What Widows and Groundwater Have in Common

For eight years, I’ve walked alongside widows through the quiet aftermath of loss. That work shaped me. What I didn’t expect was that it would also prepare me for a new kind of grief; one rising in rural California as wells run dry, farmland changes hands, and families face a future they never planned for. What do widows and water have in common? More than you’d think.

The Work I Never Expected

For the past eight years, I’ve lived in the world of widowhood, not only as a guide, but as someone who has had to rebuild from the rubble. The death of my husband, Jason, broke something wide open in me. And in that break, something else began: a calling, a path, a steady pull toward work that mattered.

I’ve sat with women and men in the thick of their losses. I’ve helped them clear out homes, redo paperwork, and relearn how to breathe inside a life they didn’t choose. I’ve lived that work with my whole heart. Grief has been my home ground.

Grief as Preparation

Lately, I’ve found myself walking into different rooms: water board meetings, stakeholder sessions, advisory circles. My boots are now dusty with the language of groundwater, drought, and agricultural transition. And to my surprise, it doesn’t feel like I’ve stepped away. It feels like I’ve stepped further in. There is a correlation between widows and groundwater.

Grief taught me how to sit with uncertainty. How to stay when there’s nothing to fix. How to listen for the truth beneath the surface. Those are the very same skills the water world needs right now.

The Ache Beneath the Policy

In rural California, the ground is sinking. Wells are going dry. Families are being asked to reimagine the future of their land. And beneath all the modeling and policy language, something else is rising.

Grief.

.

It’s not always visible. It’s rarely acknowledged. But it’s there.

Ambiguous loss lives here, too.

The kind that comes in silence. The kind that lingers in legacy.

Expanding, Not Leaving

I’m not leaving the work I’ve done with widows. That work is sacred. It shaped me into someone who lives and loves with a depth I didn’t have before. Widowhood taught me how to hold pain with reverence and how to walk alongside people through the unthinkable. That work will always live in me.

What’s unfolding now isn’t a departure. It’s an expansion. A quiet opening into a new chapter where grief is still present, just expressed through different stories. I’m making space for both.

And I’m showing up with the same steady hands.

Listening Beneath the Surface

There was a phone call. Then a meeting. Then, a seat at a table I never expected. I showed up not as an expert, but as someone who understands what it means to lose the life you planned, and still find a way forward.

If I’ve been quiet, it’s because I’ve been learning. Listening for the stories behind the spreadsheets. Finding a new language that still speaks to what I’ve always known: the human part matters most.

Thank you for walking with me.

See you at the table,

Julie