No one warned me how badly grief can make you yearn for physical intimacy – or how much backlash I would get for wanting to talk about it.

On January 19, 2003, I moved to Aotearoa as the wife of a very handsome, very charming, very kind man. Jason Hotere and I met in Brazil working with an evangelical missionary organisation. We travelled the world doing “God’s work” for several years and had two beautiful daughters. For most of their childhood I put my career and artistic pursuits aside, believing that was what was required of me: to sacrifice myself for my family to please God.

Fast forward to May 9, 2017. Fifteen years and almost four months since my arrival in Aotearoa, Jason suddenly died from a heart attack. I plunged into deep depression and suicide ideation. Our daughters were 15 and 12 years old. Without my own family here, I found support through Jason’s whānau and through a few trusted friends. Initially our church community were helpful and supportive, but soon after the tangi, the Christian clichés and platitudes started flooding in. Everyone wanted me to bounce back and be grateful that Jason was with the Lord.

But if Jesus really wanted me to praise Him because my husband was blissfully alive in heaven, leaving me here with two kids, no money and no support, then with all due respect, Jesus could go fuck himself. 

Talking about fucking oneself, the need to have sex and the taboo surrounding female masturbation became a serious struggle for me. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and it can also make your libido skyrocket. My grieving body yearned for my husband’s body, but I didn’t know what to do. 

The few times I talked to someone from my church about it I was kindly but firmly chastised. Instead of responding with care and concern they responded with spiritual bypassing, urging me to be more spiritual or more faithful to scriptures. 

According to the teachings of the evangelical church, as a good Christian wife my body belonged to my husband. In many ways I am one of the lucky ones, because my husband took great pleasure in giving me pleasure. The problem is when he died, I didn’t know what to do with my own body, and the purity culture condemnation I had been marinating in for years was hard to shake off. 

The evangelical purity culture goes like this: Sex before marriage is sin, don’t do it. Sex during marriage is blessed by God, do lots of it (even if you don’t feel like it) because your husband needs it. Sex after the marriage is over (by divorce, God forbid, or by death, Praise the Lord!) becomes, well, non-existent, don’t even think about it. Unless of course you marry again.

But I didn’t want to marry again. I had a husband and I love my husband. He just happened to be dead. And I happened to be starved for touch, because aside from my children and my close friends’ hugs, no one had touched my body for over three years, not even me. And I desperately needed to be touched. 

So, when people said “Have you prayed about this?” or “You need to give this issue to the Lord” or “God won’t give you anything you can’t handle”, I felt lost, angry and betrayed by the very community that should be there to support, guide and comfort me at a time when I was the most vulnerable and needy. I ticked all the boxes in God’s shit list – foreign, poor, orphaned, widow – and yet I was shamed and condemned for going through a very human and distressing experience. 

I downloaded a dating app and began to go on dates with the sole purpose of finding a guy (clean, intelligent, respectful) with whom I could have a guilt-free sexual escapade – no strings attached. But things didn’t go according to plan. The dates were quite awful and so tragic they were comic. 

So I wrote a play about it, Skin Hunger. It was semi autobiographical and explored the struggles of grief, faith and a deep longing for physical intimacy after the loss of a partner. It received standing ovations and positive feedback from audience members who related personally to the story.

I also received an intense backlash, mostly from Christian women who harshly criticised my play without actually coming to see it for themselves. The fact that a Christian widow was openly talking about orgasms – or the lack thereof – and starving for sexual intimacy was not only shocking but repulsive to many of them.

I was condemned and attacked through online comments and personal messages filled with Christian jargon and bible verses. In their view I have chosen to walk away from the will of God, thus becoming a terrible influence on good women, a negative role model for my own daughters, and bringing shame to my husband’s memory. Ouch!

Someone went so far as to say: “Jesus is now your husband and He should be enough.” To which I responded, “I love Jesus and I believe He can make miracles but He won’t make me cum.” Of course, that reply, coupled with the by-line of my play (“Oh my f-ing God, grief can make you horny”) only served to strengthen their perception that I had been possessed by an evil Jezebel spirit.

For the last five years, I carried a grief which simultaneously paralysed and propelled me, suffocated and liberated me. Grief made me angry, and it made me horny. But grief also taught me to give myself permission to forge my own path, to experience new things and create a new life – not the life I wanted but the life I get to live because my husband didn’t have that chance. 

Grief broke me, and through the cracks I was able to begin freeing myself from religious guilt and shame. I learnt to masturbate. I discovered what I like and don’t like during sex. I read books, listened to podcasts, went on dates, talked to a few trusted girlfriends. I reconnected with my body through dance classes, yoga and breathwork. I bought nice lingerie. I made pleasure a daily part of my routine. I went to therapy. I had good sex, bad sex, weird sex. I had sex with men who wanted to have a relationship with me. I cried myself to sleep wanting my husband and did it all again the next day.

Writing and speaking about my experience with the complexities of grief, faith and sex has allowed me to slowly embrace and integrate all the parts of myself. Dark and twisted parts I had been taught to reject or suppress through purity culture and toxic patriarchal Christian ideologies.

The most amazing thing is that my journey with grief led me to my sexual reclamation, which in turn led me to a new revelation about God’s unconditional love. Now I know without a shadow of doubt there is nothing I, nor anyone else, can do or say that will change the fact that I am loved, cherished and supported by a benevolent being who celebrates and approves of me. The whole of me, including my sexuality and my skin hunger – which lately has been thoroughly and pleasurably satisfied. 

Skin Hunger’s returning season will perform at Q theatre Loft, February 7-10, 2023. Get tickets here.