He and his wife of 14 years, Michele Stone, had a unique relationship that he doesn't believe he's likely to find again. He'd met her almost by happenstance after a friend asked him to tag along to a conference for a medieval re-creation group called the Society for Creative Anachronism, or SCA. Stone, who was 14 years older than Westfall, was an SCA member and needed a ride. While she spent much of the weekend trying to introduce Westfall to women closer to his age, he wasn't interested. When the conference ended, the two began dating.
About six years into the marriage, Stone's health began to fail. Primary pulmonary hypertension destroyed her lungs, requiring her to have a lung transplant. The transplant eroded her immune suppression system forcing her onto dialysis. She ultimately died of a stroke. Stone was sick for so long that when she finally passed, Westfall says he was prepared for it. She'd been in and out of the hospital and rehab so often during the last several months that even the dogs got used to her being gone.
"It wasn't like she got hit by a truck and died without warning," Westfall says. "And I was pretty much running everything for the last couple of years anyway, with her on disability and not working. It was not a normal spousal relationship."
Westfall says he didn't fall into a deep depression, though he's yet to deal with her possessions. He says he still has some of her family heirlooms, that both Stone's brother and sister would like, but he can't decide which items to part with, and so he holds onto all of them.
He imagines himself remarrying at some point. In fact he's dating someone from the medieval re-enactment group, but he's in no hurry to re-connect. "I'm not really good at relationships," he says. "I've had one successful one, and that one was driven a lot by Michele."
None of this is to say that men don't mourn. In fact a study conducted last year by three finance professors from major business schools tracked the operating return on assets of 75,000 Danish companies two years before and after the CEO had experienced a family death. The study, conducted by three finance professors (Morten Bennedsen of the Copenhagen Business School, Francisco Pérez-González of the University of Texas and Daniel Wolfenzon of New York University), found that financial performance declined 21.4% after the loss of a child, 14.7% after the death of a spouse and about 8% after the demise of a parent or other family member. Still, the drops in profitability were apparently sharper at companies headed up by women.
There are no shortcuts around grief, says Mark Colgan, a CFP in Rochester, N.Y. It doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman: You just have to go through it. Colgan would know. He lost his wife seven years ago to complications from a congenital heart condition. She was 28. A financial planner with years of experience, Colgan says even he had a hard time managing his financial affairs after his wife died, mostly because he couldn't concentrate.
"When people rush it, like changing the bank account titles, selling the house, making all of these mature but premature moves, it's not helping matters," Colgan says. "On the surface, it may appear they are moving out of their grief well, but is that the case? Or are they rushing themselves?"
It's almost easier for people who become clinically depressed, because everyone around them can prepare for it and assist accordingly, says Colgan. What's more profound is when someone's depression goes undiagnosed, and yet it can lead to bad decisions. One of the most common, Colgan says, is moving.
"They think, let's sell the house and move to Florida," Colgan says. "From my personal experience, the reason people make a decision like that is because they hope the grieving will stop."
People who are grieving-and this crosses gender lines-will do all kinds of things to try to outrun their loss. Joan Smith says that when her mother was dying, the doctors approached her father and asked him whether he wanted them to pull his wife off of the respirator. He said of course not, that he wanted them to do everything humanly possible to keep his wife alive.