I was diagnosed with ADHD after my husband died. He never knew the real me

"Managing grief and ADHD together is its own kind of emotional juggling act." Photo / 123RF

Stacey Heale says her ADHD diagnosis felt like being handed the key to a door she hadn’t known existed. It also exacerbated the profound grief she experienced after losing her husband.

Any couple who has been together for a long time will tell you there are certain arguments that crop up on repeat over the years. My husband Greg and I were no different. We argued over my relentless mess, my need to have multiple sounds playing at once, and my habit of talking through entire films. I lost my keys daily. He found it baffling that I could be obsessed with something one day, then forget about it completely the next. Or that I could read a book and forget the entire premise within hours.

We had been together for 10 years when Greg was diagnosed with incurable bowel cancer at the age of 39. By the time we fully understood the seriousness, we were already deep in the trenches of trying to keep him alive. Our lives became a cycle of hospital appointments, medical research, second opinions, and kitchen dance parties designed to keep things feeling normal for our daughters. When Greg died five years later, the scaffolding of purpose crumbled. I didn’t just fall apart, I exploded.

At first, my friends sat with me as I waded through the extensive death admin. But as that steady support faded, so did my ability to focus on even the most basic tasks. It took me two years to close his bank accounts, meaning unknown outgoings continued to drain money. My comfort eating and drinking spiralled. I gained two stone in a matter of months.

Our daughters were five and seven when Greg died. I tried to keep things soft and safe for them, but I was jagged inside. Some days, my brain was busy and bright, full of ideas and plans. Other days, I didn’t remember to eat until 7pm and would spend hours staring at the wall. Some mornings, none of us had clean underwear. I would be scrubbing the washing basket at 6am, drying clothes with a hairdryer. I’m embarrassed by how often I lost my car keys in the house and had to frantically call the school to keep the girls there until I could find someone to pick them up. Other mums in the class WhatsApp group began to subtly add reminders for PE kits and non-uniform days. I was regularly seen pulling up to the school gates, only to turn around so the girls could get changed.

A few months after Greg died, my family took me and the girls on a holiday. One evening, I sat on the veranda of our lodge, listening to a podcast. One of my favourite writers was talking about her divorce, but then the conversation moved to her late ADHD diagnosis. I sat, open-mouthed, as she described my entire life. I cried for hours. I told my mum, “I think I have ADHD.” That moment opened something in me. It took another year of reading, researching, and learning before I allowed myself to believe I was neurodivergent and booked a proper assessment. I had grown up in a time when ADHD meant naughty boys bouncing off walls, so accepting the diagnosis wasn’t easy.

When it came three months later, it felt like being handed the key to a door I hadn’t known existed. A diagnosis like this brings its own kind of grief: the grief of lost time, missed opportunities, an identity misunderstood. What I didn’t anticipate was how impossible it would feel to carry both burdens at once. Managing grief and ADHD together is its own kind of emotional juggling act. Grief flattens you. ADHD speeds you up. It feels like trying to sprint underwater.

Losing your partner, your anchor, is already a form of obliteration. I had no stable ground to stand on, moving from one life-changing reality to another. There was no space to process either experience on its own terms. I was too sad to engage with ADHD properly, too overwhelmed by this new self-understanding to understand and process my grief.

More than all of this, my most overwhelming feeling was a profound sadness that Greg would never know. It felt outrageous that something so central to who I am had remained unknown to the person I loved for 15 years. I now see so clearly that he had been the external structure I never learnt to build for myself.

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I mourn the conversations we never had. I grieve the support I didn’t have when I was trying to unpack this new revelation. I think about the woman he loved, who was constantly struggling to hold it all together without knowing why it always felt so hard. How many times had I seemed distant when I was actually overwhelmed? How many arguments started because I forgot something important and came across as careless? I look back on our marriage with a strange, aching clarity, wondering how different our communication could have been if either of us had known what was really going on beneath all that noise.

But he doesn’t get to know. That’s the grief within the grief. Even as I step into this more fully realised version of myself, he remains frozen in time, loving a woman who didn’t yet know how to love herself.

I’ve come to realise that many of the things Greg especially loved about me were actually powered by ADHD. My relentless enthusiasm for things I’m passionate about. How easily I make friends. The energy I bring. The ambitious (and often impossible) standards I set for myself. There are elements of ADHD my daughters delight in too, like my impulsive decisions to go on midnight drives in our pyjamas to sing along to Korean boy band BTS, or deciding on a whim to get a new puppy because the house feels too quiet.

Something beautiful has come from knowing how my brain is wired; a kind of peace with myself I didn’t think was possible. For the first time, I can name my patterns, my tendencies, my triggers for overwhelm. I still forget things, I still double-book myself, I lose my diary daily. I still sometimes cry in the supermarket, but the big difference is I no longer believe I’m an intrinsically bad person.

There’s a particular ache in grief for all the things the person you’ve lost will never see: watching your children grow up, seeing them move out, becoming a grandparent. The grief is future-focused, whereas the grief about my ADHD diagnosis is focused on what was missed in the past.

It’s been two and a half years since I was diagnosed. I take medication now, which has dramatically improved my symptoms. I can think more clearly, focus more easily and there is space in my head where there was once constant white noise. I talk to my daughters all the time about neurodivergence, and we’ll even joke about how I need them to remind me to make everyone dinner. There is a kind of chaos to our lives, but there’s also a lot of love in it.

I’m not the same person I was when Greg was alive, for many different reasons, but in truth, I’m not sure I ever really knew who that person was anyway. I’m now learning to become someone new – a widow, a mother, a woman with ADHD who is finally beginning to understand herself. It’s messier than I’d like, and far more complicated than grief alone, but it’s real in a way that feels honest for the first time in years.