Long after the condolences fade and the casseroles stop arriving, widowhood often becomes an intensely private kind of survival — especially for younger women still raising children, caring for aging parents and trying to appear strong for everyone around them.
That was the reality Gina Lissone, of Baldwin, and Medina “Dina” Fonville, of Brentwood, said they encountered while searching for help on Long Island as younger widows: rooms filled with sympathy, but few women who shared their cultural background, family dynamics or the unspoken understanding of what grief looked like in their communities. Feeling that absence pushed the two women to ask a difficult question: Where were the others like them?
The answer became Widow’s Journey Reach One Teach One, a nonprofit through which Lissone and Fonville are now building a culturally conscious healing space for younger widows, particularly women of color, who they say are too often taught to grieve quietly and endure privately.
When Lissone’s husband died in May 2023, the now 56-year-old registered nurse she felt not only devastated, but untethered. As a younger widow, she knew few women her age navigating the same sudden shift in identity, family life and loneliness. Hoping to find community, she joined a Long Island bereavement group — and quickly realized something else was missing.
“No one in the room looked like me,” Lissone recalled.
“I am a Black woman,” she said. “While it was a great experience, and we all had the commonality of losing our husbands, I did find that it was missing a little bit of sharing with people from my own culture and my faith.”
Fonville, also 56, a hospice nurse, had entered that same room two years earlier, after losing her husband to Covid-19, just five days after his diagnosis.
“I don’t think you know what to expect when you enter a bereavement group,” Fonville said. “You just feel like, ‘OK, I need support.’”
Both women said the support they found was meaningful, but not complete. The loss in the room was shared, they explained, but many of the cultural expectations they carried into widowhood — to remain strong, keep family life moving and avoid appearing emotionally unraveled — were harder to articulate among women who did not share those same experiences.
Lissone said that in her own community, asking openly for mental health care can still feel uncomfortable, if not taboo. “We tend to be a little bit more guarded about things, and feeling as if we’re strong enough to handle it,” she said. “Meanwhile, you’re secretly dying inside.”
Both women said that the instinct to pray through pain or privately endure it often keeps widows from getting involved in formal grief treatment.
“People hear ‘mental health’ — ‘oh my God, I’m not crazy. Oh no, I don’t need a therapist,’” Lissone said. “There’s so much of that associated with it, and then people are suffering silently.”
As they continued attending weekly support sessions, both women found themselves asking the same question: If they needed this kind of support so deeply, where were the other younger widows of color navigating the same loneliness?
Lissone said she had already begun imagining a space that felt more culturally familiar — one where women could speak more freely about faith, family, identity and the hidden pressures that come after loss.
“We just questioned, what would we want,” Fonville said, “and then we created basically what we wanted.”
That vision took formal shape in 2024, when they launched Widow’s Journey Reach One Teach One, a nonprofit created by nurses and certified grief educators. The organization is aimed particularly at women of color who may feel unseen in traditional grief spaces, using guided discussion, reflective exercises and community-building to help participants reconnect with confidence and routine.
This spring, less than two years after Lissone began her own bereavement journey, they launched one of the nonprofit’s flagship programs, Strength in Sorrow, with an inaugural group of five women. In weekly meetings, participants move through guided discussions on what the founders call the “12 Stones of Widowhood,” tackling emotions such as fear, loneliness, distrust and shifting identity.
The sessions are intentionally designed to go beyond conversation. Each also includes a hands-on exercise meant to help participants process grief physically and creatively — from building “joy jars” to creating collages that explore secondary losses and unexpected areas of growth.
“We’re not necessarily focusing on the sadness, the bereavement,” Lissone said. “We’re looking to empower people.”
“This is about healing and wellness,” Fonville added. “It’s about giving them tools.”
The atmosphere in the meetings, Fonville said, is far removed from the image many people associate with grief counseling. Rather than a room defined by tears and silence, she described women arriving cautiously at first — “like the first day of school,” she said — before gradually settling into activities and conversations that become increasingly candid with each passing week. By the second or third session, she said, strangers begin sounding more like friends.
“They are with people that get them, and they don’t have to explain,” Fonville said.
Both women said the early response has only reinforced what they suspected from the beginning: the need for this kind of grief support is far larger than many realize.
Participants have gradually begun sharing fears about identity, parenting, faith, finances and the uncertainty of rebuilding a life they never expected to be living alone — a shift that Lissone and Fonville say confirms many that widows had been searching for exactly this kind of experience.
They said they hope to expand through additional groups, partnerships, fundraising and broader grief resources that can reach more widows across Long Island.
“This is about taking the chance,” Fonville said. “You have absolutely nothing to lose and a whole lot to gain.”
Widow’s Journey Reach One Teach One is now assembling its fall Strength in Sorrow group, an eight-week bereavement program that meets from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Coes Neck Community Room in Baldwin and the Long Island Welcome Center in Dix Hills. Widows interested in participating or learning more can submit an inquiry through the organization’s contact form at widowsjourneyr1t1.org/contact-us.
