WAY member Rosie Moss turns award-winning Widowed AF podcast into book

April 2026

WAY member Rosie Moss won interviewer of the year in the 2025 British Podcast Awards for her podcast Widowed AF, which features the stories of many fellow WAY members. Now she has turned her story into a book…

---

“When my husband, Ben, died suddenly in 2018, I didn’t just lose him. I lost my life as I knew it.

I was 37, with three small children, the youngest just six months old. One moment I was in a partnership, making decisions together, sharing the mental load, planning a future. The next, I was completely alone. The shock and horror of it all left me reeling.

People often talk about grief in emotional terms, and of course that is a huge part of it. But what struck me most in those early days was the sheer weight of living. The admin, the responsibility, the relentlessness of it. There is no pause button when you have children. You are grieving, but you are also packing lunchboxes, answering endless emails, and trying to hold some sense of normality together for the people who need you most.

In those early months and years, I felt completely untethered. I didn’t know anyone else in my position. None of my friends understood what it was like to be widowed in your 30s with young children. I felt like I had been dropped into a world that nobody else around me inhabited. I felt alienated, scared and utterly terrified.

That is where the charity WAY Widowed and Young became my lifeline.

WAY introduced me to people who just got it. It was a place where I could be honest about how hard it was, without worrying about being ‘too much’. That kind of peer support is invaluable. It removes the isolation in a way that nothing else really can. It was, and still is, a space where the less palatable aspects of widowhood can be shared, a place where we can be vulnerable without judgement or shame.

That sense of connection is something I have carried into my work.

I created my podcast, Widowed AF, in 2023, because I felt there was space for the rawest of conversations about widowhood that reflected my own experience. I didn’t want platitudes or neat endings. I wanted real stories. Stories that showed the complexity of grief, the humour that can exist alongside it, the anger, the confusion and the rebuilding of a life that looks completely different to the one you had planned.

The podcast has since grown into a global community. It is a space where people feel seen, and where they can recognise parts of their own story in someone else’s. That, to me, is the most powerful thing. Not advice, not solutions, but recognition.

My book, Widowed As F**k, came from that same place.

It is part memoir, part collective voice. It tells my story, but it also carries the stories of so many others I have spoken to through the podcast. I wanted to create something that felt like a companion. Something that says, this is awful, and you are not alone in it.

---

Because that is the truth of widowhood. It is devastating, disorientating and life-changing. But there is also strength in shared experience. There is something profoundly reassuring about knowing that someone else has stood where you are standing and found a way to keep going.

WAY plays a crucial role in providing connection at a time when the world can feel incredibly isolating. They offer understanding without judgement and community without expectation.

Eight years on, my life looks very different to how I imagined it would. It has been rebuilt in ways I never anticipated. Not better, not worse, just different. And while grief never fully leaves, it does evolve, and I have learned to coexist with the sadness while still embracing what life has to offer.

If there is one thing I have learned, it is this: you do not have to do this alone. And you were never meant to.”