In this program Barbara Rady Kazdan, author and Women’s Connection member, will share her personal experiences to help participants consider and learn to cope with the challenges of widowhood.
In an interview format, Barbara Kazdan will offer insights she gained as a widow. Selby McPhee, fellow author and recent widow, will ask her to expand on topics like these:
• Where did you initially find help and emotional support?
• As a new widow, what were some of the biggest challenges you faced?
• What did you try that yielded new engagements and relationships?
After the interview, everyone will participate in a short small group discussion to brainstorm solutions to some of the challenges new widows experience.
Who should attend? Widows, women in long term relationships, and women who are caregivers for their spouse or partner.
About Barbara Rady Kazdan
After a career as a nonprofit leader expanding opportunities for underserved youth and adults, Barbara turned her passion and pen to creative writing. Her English Literature degree from the University of Michigan served her well, first to advance social change, next to writing narrative nonfiction.
Widowed after 40 years of marriage to David, her college sweetheart, Barbara has been navigating widowhood guided by her innate optimism and zest for life. After years of writing workshops, honing her craft in her memoir group, and authoring countless essays, Barbara is delighted to publish her first book, "Oh. I’m a Widow: Working Through Life After a Death". A chronicle of her journey, the book offers encouragement, support and guidance to the bereaved.
Mother of three, grandmother of five, Barbara is grateful for her close-knit family and rewarding professional experiences. A native of Chicago and longtime resident of Silver Spring, Maryland, friends and colleagues know her as a woman with a huge heart and hungry intellect. Find Barbara now nestled in a Craftsman cottage in the shadow of downtown Los Angeles, living next door to her son and his family.
Sample her work at www.achievingchangetogether.com/published-works.
About Selby McPhee
Writer Selby McPhee is the author of two books: "Love Crazy", a family memoir based on a box of old family letters, with the tempting admonition “to be destroyed unopened,” published in 2013, and "Making It Up: The Vassar Class of ’65 on the Cusp of Change", which examines the lives of a collection of Vassar girls, born in wartime, raised in the 1950s to be good wives and mothers, who graduated in 1965 to a world newly opened to professional opportunities for women. Widowed in 2022, she spent several years taking care of her husband, who suffered from dementia. Selby grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and now lives in a retirement community in Washington, DC.