Taryn Davis, the founder of the nonprofit American Widow Project, paints a wall on Friday morning at her group’s new headquarters in Austin. (Photo by Wes Ferguson)
by WES FERGUSON
Taryn Davis has been traveling the country and connecting with her fellow military widows on the Internet for nearly four years.
Now the 25-year-old Buda resident is establishing a more permanent home for her nonprofit group, the American Widow Project: a two-room office in downtown East Austin.
“I’m thinking it will be a place to celebrate life,” she said, “to celebrate the life that widows are reclaiming after losing a spouse.”
Fitting with the celebratory mood, Davis was applying a coat of festive yellow paint to the walls of the empty office this past Friday, after meeting her mother-in-law for coffee earlier in the morning. She was expecting a couple of other military widows to come help her decorate and furbish the place over the next few days.
The American Widow Project’s new office, just off Interstate 35 on East Fifth Street, will give volunteers a place to come help Davis with organizational tasks. That way, she can focus on the “important stuff,” reaching out to military widows and helping them heal.
Davis, a San Marcos native, was a senior at Texas State University when her husband, Michael, was killed by roadside bombs on May 21, 2007. The couple had last spoken about an hour and a half before he died.
Davis said she felt lost and alone after Michael’s death. Because she was only 21 years old, she said, other people assumed her youth would ease her grief or make her sacrifice less significant – that she would be able to “get over it.”
She didn’t know anyone else who had experienced what she was going through. After grieving for three or four months, Davis contacted another woman whose husband had died alongside Michael. Their encounter led to a cross country documentary project and the formation of the nonprofit group.
While connecting with so many of her fellow war widows, Davis also learned to cope with her own loss.
“It changed the course of my life,” Davis said, “just knowing and seeing firsthand that I’m not the only widow who is 20-something and sits in bed thinking, ‘OK, what am I supposed to do?’”
“I wasn’t living life fully until I met these other women and started this organization,” she said.
Nearly 3,000 husbands and wives have been widowed during the war on terrorism, and the American Widow Project has connected with almost 800 of them. Davis hopes that through her group’s efforts, the label “widow” will lose its stigma for generations to come.
“People say we shouldn’t be defined by that label, but the label doesn’t handicap us,” she said. “If anything it enhances what our life is.”
