A word from the Chair of WAY: Joanna’s story

February 2025

The Chair of WAY Widowed and Young Joanna Sedley-Burke talks about being an LGBTQIA+ widow – and her ambitions to make sure everyone knows about WAY.

WAY is a UK charity that offers bereavement support to young widowed people across the UK – married or not, with or without children, inclusive of sexual orientation, gender, race and religion.

Joanna Sedley-Burke has been the Chair of WAY since June 2021. As the Managing Director of a Removals, Storage & Logistics Company, she has plenty of management experience that she brings to the role – as well as an understanding of some of the unique challenges facing WAY members from the LGBTQIA+ community. Here’s her story…

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“Nothing can prepare you for the death of your soulmate,” says Joanna Sedley-Burke, whose wife Paula died of undiagnosed pneumonia in April 2017. Joanna’s grief was compounded by society’s response to her status as one of a very small number of LGBTQIA+ widows in the UK since same-sex marriage became legal in 2014. She felt almost as if she had to come out all over again in the aftermath of Paula’s death.

“I had people asking was she my daughter or mother when presented with the death certificate,” she says. “And even the hospital referred to me as ‘husband’ at one point in the medical notes.”

“After your wife dies it feels like all you do is tell people your wife is dead,” adds Joanna, who had a civil partnership with her partner Paula in 2006, which was converted to a marriage in 2014. “People assume you are straight but you constantly have to say, ‘no, I meant my wife’. It is exhausting.”

“There are fewer people going through this process and there is less support,” acknowledges Joanna, who contacted the campaigning organisation Stonewall in the aftermath of Paula’s death but was told there was nowhere they could recommend to help with bereavement support. 

Thankfully she found WAY – which provides peer-to-peer emotional and practical support to 4,500+  young widowed people across the UK.

“I think it’s such a great charity and touches so many people in different ways,” says Joanna. “Nobody chooses to be in the club. It’s not something you want to be a part of. But as much as our friends and family try, no one can get it until you have been through it.”

“When you join WAY, you make connections with certain people and not always geographically either,” she says. “Inevitably there are some people you relate to more or less. You might have nothing in common but you build up a relationship based on your common pain and they support you. Over time you realise you can support others and start to pay that forward as much as you receive support.”

Being able to talk honestly to WAY members who understood the dark times and what she was going through was a source of enormous support for Joanna.

“I wanted to know what it was going to be like three or four years down the line,” she says. “Everybody’s life is different – but I wanted to know honestly if I’d still feel this bad in year four or five. And someone said, ‘You still do. But not as often’.”

In 2018, Joanna decided to pay it forward by becoming a trustee for WAY. And in June 2021, she became Chair of the charity.

“I’ve been involved with many campaigns such as equal rights and civil partnerships,” she says. “I’ve worked for a women’s charity that dealt with domestic abuse. I wanted to be able to use my experience both professionally and personally to make sure that WAY is here in many years. And also to share my personal experience of grief and being gay. I didn’t know anyone else who is LGBTQIA+, whose other half had died until I joined WAY.”

“I joined the Board to increase diversity and inclusion within the charity. WAY has moved on in leaps and bounds in recent years, but we still have some way to go. Since our 25th birthday in 2022 we have refreshed our brand and are focussed on increasing our visibility as a charity. WAY has been such a lifeline for me and I want to make sure that everybody who has lost their partner at a young age – married or not, with or without children, inclusive of sexual orientation, gender, race and religion – knows about WAY.”