(CNN) -- Taryn Davis was 19 when she married her high school sweetheart.





"It was probably the happiest point of my life," she said. "I didn't need someone to complete my life. He made me want to be a better person."





Two days after the wedding, Davis moved to Alaska to be with her husband, Michael Davis, who was stationed at an Army base there, putting their honeymoon plans on hold.





"He wanted to take me to Hawaii," she remembered. But they never got to take that trip.





On May 21, 2007, Davis came home to find two men waiting to tell her that her husband had been killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq.





At 21, Davis was a widow.





Consumed by grief, she felt she had nowhere to turn for support. After her husband was deployed to Iraq, Davis moved back home to San Marcos, Texas, away from a military community.





"I didn't live near any bases," she said. "When Michael was killed, I was in my senior year in college. I didn't have a connection to military wives."





But Davis was not alone.





Since 2001, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have left 2,829 women without husbands and 46 men without wives, according to a May 2011 report from the Defense Manpower Data Center.





"In the beginning after I lost Michael, I honestly wanted to die," she said. "I wanted someone 21 to say, 'I got the knock on the door. I had the two men who said the words that shattered my world. And I am like you and trying to pick up the pieces.' "





So she made it her mission to seek out other widows. She contacted a widow whose husband was killed alongside hers.





"I gave her a call one day, and I said, 'I want to know all the things that people stopped asking me. I want to know how you met your husband. I want to know how you fell in love, how you were notified, and most importantly, I want to know what makes you get up every day and face life again,' because I didn't know the answers."





Davis found other widows on MySpace and used some of the $100,000 she received in military death benefits to buy video equipment.





Then she set out across the country to interview six widows in six different cities.





"It was in the midst of filming that documentary that I got the idea of starting a nonprofit organization that would allow these women to have a place to share all the things that we basically were asking [in the film]," she said.





Four months after Davis' husband was killed, the American Widow Project was born. Since then, more than 750 widows have joined the organization.





It started with the website -- a place for young widows to share their stories, learn from one another and find comfort in knowing they're not alone.





Then Davis began organizing "getaway" trips so the widows could meet in person.





The trips have ranged from skydiving out of planes to rebuilding a house damaged by Hurricane Katrina through the St. Bernard Project.





Brooke Toner, a widow who helped rebuild the house in New Orleans, said it was hard to find other people who understood what she was going through.





"After Frankie died, I just felt like there was nothing that was going to give me any comfort," Toner said. "I felt like nobody could understand that amount of loss of my best friend, my husband, my soul mate.





"I didn't even think that these women could understand that. But I've been fortunate to meet all of them. They're dealing with so much of it, and they're on a similar path. For me, it's comforting."





Erin Dructor, who also lost her husband, agrees.





"It's opened my eyes to show me different ways on how to be able to
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