I am not much of a fan of the term, or the idea even, of a Chapter Two where life after being widowed is concerned. It implies that I didn’t begin my life until the day I met my late husband,Will, and that everything and everyone who preceded him was but a prologue to actual living. I was 35 when we married. I had lived quite a bit of my life, and it was not a half-existence. There were many chapters in the Book of Me before that day arrived. The idea that Will was my chapter one and Rob is now chapter two is almost archaic but in a quaint sort of 1950’s Ronald Reagan sexist pig sort of way.

I didn’t realize until today how much I resent this chapter motif as it relates to marriage and widowhood. I was/am significant as a person, a woman and a wife. No one facet of who I am defines me so utterly that it negates another part. Not woman, wife, mother, teacher, writer, runner, friend, sister, daughter, aunt or any other title I wear, mostly simultaneously, on any given day. 

I don’t know why this angers me so much. It has been a near constant theme running through the various forums at the YWBB since I began posting back in the fall of last year. It is not just the idea of a second chapter to lives that were already books by the time our spouses came along, but also the deification of our dearly departed that sets my teeth in a barely stifled snarl. One woman today wrote something along the St. Husband line today that nearly goaded me into to a rather cold-blooded response. 

“…..we were loved so completely, purely, intensely, simply, and eternally by our spouse…”

This is such a load of crap that I don’t even know where to begin with it, but I doubt that Mary Magdalene had it this good with Jesus Christ. 

My late husband was a really nice guy. Ask anyone who knew him and they will tell you that he would give the shirt off his back for a friend. He was a good husband too. He put me and our marriage first. But he wasn’t perfect. He lost his patience and his temper from time to time. He didn’t plan for the future and actually it was a tooth-pulling exercise to get him to consider life beyond next year or the year after, let alone plan for anything like he or I dying unexpectedly.  He was a smoker, despite my asthma, though he tried time after time to quit. He loved me, but there were times when he didn’t “get me” at all. The one time that I did manage to pin him down on the subject of the future came during a road trip the two summers before we got pregnant with our daughter. We were heading home from visiting his best friend’s family in St. Louis and we were talking about who we would name as guardians for the children we wanted to have. The conversation eventually came around to what we expected of the other should something “happen”. Such a silly euphemism for what amounts to a complete up-ending of one’s whole frame of existence but those were innocent times. 

“So would you remarry if something were to happen to me?”

“Yes,” followed by a sidelong glance in my direction when the silence made him realize he might have answered that question a bit too quickly. “I’m only 27. I love you but if you were gone would you want me to spend the rest of my life alone? Look at my mom and how unhappy she is.”

He went on to say that he expected me to marry again. Actually, he made it sound like an edict, and I understood why. His mother had been widowed at 32. She never married again. Her late husband just couldn’t be replaced. A truer statement than you know because Will’s dad was a violent alcoholic but with widow-goggles he became a knight all agleam and resplendent. I would never have known this but for Will. Both my mother-in-law and his father’s family had sanitized his father’s memory past recognition, and I was actually shocked to learn the truth from him. But it taught me something in retrospect and I am distrustful of people who have nothing that sounds “real” to say about their late spouses or marriages. Having been married, then and now, I know that there is no such thing as perfect. We may marry people on the most perfect day we have ever known but we live with them on all the other days for years, and hopefully decades, to come. 

I guess I understand why so many widowed people downplay the idea of falling in love again. Opening yourself up to the possibility of a new relationship is scary and it can be a cause for self-reflection. It is hard to look at yourself honestly and realize that the things about you that aren’t that attractive may have been things that your late spouse simply put up with gracefully because they loved you. 

It’s hard to admit that you aren’t perfect either. I had a hard lesson in that when I asked a widower friend on the board to review one of my first online dating profiles and his assessment was essentially  along the lines of “I am sure someone will find that intriguing”.  And I knew exactly what he meant. I was completely myself in that profile and unfortunately when given the chance to express myself via the written word, I am myself in THX. Will loved that I was a cut to the chase kind of girl, but I am more blunt than the candlestick that Miss Scarlet used to knock off Colonel Mustard in the drawing room. I know that. Still it hurt to be reminded that Will was an exception and I would have to put some effort into meeting such a man again. 

Rude awakenings await most widowed people. The knowledge that  you were loved not in spite of your “flaws” or even because of them is a concept that even the most elastic mind will have trouble wrapping around. Our late spouses simply loved us for all of ourselves because the option, not being with us, was as unbearable as our loss of them would eventually be.