Rochelle Pitts’ world was shattered when her husband of 13 years, Jesse, was killed in a tragic car accident three days before Christmas in 2020 — leaving her six months pregnant with the couple’s fourth child and taking care of three others.
Following the birth of her son, Rochelle expected she would raise her children alone and never have a second chance at love.
“After my husband died, I never wanted to be with anyone ever again,” Rochelle told Jam Press, who said it made her “sick” and “felt like cheating” to even consider a new relationship.
“I also had four children and was alone, so how could I even begin to date?” she added.
However, an unlikely source of comfort emerged in the form of her late husband’s best friend, Scott, with whom Rochelle started to develop her own friendship about six months after her husband’s passing.
That was when she realized that they possessed many similar traits. It was not long until the platonic friendship began to undergo a change, though she had her worries.
“I was apprehensive to date him, one main reason being that I knew no one would understand us,” Rochelle said. “It started slow. We would watch movies together and he’d help me out in the yard or with random things in the house.”
It wasn’t until Scott asked her on a date that she knew that she was wrong about her misgivings.
“He has seven siblings; he understands grief because of his own experiences with death in his family, and he cares about my children,” Rochelle told Jam Press. “Our grief doesn’t phase [sic] him.”
Rochelle and her family were consumed by sorrow following her husband’s unexpected death.
“Immediately after he passed, life was extremely chaotic — we all cried constantly,” said Rochelle.
At the time of the accident, Rochelle was six months pregnant with her youngest daughter, Wren, who she said is the spitting image of his father. His birth was particularly difficult as the baby arrived just weeks after Jesse’s death.
Rochelle recalled how during her cesarean section, she could hear everything since her husband and his “excitement” were not there to “calm” her through the procedure.
“With Wren, I heard every noise,” she recalled. “I heard the doctors say where to make the incision, I could hear them cutting things, I could hear the sounds of the suction.”
On a brighter note, Jesse’s organs were donated and reportedly helped save four lives on Christmas day. Still, Rochelle’s emotions continue to run high.
“It has been about a year and a half since he died,” she said. “It still hurts every day, but now it’s different.”
She explained that Scott has been respectful of her needs, knowing that she and her late husband met in their teens while they were both working at a restaurant.
“He also honors Jesse’s memory; when we first had a sit-down dinner together, he pulled up a separate chair and left Jesse’s usual seat empty,” she said of the remarkable gesture by Scott. “He still does this.”
Rochelle, who is now a paralegal studying to be a lawyer, said that it is important for her to grieve publicly. As such, she launched a now-viral TikTok account, as well as a website, Untitled Grief of a Young Widow.
“Before I was a widow, I may have raised an eyebrow if I saw a widow date her husband’s best friend after his passing,” she said. “But now that I am a widow, I understand that this is so normal.”
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