I Buried My Amish Husband Last Year, The First Thing I Did After

The black dress was still hanging on the back of the bedroom door when I did it. Three days after we buried him. Three days of casseroles arriving at my doorstep wrapped in dish towels. Three days of my mother-in-law sleeping in my spare room because a widow shouldn’t be alone. And on the fourth morning, before the sun came up, before anyone else was awake, I walked out to the woodshed in my bare feet across the frozen grass, and I did the one thing I had been thinking about for 13 years of marriage.

Before I tell you what I did, before I tell you why my hands were shaking so hard I almost dropped it, let me say this. I’m Hannah, and this is Hannah the Amish Girl. I grew up Old Order Amish in Lancaster County, and this channel is where I finally tell the truth about a world that asked us to swallow our voices for generations.

If you want to hear stories from behind the prayer cap that nobody else will tell you, please hit that subscribe button, tap the like, and turn on the notification bell so you don’t miss anything. And in the comments, tell me where you’re watching from. I want to know who’s listening tonight.

Daniel died on a Tuesday in February. He was 41 years old, a heart attack in the milking barn at 4:30 in the morning. He went out before sunrise the way he always did, and when he didn’t come back for breakfast, our oldest son Samuel went looking. Samuel found him kneeling beside the cow he’d been about to milk. His hat had fallen into the straw. The lantern was still burning.

I want to be honest with you because honesty is the whole reason I started this channel. I loved Daniel. He was a good man by every measure our community used. He worked hard. He prayed before every meal. He never raised his voice to me or to our five children. He was steady the way a good draft horse is steady, reliable, strong, never complaining about the weight of the harness.

And when I heard Samuel screaming from the barn that morning, I felt something break inside me that I will never fully be able to name.

But I am also going to tell you something that took me a year to say out loud, even to my therapist. When I sat beside his body waiting for the bishop and the undertaker to come, when my hand was on his cold hand and the lantern was still flickering, and the cow he had been about to milk was making that low sound cows make when they need to be milked and nobody is coming, I felt grief. And underneath the grief, quiet as a second heartbeat, I felt something else. Something I did not have a word for yet.

The Amish funeral happens fast. Within 3 days, the body is washed and dressed in white by family members. Daniel’s brothers built his coffin from plain pine in our barn while I made coffee for the men who came to help. There is no embalming. There are no flowers. The viewing happens in our home, his coffin in the front room where we had eaten supper together two nights before. Hundreds of people came through. I shook every hand. I accepted every casserole. I sat on the hard wooden bench during the 3-hour service, and I sang the Loblied from the Ausbund the way I had sung it every other Sunday of my life.

And the whole time, that second heartbeat under the grief was getting louder.

Here’s what nobody outside the community understands about Amish widowhood. The mourning period is structured down to the smallest detail. A widow wears black for one full year. Black dress, black apron, black bonnet, black stockings. No exceptions. After the year, she may transition to dark gray or dark purple, but only slowly and only with the bishop’s quiet approval. She does not attend social gatherings beyond church for at least 6 months. She does not laugh too loudly. She does not sing anything that isn’t a hymn. She does not, under any circumstances, do anything that might suggest she is anything other than completely defined by the man who is no longer there.

If you’re still here with me, please tap that like button. It really does help this channel reach other women who grew up the way I did, women who are still trying to find their voice. And subscribe if you haven’t yet, because I’m just getting to the part of this story that I have never told anyone.

The widow’s role goes deeper than clothing. There is an unwritten understanding in the Ordnung, the unspoken code that runs underneath every official rule, that a widow’s grief belongs to the community as much as to her. People will visit. People will check on her. People will, with genuine kindness and absolute certainty that they are helping, watch her for the entire first year to make sure she is grieving correctly.

My mother-in-law moved into my spare room the night Daniel died. She told me it was so I wouldn’t be alone. I knew her well enough to know she also believed, without ever saying so, that a widow alone with her own thoughts was a widow who might think the wrong things.

And I was thinking the wrong things.

On the night of the funeral, after everyone had finally gone home except my mother-in-law, I lay in the bed Daniel and I had shared for 13 years, and I stared at the ceiling, and I let myself think the sentence I had been pushing down for 3 days: I am 34 years old. And for the first time since I was 16, no one is waiting for me to do anything.

I don’t know how to explain to you what that sentence felt like. It was not happiness. Please understand that. It was something more complicated and more frightening. It was the feeling of standing at the edge of a field you have never been allowed to walk into and realizing the gate is open and no one is watching.

So, let me tell you what I did 3 days after we buried him.

In the back corner of the woodshed, behind the kindling box, behind the old harness Daniel had been meaning to fix for 2 years, there was a wooden crate. Inside that crate, wrapped in an oilcloth I had stolen from the buggy shop the year I turned 22, was a notebook. A simple black composition notebook, the kind English schoolchildren use.

I had bought it in a gas station 13 years ago on the one trip Daniel and I took to visit his cousins in Ohio, while he was inside paying for fuel. And I had hidden it in that crate the day we got home, and I had written in it once a week, every week, for 13 years by candlelight after Daniel was asleep. He never knew it existed.

I want to be clear that I do not believe he would have been cruel about it. I believe he would have been confused, then concerned, then he would have spoken to the bishop, and the bishop would have spoken to me kindly, and the notebook would have been burned in the kitchen stove with both of us watching, and I would have agreed it was for the best.

That is how the system works. Not through cruelty, through certainty, through the absolute conviction that everyone, especially the women, will be happier without the things that pull them away from the path.

And so, for 13 years, the notebook lived in the woodshed, and in it I had written every thought I was not allowed to have, every question about scripture I was not allowed to ask, every dream I had not been allowed to dream, the name of every book I had heard about from the English neighbors and wanted to read, the list of places I had wanted to see: the ocean, the mountains in Colorado, a library—just any library, where I could walk in and take a book off a shelf without anyone asking me why.

I’m going to pause here because I need you to know I’m doing okay telling you this. If this story is reaching you, please subscribe and turn on the notification bell so you don’t miss the next one. There are stories I’m finally ready to tell, and I want you with me when I tell them.

So, on the fourth morning, 3 days after we buried Daniel, I walked out to the woodshed in bare feet across the frozen grass. I unwrapped the oilcloth. I held that black notebook in both hands and I read it—all of it. Every single page.

I sat on an overturned bucket in the cold woodshed in my black mourning dress and I read 13 years of my own hidden voice. And I cried, but not the way I had cried for Daniel. I cried the way you cry when you find a person who has been lost for a long time and realize she was alive the whole time, just waiting.

Then I did the first thing I did after burying my husband. I took that notebook into the kitchen. I sat down at the table where I had served him three meals a day for 13 years. I lit the kerosene lamp because the sun still wasn’t up. And on a fresh page with a pencil I had sharpened with a paring knife, I wrote three sentences:

I am leaving the Amish. I am taking the children with me if they will come. I am going to find out who I would have been.

I want to tell you about my friend Rebecca because her story is the reason I had the courage to write those sentences. Rebecca was widowed at 29, 4 years before me. Her husband died in a buggy accident on Route 340.

She wore the black for the full year exactly as she was supposed to. Then she wore the dark gray for another year because her mother-in-law said it would look strange to switch back to color so soon. Then she wore the dark blue. Then her oldest son got married and her daughter-in-law moved in. And Rebecca, who had never lived alone for a single day of her life, who had gone from her father’s house to her husband’s house at 19, found herself 34 years old and quietly invisible in her own home.

She told me once at a quilting bee, in a voice so low I almost didn’t catch it, that she sometimes wondered if she had actually died in that buggy accident with her husband and just didn’t know it yet.

I never forgot that. The day I sat in the woodshed with my notebook, I heard Rebecca’s voice in my head as clearly as if she were standing beside me, and I understood that the system does not need to kill you to bury you.

Leaving was not fast and it was not clean. I’m not going to pretend it was. Three of my five children came with me. Two stayed. The two who stayed are now grown and they speak to me through letters that I treasure, even when they tell me they are praying for my soul. The shunning was immediate and it was total.

My mother has not spoken to me in 14 months. My father sent one letter, three sentences long, telling me he loved me and that he could not see me again until I return to the church. I keep that letter in the drawer of my nightstand. I read it on the hard nights.

In therapy, I have learned that what I felt in those 3 days between Daniel’s death and the morning I walked to the woodshed has a name. It is called the grief of the unlived life. It is what happens when someone you genuinely love dies, and in the silence after their death, you suddenly hear the woman you were never allowed to become, and she has been knocking on the inside of your chest for years, and you finally have to decide whether to let her out or keep her there until you die too.

My therapist, who has become one of the most important people in my life, told me something during our sixth session that I think about every day. She said grief and freedom are not opposites. They live in the same room. You can love someone deeply and still be relieved that the role you had to play for them is over.

That does not make the love less real. It makes you a whole human being instead of a costume.

If this is hitting you in a soft place, please drop a comment and tell me, and subscribe to this channel so you don’t miss the rest of these stories. I read every comment, and your words have carried me through the days when I wondered if I was wrong to leave.

The Amish world gave me my children. It gave me 13 years with a man who was, in his own quiet way, a good husband. It gave me a community that brought casseroles to my door for 2 weeks straight after Daniel died. Women who scrubbed my floors and milked my cows and asked nothing in return. I will not pretend that what I left was a prison. It was a home.

And it was also a place where the woman writing in a notebook by candlelight had to hide her own handwriting from the man sleeping next to her.

There is no theology I have ever read in any tradition that requires a woman to bury her own voice along with her husband. There is no scripture that says her grief must be the only thing she is allowed to feel.

The widow’s black is supposed to be a sign of love. In my community, it was also a uniform. And the morning I walked to the woodshed, I understood for the first time that the uniform had been on me long before Daniel died. I had just been too tired to notice.

I still wear black sometimes. Not because anyone is making me. Because I did love him, and grief deserves its own clothes some days. But I also wear blue now, and green, and one bright yellow sweater my daughter bought me for my 35th birthday that made my mother-in-law stop speaking to me for a month before she stopped speaking to me forever.

If you grew up in a place where your grief was a script and your future was already written, I see you. If you ever loved someone and also, quietly, in a part of yourself you were ashamed of, longed for the day the role would end—you are not a monster. You are a person who was given too small a life and too large a soul. Those two things will press against each other until one of them breaks, and it does not have to be the soul.

I buried my Amish husband last year. And the first thing I did after was open a notebook I had been hiding for 13 years and read the woman I had been all along. She was still in there. She had been waiting. And when I let her out, she did not run. She just stood up slowly, the way someone stands up after sitting too long, and she walked into the kitchen, and she started writing the rest of her life.

If this story stayed with you, tell me in the comments what part hit you hardest. I read every single one. And if you want to hear more truths from behind the prayer cap, please subscribe to Hannah the Amish Girl and turn on that notification bell. There is so much more I am finally ready to say.

Until next time: the woman you were before they put the dress on you is still in there. Go find her. She has been waiting longer than you know.