Forward” was cathartic for other reasons, as well. Ackell, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer\u2019s in 1998, is now under hospice care, and Fox is once again preparing for the inevitable. “In great measure I wrote a book that would have helped back then, but Ed is at the end of his life now,” she said. “Since his diagnosis, I\u2019ve been experiencing what\u2019s known as anticipatory grief.”
\nFox set forth in finding widows and widowers to interview, and for nearly a year she lived and breathed the project. She wanted as large a cross section as she could find, and find it she did. Young, old, male, female, straight, gay \u2014 they\u2019re all covered in the individuals she interviewed. Only one variable stayed relatively consistent: location. That was what shocked her the most, Fox said.
\n“I thought I would have to travel all over the country to find people who had the experiences I wanted to profile,” she said. “It turned out all but one lived in Southern California, and I found every one either because I knew them or friends knew them, or friends of friends knew them. And that tells me that there are so many stories around us that we never get to hear or learn from. They are literally all around us.”
\nFox\u2019s book tells the story of a young mother who lost her husband suddenly and was left with three young children. It tells of octogenarians who watched their spouses slowly deteriorate before their death. It tells of a military wife whose husband died in Iraq and a young woman whose husband committed suicide. There is the story of a middle-aged gay man who lost his husband and the story of a woman who was contemplating how to help her terminally ill husband die, the way they had both planned years earlier. One woman tells the story about how her husband died in an accident \u2014 shortly after she had served him divorce papers. Some experienced the horrors of a violent or painful death, while others were able to plan for a peaceful passing. Each story is accompanied by candid photographs of the storytellers as they recount their experiences with death. Fox said one of her rules for inclusion in the process was that the subjects be open and honest with their feelings and stories, and she wanted the photographs to reflect that.
\n“I wanted to have very informal, conversational interviews,” she said. “And I wanted to capture that on film. The photos are very emotional, raw and real. I think they capture the complexity of loss and humanity and dignity. I planned that. It was absolutely what I wanted.”
\nLike her last book, “I Still Do: Loving and Living with Alzheimer\u2019s,” Fox hopes “One Foot Forward” will help broaden the conversation on a difficult topic. Her own experience as a widow struggling to understand death and loss exposed a society that is patently uncomfortable with end-of-life issues.
\n“We all know it\u2019s coming, but it\u2019s like we don\u2019t believe it,” she said. “Some of that is understandably protective, but it does us all a disservice. It makes something difficult to begin with much more difficult. These stories are all around us, but we may not know it because it\u2019s not part of our culture to talk about it.”
\nApart from contributing to the social dialogue, Fox is using her book to help in other \u2014 perhaps more tangible \u2014 ways. One hundred percent of the author royalties from “One Foot Forward” will be donated to the National Hospice Foundation, a cause near to her heart. At a book-signing event at Warwick\u2019s on Monday, Sept. 16, a percentage of the proceeds will be donated to local Elizabeth Hospice.
\n“I find that books can serve as a platform to advocate for things I really care about,” she said. “\u2026 With \u2018One Foot Forward,\u2019 it gives me the opportunity to encourage a conversation about death, but also about palliative and hospice care \u2026 It\u2019s another area people are uncomfortable with, something they think means they will die in the next week. But it\u2019s about much more than that. It\u2019s about comfort and care at the end of life.”
\nFor Fox, the stories in the book \u2014 though all very different \u2014 should reflect just how much we\u2019re all alike when it comes to death and grief.
\n“We\u2019re all different in our own way, yet grief and loss touch us all, regardless of where we live or our circumstances,” she said. “I know that for myself, talking to others really helped me understand what I\u2019m going through now. Each loss is specific, but they\u2019re universal also.”
\nFox will be at Warwick\u2019s, 7812 Girard Ave., on Sept. 16 at 7:30 p.m. to discuss and sign her book, which is available for $29.95. For more information on her writings and photography, visit judithfox.com.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When Judith Fox was 50, her husband, Jerry Fox, was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. Exactly one month after his diagnosis, he was dead. The tragedy was a total shock to Fox, who wasn\u2019t sure where to turn when she found herself a 50-year-old widow. She didn\u2019t know anyone who had been widowed, […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":282664,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11560","_seopress_titles_title":"In recounting stories of death and grief, local author shows it\u2019s all about putting \u2018one foot forward\u2019","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11560,11551],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-282663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-la-jolla-village-news","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282663\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/282664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}