Dubai’s Widow Warriors: Meet the inspiring sisterhood finding strength after profound loss

It’s a quiet January evening, and a table in a lit garden is being set. A group of women laugh, smile as they place food on the table.

It’s a potluck dinner, and a little excitement fills the air along with the smell of momos and chutney.

Who made what? They settle down on the couch, enjoying the momos and insisting that we join them too. On the side, a little girl sits with her book. Her mother guides her to eat.

These are Dubai’s ‘Widow Warriors’, a slowly expanding community of sisterhood founded by Priya Pinto, a transformational coach. Each have suffered an immeasurable loss, and so they just help each other as much as they can. There’s just endless love and warmth that they need on particularly trying days. It helps with grief--the awkward guest that follows them everywhere; unfortunately, no negotiation works on that front.

Sometimes, grief makes pressing demands. And sometimes it threatens to swallow them whole.

And that’s why they have each other. The laughter doesn’t erase the grief, but it makes space for it.

‘I was blessed to have spent so much time with him’

It’s easy to see why the other women feel the strength of Pinto’s energy and radiance. She holds on to the light of her best memories and the warmth spreads to others. As she says about her late husband, how can someone who has given you so much happiness, be the source of your pain?

Sharing her story, she begins. “I came to Dubai in 2000, when I was just newly married. I came with my husband, and we built the most beautiful life together. I had my two children, here in Dubai.”

He was her childhood sweetheart; she had known him since she was 9 years old. “He went from friend to best friend, to best friend to husband, to father of my children.” They had done everything together: Skydiving. A 10k marathon. “Just a full life up to that point.”

One day, he went to play football, just as he had been doing for 17 years.

He suffered a massive heart attack, and passed away a day later. Perhaps, to give her a little time, she believes. But death will always be sudden, and it felt gnawing. There had been no signs or foreshadowing of it. He was just 39, and they had been preparing for his 40^th birthday.  

She was then faced with a nerve-wracking decision: Stay in Dubai, or go home to India. The immediate decision as grief washed over her, was yes, return to India. How can a single mum bring up children in Dubai? Yet, after the funeral, she made a decision. “I felt that we had decided to bring up our children in Dubai, and I was going to give that a shot.”

And give that a shot, she did.

 Dismissing the stereotypes of Dubai glamour and no substance, Pinto recalls the help she received at every stage, beginning with the landlord who told her, “Don’t worry. You stay as long as you need to.”

Rebuilding

She began to piece herself together, slowly. While working as a volunteer at a hospital, she would meet and help people. One lady, named Pam, who meets many widows and would suggest them to speak to Pinto in this unsteady, arduous journey of grief. “I remember, one lady, coming into my house, named Charu. Her shoulders were drooped and the light was off in her eyes, and she was carrying the world on her shoulders. I recognised that so well,” says Pinto. The two women spent the evening just sharing stories. But the impact on Charu appeared immediate: She left the house, not feeling alone. “That’s when I realised, the power of sharing stories and building a community,” explains Pinto, who has also written a book, Ma, Will Life Ever Be the Same Again.

The Widow Warriors

That’s how the Widow Warriors began, in April 2021, in the middle of COVID. The first meeting was online. Pinto was unsure of how to run such a group, and just promised to be there and that they won’t pass judgement. They would just hear each other. Once they met in person, there was a different energy. “There’s nothing like meeting in person,” says Pinto. They met at her house, or somewhere else.

Perhaps a potluck, or maybe a night of games.Maybe, just an evening where they trade stories, and what’s going on in their lives.

However, painful days arrive sometimes like a storm. The group becomes oxygen. They can call each other at any time, and that includes at even 3 am. “It is the place where you are completely understood. One of us could be having a breakdown and writing paragraphs on the WhatsApp group, and it would be read by all of us, and we would all be feeling her pain at that time. We understand it doesn’t stop,” says Bhavna Nihalani, another fellow Widow Warrior.

With others, they might feel hesitant to share their pain after a point.

But that doesn't happen in this group.

‘Here, nobody feels sorry for me’

In this group, everyone has the same fears, doubts and similar stories, explains Charu Rab Nawaz, who lost her husband to a sudden heart attack, five years ago. “My family might have sympathy, but here, you can keep sharing. I am understood in a way, where no one feels sorry for me,” she says. Even her children know, that if she feels low, she would reach out to the Warriors to feel better. “They will ask me, if I have spoken to Priya or not,” she says with a laugh.

Nawaz’s journey to the Warriors, began soon after her husband’s death. “The world had flipped, and I did not see a life where I could continue to be without my husband. The first two years were dark. Day in and day out, I had panic attacks. I was researching for my children, how do children without a father grow up? Would they be stable emotionally?” She recalls. After the funeral, she was jolted again, her daughter had to be hospitalizsd. For the first time, she had to make a critical decision entirely on her own, and she did.

Since then, she has tuned out anyone who tried to tell her something was impossible. “The more someone says I can’t, the more determined I become to prove them wrong,” she laughs. Finding Pinto and witnessing her joy, she finally began to believe: There is a light at the end of this tunnel.

 ‘I realised feeling safe is possible’

Quiet, soft-spoken Smitha Ajit lost her husband in 2019. Her world had completely stopped. “I was not even thinking about the future. I was not thinking about my career, or anything. I did not know where to start,” she remembers.

It’s almost like a paralysis that takes hold, leaving you stuck in survival mode. You live day to day, and look at what needs to be done, as Ajit says. “It just felt that no one would understand what you are going through, not unless they’ve gone through it. It’s so difficult to share something like that with someone,” she says.

The simplest of things was just doing ordinary tasks. Waking up in the morning, going out in the world and pretending to be okay.

Two years later, she found a comfort and space in a friend who would eventually lead her to Pinto’s group. “I would talk to her on a daily basis, and it was four hours, because the grief just hits all of a sudden.” Sometimes, she wouldn’t even know the trigger. Anyone can say anything and suddenly memories surge. “You need to talk to someone, because you cannot just sit with that emotion.”

And when she met Pinto’s group, some part of the burden was lifted from her shoulders. “I started understanding and believing that feeling safe is possible. Till then, I wasn’t feeling safe with anyone,” she said. In the meetings with the group, she felt an unconditional love that she had not seen in two years. “It made me feel so empowered,” explains Ajit. “They are the chosen family for me.”

It has been six years, and Ajit, like the others, has lived several lifetimes since then. There’s something she would like to tell her 2019 self, however. “I had this strange belief, because maybe of my conditioning in childhood, that you can’t ask for help. If you do, you are seen as weak. That’s how I grew up, and that’s how the people around me have been.”

But this belief was shredded by the group. “I just felt safe to express myself,” she says. “The universe has really guided me to this community of girls. I have not seen so many people with so much hope, and urge to live life to the fullest.”

The goal: Buy a house. Focus.

Bhavna Nihalani met her husband at the age of 15, and had spent 17 years with him. In 2018, he passed away.“He was my husband, the father of my son, business partner, and everything. A really big part of my life. And suddenly, someone just turned the light off on that,” she says.

Insomnia overwhelmed her. “I could not, understand how I am surviving without sleep. I couldn’t understand when the night would fall, and when the morning would come,” she says. “I would just be sitting up all night, trying to process what happened.”

One day, Pinto reached out to her.  The conversation was for over two hours, and she just kept talking about her feelings. In those two hours, Pinto helped her focus on goal: Go, buy a house. The thought took root in her mind. “My therapist helped me in identifying a safe thought that I can practice. And my safe thought was imagining myself standing in the balcony of my house, looking down at my child happily playing,” recalls Nihalani.

And, it encouraged her to buy a house. With a little joy, she says, “It’s such a big deal for me.”

‘Acceptance is hard…it’s very, very hard’

Sometimes, a part of the person dies too along with their loved ones. It’s reborn too, painfully, carefully and takes steps carefully, just trying to put one foot in front of the other.

Richa Naik, is taking those steps. Her life dramatically changed in 2018, when her husband had a seemingly innocuous eye issue that turned out to be a brain tumour. “My was daughter then four years old,” she says, adding that the tumour was complex and located in the brain where it couldn’t even be treated surgically.

They went for radiation, felt relieved to know that it had reduced, only to learn, three months later that the ordeal wasn’t over. Things started dramatically changing, when her husband started falling. “He was falling on his face, and within weeks, the tumour was the size of a golf ball.”

She had to make a bitter acceptance at the time. “It was hard. It was so, so hard,” she said. There were eleven hospitalisations in one year, and sometimes they would return home from the doctor, only to go back to the hospital again, with their daughter in the back seat. As she says, one of the most painful parts of it all, was watching her child mature before time.

And then her husband passed away.

Naik finds it hard to recognise herself now, as she says. She looks in the mirror, sees the grey hair, and sees a different version of her. “I have grey hair at 40. This is a completely new me,” she says. Like many others, she is grateful for the community, grateful that it shatters the stereotypes of women tearing each other down, and instead lifts each other up. The group avoids well-meaning platitudes that can do more harm than good, like insisting someone simply accept their fate or telling them to ‘move on.’

They just hold each other in these moments of grief and find ways to build little joys, everyday.  

The lessons on the journey

There’s no textbook to grief.

The women keep learning as they go along. One lesson was: The idea of being strong and not crying in front of your children. Pinto questions this idea and says, “What lesson am I giving them, if I don’t cry in front of them? If something happens, you’re not supposed to cry? Instead, when I showed my vulnerability to my children, I got even closer to them.”

It’s one of the many lessons that the Widow Warriors have learned. Pinto looks with pride at this comforting group of sisterhood. These women are joyous and living their lives, she emphasises.

 The shadow of loss will always remain, but they are determined to change what it means to live after loss.  “You can’t get over it. They’re always going to live on in your heart forever, in all your tomorrows,” says Nihalani. Her husband is always with her, because after all, the dead are not truly dead to us unless we forget them. “I see signs of him in my life everyday. In my head, I’m always talking to him, and seeking his help.”

He’s always there, and yet he is not. The feeling of loss comes in waves. “I try to tell myself every day that I'm doing my best to fill in the gap,” she says.

Grief takes many forms. It's the awkward guest. It's waves submerging you. It's a monster that can eat you whole, or it's a snake that pulls you into its coils and strengthen its grip.

But, maybe, just maybe, you can find the way out, slowly. “You can wake up and say, ‘My husband is gone. I’m alone. Why me?’ Or, you can say, I have two children. I will live for them,” adds Pinto.

Whatever you choose, he’s not coming back, she says with a quiet smile. But maybe, you can try rewriting your story from ‘Why me’ to a new ‘why’.

And, after meeting Dubai's Widow Warriors, you just learn, loss may have altered their lives, but it didn’t get the final word.