Kimberly and Rasheed

Rasheed Wiggins was a man in love. After seven years into his relationship with Kimberly Holmes, he decided to make up for lost time and ask Kimberly to marry him.

They had known each other casually as students at Duke University but went their separate ways after graduation. Kimberly chased a career in television news while Rasheed pursued a business executive path and entrepreneurship. Both were driven.

Like many women juggling hectic careers and personal lives, Kimberly began feeling exhausted and hopeless about ever having a long-term relationship. At one point, she adopted a self-imposed “man-fast,” telling God she would date no one. “And of course, that’s when every cute guy came out of the woodwork.”

It was also about the time that she and Rasheed randomly reconnected when both attended a mutual friend’s wedding. Thrilled to see Rasheed, Kimberly felt dejected when he didn’t ask her to dance at the reception. But when a friend tipped him off, Rasheed immediately made the ask – a dance that launched their loving long-distance romance.

Eventually, Rasheed realized that after years of dating, Kimberly was getting “antsy” watching her friends become engaged, get married or have children. So, he secretly orchestrated a complicated plan for an imaginative and, of course, romantic marriage proposal. His scheme was to recreate Kimberly’s former Washington, D.C., apartment – the place they loved so much – and provide the perfect setting for him to sweep her off her feet and pop the question. Rasheed convinced the apartment occupants to let him take over their home, completely rearrange their living room and create a private and unforgettable moment in the name of love.

With help from Kimberly’s enthusiastic posse of girlfriends, he collected many of her favorite possessions, including a beloved quilt made by her grandmother, all of which were used to set the scene as close as possible to how it looked years earlier. Kimberly remained clueless.

Using her 30th birthday as the perfect moment, Rasheed flew Kimberly back to D.C. under the guise of a celebratory dinner. On the way to the restaurant, he stopped the car in front of her former Glover Park apartment building and invited his now baffled girlfriend to go inside with him. She followed Rasheed thinking he had lost his mind. To her shock, when he pressed the door buzzer for entry, the couple were let in to the building.

Kimberly was greeted by a trail of rose petals sprinkled along the stairs leading up to her former third floor abode. Her heart began to pound. She watched Rasheed open the door to what had been her apartment. It was like stepping back in time.  “Everything was exactly as I’d left it – my photos, my grandma’s quilt; even little things I’d forgotten about. It was so surreal.”

Rasheed looked at Kimberly and told her he was doing what he should have done long before. And then he proposed. “He gave me the biggest engagement ring I’ve ever seen. It was incredible.”

The young couple’s fairy tale life continued with their wedding in the esteemed chapel at Duke followed by a joyful ceremony with family and friends. As their love and life together as husband and wife bloomed, so did their respective careers, each enjoying professional advancement and success. Most importantly, they were finally living and working in the same town with Kimberly in a coveted news anchor role in Orlando and Rasheed as an executive with the Darden Corporation while also launching his own business startup. 

Then on one ordinary night in April 2016, everything changed. The couple ended their busy week with quiet – a Saturday afternoon movie followed by cocooning at home. Late in the evening, Rasheed got a craving for Swedish fish and said he was going to dash to the convenience store across the street, something he had done before. Kimberly suggested that he take their car because of the heavy traffic in their area. But the night was pretty, and Rasheed preferred to walk. It was the one night when he did not give her a hug and kiss before leaving her but he assured his wife he would do so when he got back in a few minutes. And then he left.

Rasheed’s snack run should have taken no more than 15 minutes, and when he didn’t return in that time frame, Kimberly began texting him to check his status. She initially assumed his unusual lack of response was because he was talking to his dad or a friend on the phone. But after half an hour, her concerns and texting began to escalate. Kimberly grabbed her dog, Lola, and walked to the apartment complex entrance where she was unexpectedly overwhelmed by the bright, flashing lights of emergency vehicles and a crowd.

“It was weird because knowing Rasheed, he was always someone who would go and help someone else. So, I’m there trying to figure out what happened and where he is because I know he’s trying to help.”

She scanned the faces in the crowd, searching for her husband until she was approached by a police officer with whom she shared her concerns. The officer’s reaction felt odd to her He asked Kimberly for her husband’s name. When she told him, he invited her to sit in his patrol car. Again, odd. It was there that he told her what had happened. Rasheed had been killed.

It all felt like a scene from a movie. It wasn’t believable; it wasn’t possible.  Her head was spinning.

“I thought to myself that he is saying this stuff to me and it’s not true. I know it’s not true. It then started to sink in that the white blanket in the middle of the street was covering Rasheed.”

Rasheed had been struck by three cars – one right after the other. The first two drivers did not stop. The third, a cabdriver, stopped as his passengers called for help and stayed with Rasheed. Witnesses reported that the first driver was a woman and the second driver appeared to have been looking at a phone. Neither returned to the scene.

Dealing with unimaginable shock, Kimberly called a friend from work to come help her.  She was soon joined at the scene by several friends who helped her throughout the night. As is often the case for a spouse dealing with the sudden and unexpected loss of a partner, Kimberly was tasked with the immediate and torturous duty of notifying family members about the tragedy. “I still feel the scream that came out of my mom when I called that night.”

Within hours, the first layer of family members began arriving at her home along with an unstoppable flood of emotions, immediate decision-making and hundreds of questions all compounded by a newly activated police investigation. Law enforcement launched a high-profile campaign to find the unidentified drivers.

At the height of their grief, Kimberly and Rasheed’s mother, Mary Wiggins, made numerous public pleas to convince the drivers or anyone with information to come forward, if for nothing more than to fill in the blanks about what had happened. Even with Kimberly’s news colleagues aggressively hunting for information, no one came forward. Today, almost ten years later, she knows no more than she did that night.

By the end of that terrible week, Kimberly left the home she shared with Rasheed, first driving with her parents and sister to her husband’s funeral in Georgia and then returning to Washington, D.C., to live with her parents. She never returned. For weeks, “I just sat there and did nothing, or I was on the floor screaming and crying as I tried to figure out life.”  At age 35, she was a heartbroken, young widow.

Her grief would not settle. “I know that I can’t be the one trying to get justice; no good comes out of that. That has to be something God does.”

Seeing Kimberly paralyzed by sorrow, her friend Jamie Wong shared an article about a town in Northern India informally known as the City of Widows. For decades, Vrindavan has served as a sacred pilgrimage destination for the grieving. It is estimated that 15,000 to 20,000 widowed women and children make their homes there. Despite massive poverty, they find solace among their own.

Within three weeks of first contemplating the trip, the two women departed on what would prove to be an extraordinary spiritual journey. “It definitely was an eat, pray, love trip,” she recalls. Kimberly was overwhelmed by what she witnessed and what she learned. In addition to finding and interacting with others living a shared sorrow, she also began to find a bit of her old self. She spoke to numerous widows, listening to their unique stories of loss as well as narratives about strength and wisdom, including counsel from one woman who advised Kimberly to “busy your brain.”

The women completed their travels with a visit to the Taj Mahal and left the country fortified by the power of loss and love. Kimberly’s sojourn to India sparked her first, tiny soul-wakening moments since that terrible night when Rasheed was taken from her. “I started to think, maybe I can build a new life.”

Soon she began tentative efforts to heal by doing what she knows best – storytelling. Through the basic act of blogging, she discovered the beginnings of a return to her roots in journalism. She began sharing chapters of how her life was forever changed. The more she wrote, the more she found her confidence grow as well as unexpected camaraderie from a growing online audience. 

From there she began building a network of “wisters” – her widowed sisters, becoming close with several including Roni Hollis whom she discovered held a shared purpose to help others like themselves.  The result – “Still His Still Hers,” their collaborative effort to show widows they are not alone. They followed their instincts to see where their efforts would take them. “I don’t know what we were doing, but we were doing something.”

Within months they were making and distributing small, one-of-a-kind gift baskets for other widows they would learn about as a gentle way of showing that there can be moments of peace and light. The packages were random and contained trinkets, cookies or books that Kimberly found while out and about and which they thought could bring comfort to someone grieving. The boxes also included a personalized card with messages of comfort.

As Kimberly’s outreach continued, so did her thoughts about returning to work, but she no longer had the drive or interest in working in a large media market. She returned to the first television station where she worked on-air, on Maryland’s eastern shore where she felt protected from having to report personally difficult stories such as hit-and-run traffic deaths. Her new normal reminded her of a Hallmark movie. She bought a cute little house near the water for her and her beloved Lola. It all suited her.

“I started to think, maybe I can build a new life.”

She remained lonely and uncomfortable. Ever intentional about finding her way forward, Kimberly leaned into her ongoing sadness, anger, frustration, loss and loneliness. That included being infuriated by well-meaning friends who assured her that she was still young, still pretty and that she would marry again. She realized that people assumed that by her outward appearances she seemed to be doing just fine when in reality her heart was severely broken. She could still be overcome by her own negative thoughts. There were days she just didn’t want to live.  “I can’t do this. My heart hurts so much.

“I’d be lying on my floor just trying to catch my breath.” But in those dark moments, she heard a voice insisting that she keep going, just keep going. “I found a way to slowly claw my way forward to the light.”

Kimberly tucked herself into her quiet but busy existence, which included hosting small, “wister brunches” in her home. An introvert by nature and protective of her personal space, Kimblery found the gatherings initially difficult, but she also felt energized by the power of positive energy, waffles, eggs and good conversation. “It was beautiful, and I am grateful for that.”

She came to discover that what helped her most was to think about the things she loved and what had always made her happy, like music and dancing. In one impulsive moment, she posted a social media clip of her dancing at work to make the point that even as a news anchor, she didn’t take herself too seriously. Her post attracted an immediate and welcome embrace from the public.

So she posted more of her “green room shenanigans” and quickly attracted a fan following.  When she didn’t post she heard about it. “I’m pretty sure my Columbia J School professors are so ashamed right now that this is what my journalism degree has come down to, but it was funny. And it was really about finding small ways to smile myself.”

Three years after Rasheed’s death, Kimberly was effectively making her new life. She remained close to Rasheed’s family who encouraged her. So, when she was invited to attend a charity golf tournament in honor of Rasheed at his New Jersey high school, her emotions ran high. Anxious about attending, she asked one of their former Orlando neighbors, who had been friendly with Rasheed and who consistently checked on Kimberly after Rasheed’s passing. He knew she was still hurting. 

The conversation with Darian was clumsy and awkward, prompting Darian to cut to the chase.  “What do you need, woman? Just say it.” 

Kimberly wasn’t consciously looking for a new relationship nor did she think she would have one. She was broken. “I’ve gone through some stuff, and I can’t just hide it away.” But at the same time, she made a list of all the things she did NOT want in a partner.  Eventually, she burned the list and “let the ashes fly.”

Darian’s attendance at the tournament made for a happy weekend and the beginning of a deeper friendship. The couple began speaking by phone regularly, and like teenagers, they chatted for hours. While Kimberly was surprised to have deep feelings for Darian, he had his own concerns about falling for his friend’s widow.

Eventually, he confessed to Kimberly that he had strong feelings for her that he could no longer ignore. He asked if they could date, and she said yes. Soon after, Darian moved to Maryland to be closer to Kimberly. And then COVID happened, accelerating their relationship beyond what both had anticipated. Three months after his move, Darian proposed, and the couple married in their living room. One month after that, Kimberly, 40, discovered that she was pregnant, a blessing since she had been told years before she would not be able to have children.

Today, Kimberly is happily married and mom to a toddler. She says finding love with Darian was a double wink from God. Her new family makes their home in North Carolina where she teaches public relations writing courses at North Carolina State University. She has preserved Rasheed’s legacy by establishing the Rasheed A. Wiggins Entrepreneurial Prize at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business along with an endowed scholarship in Rasheed’s name at his alma mater – St. Benedict’s Preparatory School in Newark, New Jersey.

Her determination to help widows has not waned. She continues to guide and comfort others in their grief, but in a new format. She serves as a public speaker, advisor and hosts her own website dedicated to the strength of the human spirit and love. In her new chapter as a wife and mother, she is currently “flirting” with the idea of creating a daylong conference dedicated to the issues widows face ranging from grief to finances to dating. “People need to know that even with a broken heart, you can have a good life. I will always feel that call, that tie, to help my wisters.”

 From enduring unspeakable tragedy to living with hope, Kimberly is happy, something she thought she’d never be again. “It’s been a journey for everyone. It’s like you really feel the sun coming out and a new life starting. I choose to celebrate the thing that makes me human; the only thing that matters in this world; the thing that makes me want to live – love.”