The Witness to a Life: Rita Egizii on Living Alongside Grief

For decades, Rita Egizii has been a well-known name in Calgary. An entrepreneur and educator, she helped found Wellspring, the cancer support organization, and the Chickwagon! Foundation, which was started in 1999 when local businesswomen came together to become the first and only all-female chuckwagon sponsors.

She builds, creates and teaches. Then, 18 months ago, her husband of 46 years, Greg Lucier, passed away at home, and the house went completely silent.

After his death, Egizii barely recognized her own life. She had survived a stage four terminal breast cancer diagnosis 30 years ago, so hard times were nothing new to her. But losing Greg, her soulmate, her best friend, her “witness,” was different. He had been there since she was in her early 20s. He helped her build companies and create worlds. With him gone, she lost the one person who had watched it all.

“It’s like trying to take the flour out of a cake,” Egizii explains, describing the dissolution of her own identity after his passing. “When you’ve been that close in a relationship and you are one person, not only do you lose that physical individual, but you lose your own self.”

For months, Egizii struggled with a darkness that her business success and global travel couldn’t reach. People told her she had purpose, that she helped others, but she felt indifferent. She had been fighting for her life for decades. Now she felt she had lost the reason to fight.

In that state, Egizii attended “Camp Widow” in Calgary this past September. Surrounded by strangers willing to be vulnerable, she found the support she needed. What she heard there put into words something she had been struggling to say: grief is not a problem to be solved.

“I have suddenly found this tribe where I can walk in and I swear to God, I can look in your eyes and I don’t have to say anything because we share something without saying a word,” she says.

At Camp Widow, her thinking shifted. She began to compare her cancer journey with her grief. When she was diagnosed with cancer 30 years ago, she eventually accepted that it was a permanent, chronic condition she had to learn to live with. She could not “fix” her compromised DNA. In the same way, she came to see that she could not “fix” the fact that Greg would never return.

“You learn to live alongside your grief for the rest of your life,” she observes. “Because it’s grieving for him and it’s grieving for who we were as a couple. It’s grieving for the person I was with him.”

That understanding has brought some peace. Egizii criticizes a society that she believes sanitizes death, hiding it in hospitals and making grief something to fear or move past quickly. She recalls the unsolicited and often shocking advice she received: questions about why she still wore her wedding band, or comments about how “great” she looked, which ignored the turmoil within.

“Our society is not comfortable with death, and they have no idea about grief,” she says.

Egizii is choosing to keep Greg alive in her daily life. Many describe him as a true Renaissance man: a neurophysiologist, artist and animation studio founder. She carries him with her in a pendant containing his ashes, and she speaks his name freely. She believes that keeping a loved one’s memory alive is the opposite of forgetting. It acknowledges their lasting contribution.

“Why would you not talk about someone who is pivotal to your life?” she asks.

As she moves forward, Egizii accepts that the waves of grief will keep rolling in. She remains active in the community, teaching and supporting entrepreneurs, and she finds purpose by carrying what she lost into the life that remains. She is preparing for a transition to a “parallel path” where joy and grief coexist.

For those facing their own losses, Egizii offers the same advice she received: “Be kind to yourself. It will be difficult. The strength will come from within.”

She describes Camp Widow as an embrace. It is a place where the “hug” of shared understanding fills the hallways, and where mothers with young children and men all carry the weight of their own stories.

“I feel really comfortable with that,” she says of her ongoing connection to Greg. “I’m going to keep inviting him into the room.”

Rita Egizii is not “over it” and doesn’t intend to be. She is building a future that honors the man who opened her world, and she is still helping others through their own complicated losses. She has always built communities, and now she is building one for the bereaved. Her message to them, and to herself, is that the cake is forever changed, but the love that baked it remains.

Find out more about Camp Widow at Soaring Spirits Canada

Watch the full story on Unison TV