Leslie Harter-Berg lost her husband and became a single mom almost overnight — forcing her to find her own way through, with humor and heart
Credit: Courtesy of Leslie Harter-Berg
NEED TO KNOW
- In 2019, Leslie Harter was on vacation with her husband, Ryan, and their two young sons when he died from a rare health condition
- Leslie, then 30, struggled to balance her loss with the reality of being a single mom
- She learned that grieving and healing was not simple or tidy and, with the darkly humorous new memoir You’re So Strong, she’s sharing those lessons
She left for a carefree Disneyland vacation with her husband, an infant and a toddler. She returned just days later as a single mom overwhelmed by grief.
Leslie Harter was only 30. Her husband, Ryan, had turned 34 the month before he had a fatal stroke on April 1, 2019, as a result of a rare arteriovenous malformation of the blood vessels in his brain.
A cruel April Fool’s joke, Leslie says. Ryan died the next day. Their boys, Wit and Rory, were just 3 and 1. It was absurd, unbelievable.
The Vancouver, Wash., native handled it the only way she knew how — through dark humor. In the opening of Leslie Harter-Berg's new memoir, You're So Strong: On Grief and Letting Go of My Favorite Compliment, set to be released on Tuesday, March 24, she describes sitting in the hospital waiting room with her family while holding a giant box of tampons.
“The demands of the world do not stop because your husband died,” Leslie, 37, tells PEOPLE. “I put pressure on myself to keep going, but what I realize is I needed to fall apart a little bit more.”
She adds: “I probably also needed a nap.”
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In the aftermath of Ryan’s death, Leslie says, the common refrain from friends, family and acquaintances alike was that she was “so strong” and could handle it all. She grew to hate that phrase, because she wasn’t and she couldn’t.
“I was really trying to get through the stages of grief as if they were a homework assignment,” she says, referring to the familiar checklist of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
It wasn’t as simple as all that. Not at all.
“What I really discovered is there is no moving on. Grief is with you forever,” says Leslie. “It changes you.”
And seven years later, “there is still no graduating to acceptance" of Ryan's death, she says.
They first met in 2010 when they did a job-share in nearby Portland, Ore. While not at first romantically involved, they grew to be best friends — two nerdy twentysomethings who loved writing and making movies — and eventually more.
They married in 2013 and, the next year, started a video production company called Harter Creative.
That meant that after Ryan died in 2019, his widow, in addition to holding her personal life together, also had to keep their business going. She went on to combine the personal and the professional with a nonprofit, Vids for Wids, that shares other people’s stories and expert advice.
“I really leaned into the widow community and just started talking a lot with other widows,” Leslie says. “They were such a lifeline to me.”
Credit: Courtesy of Leslie Harter-Berg/Luke and Mallory
Finding Love Twice
At their last Christmas together, in 2018, Ryan randomly set up a camera to record 30 minutes of ordinary interaction. At the time, Leslie deemed it “boring and obnoxious.” Now it’s much-loved footage that she shares with her sons to remind them of their playful, loving father.
At first, she says, she was angry that her son Wit, who kept some memories of his dad, did not seem to want to talk about him. It felt like a kind of betrayal, Leslie says. She was shocked he didn’t seem more upset and admits she was “offended” on her late husband’s behalf.
“I decided their grief had to look a certain way and I was so wrong,” she admits, “because child grief is so different than adult grief.”
She made sure Wit received therapy. “As time goes on, he delves into it on his own terms,” she says.
Ryan had known a lot of grief in his own life. His mom, Karen, died of pancreatic cancer when he was 19 and his died then died in a car crash when he was 24.
“I expected my experience to turn me into a bitter and hardened person,” Ryan once wrote. “I have found the opposite to be true.”
He had seen death and suffering more than he ever wanted, he wrote.
“But it was there, in the midst of the ugly, that God himself showed up through the love of my friends,” he wrote. “My life has taught me, not that pain is absent, but that love is more powerful and present than any of it.”
After losing her husband, Leslie had to work through a lot of complicated emotions, including returning to dating and intimacy, which happened surprisingly quickly. An entire chapter in her memoir is about wanting to kiss a man again months after her husband's death.
She wanted different things, all at once: She wanted to protect the memory of her late husband. She also wanted someone she could cuddle and love.
Moving forward meant learning how to carry those complicated feelings, even when she had to drag the emotional baggage alongside her.
Before Ryan died, she’d had trouble understanding the story from Ryan’s early adulthood about how his own father had remarried just three months after Ryan’s mom died of cancer.
Leslie had questioned how he could just move on so quickly, but Ryan was never angry about his dad’s decision: He told Leslie that he wouldn’t be able to be there for his dad or have adventures with him. His dad deserved not to be alone.
“He said that’s what he needed,” Leslie recalls.
And so: “The minute Ryan died, I had no more judgement on Jeff [Ryan’s dad],” Leslie says. “Time moves differently in grief.”
In those first months after being widowed in 2019, Leslie ran into Solomon Berg at a party. An architect, Berg had offered at their first meeting to help her remodel her home at no cost.
By fall 2020, she was considering pursuing the 42-year-old. She was drawn to this kind man who loved her kids.
The two married on May 19, 2022, and had their first child together, Rhys, on March 24, 2023.
“I feel very blessed and lucky that I was able to find love twice,” Leslie says.
That love, however, hasn't always been easy. Leslie’s life is tied up in the love she shared with Ryan, too, and she and her husband make room for that.
"I can only imagine Ryan telling me not to waste this one life I get," she says.
She hopes people walk away from her memoir feeling like they have permission to throw out the simplicity that grief proceeds in stages be okay if their grief — or their kids’ grief — looks different from anyone else’s or how they imagine it should feel.
And she has one more piece of advice: “You should be okay taking a nap.”
You're So Strong: On Grief and Letting Go of My Favorite Compliment is available on March 24.
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