Chadwick Boseman's Widow Speaks About Grief in First Interview Since His Death

Taylor Simone Ledward has just given her first public interview since the death of her husband, actor Chadwick Boseman. In a conversation with Whoopi Goldberg for Good Morning America, Ledward opened up about the grieving process and how she is working to keep his memory and legacy alive.

Ledward first met Boseman in 2015, and they got engaged in 2019, marrying in secret. "I met this person, who was a wonderful man, and he ended up being a global superstar," she told Goldberg. "And really, after Black Panther came out, it did kind of happen overnight."

She added: "I can't believe that I was so lucky. I can't believe that I got to love this person, and I also got them to love me too."

Boseman passed away in August 2020 after privately undergoing lengthy treatment for colon cancer. Ledward reflected that the timing of the pandemic allowed the two of them to spend their final months together uninterrupted by intrusions from the media.

"It was Covid when things were really starting to spiral, and that meant that everybody was in their house, and there was no pressure for anybody to go outside," she siad. It seemed like, is this a crazy coincidence? That we get to actually be inside, we get to be here with family, together, and everybody in the world is also experiencing this togetherness in the midst of this awful scary unpredictable time? We kept that circle real, our circle was basically a dot."

"It has been the most challenging two years I've ever had in my life," she continued. "Some days I'm doing worse than I'm really willing to acknowledge, and other days I'm doing better than I feel comfortable admitting... The grief, it really moves in."

The education and empowerment of young Black people was a passion of Boseman's, as exemplified in the many speeches he made while receiving accolades for his work in Black Panther, and Ledward has continued that work in his honor, putting his name to the College of Fine Arts at his almer mater, Howard University.

"We have a scholarship now at Howard, and we have four scholars, one of them graduated this past year, and was very proud to be the first graduating Boseman scholar of the first graduating class of the Chadwick Boseman College of Fine Arts," she said. "[We are] taking this mantle and we are carrying it to as many voices as we can.

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