Green’s Dictionary of Slang

bereavement lurk n.

[SE bereavement + lurk n. (3)]

a form of begging that depends on attracting sympathy for the fact that one’s wife has supposedly just died.

[US]G.A. Brine in Ribton-Turner (1887) 642: The ‘bereavement lurk’ is a lucrative one—(i.e.) the pretended loss of a wife [etc.].