dating widowers

The Void


Simulated gravitational lensing (black hole go...

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Lay down all thought

Surrender to the void

It is shining

It is shining

-John Lennon, lyrics to Tomorrow Never Knows off the Revolver album

 

 

 

Widowed people often ask about filling the void left by their deceased spouses, or rather they talk about how it can’t be filled. Surprisingly, I don’t disagree with them. Voids can’t be filled. How can you fill something that isn’t empty?

 

Voids are black holes of the soul. They devour. Nothing escapes their gravitational pull. Everything that was joyous and worth getting up in the morning for has been sucked into this pitch-colored vortex, never to be experienced again. They act almost like vacuum, clearing away the memories left behind by our spouses like cracker crumbs. Remnants of a life that hide like a set of misplaced car keys when you need them, but turn up when unexpectedly and rock us to our core.

 

Voids are necessary for the same reason that basements or backs of closets exist. They hold the things that our lives can’t rid themselves of, for a variety of reasons, but can’t use anymore either. Psychic storage units that you venture into at your own emotional risk. Why would you throw opportunities for love and happiness into that?

 

The life you find yourself living in the aftermath hangs on the edge of this blackened crater. It would be easy to fall in, let the dark claim you, but most of us don’t. True, we wander the rim for a time, but eventually we walk away in search of unscathed earth to resettle ourselves upon.

 

It’s not about “filling” anything or in the case of “the void” paving over it. It is about relocation, finding new space or in some cases making new space. Some people don’t have the capacity. They surrender to the grief. Or worse, they seek replacements and dump new love on top of old pain. It always comes back to this however, acknowledging the former life and honoring the love that once was while moving forward and being open to the possibilities that life does present even to those who aren’t paying attention.

 

 

 

 

High End Pens


Parker Duofold pens from a 1920s magazine adve...

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“None of us can have as many virtues as the fountain-pen, or half its cussedness; but we can try” – Mark Twain

 

There was a small article on fountain pens on page 194 of the September 2006 issue of Oprah Magazine. I saved it because it reminded me of my late husband. Will loved pens. In general he hated shopping unless it was for a new pen or Pittsburgh Steelers paraphernalia. He would tease me about my Target addiction and only reluctantly would he actually accompany me, but he rarely left there without a new pen.

 

He didn’t write much in his line of work. Mainly he took orders and filled out inventory files, but he insisted on having a good pen with which to do these things. Before his illness took its vicious hold of him, he had printer perfect block letter penmanship, and his cursive was small and impossibly neat. He would leave yellow post-it notes for me on the kitchen table with short utilitarian messages and “I Love You’s” whenever he left the house and knew I would get home before he could get back.

 

But he did write once upon a time. There are three or four pieces of lined notebook paper with poems he wrote when he was just starting college that I have saved. They reflect a rough time in his life. A good friend of his had just committed suicide and the younger brother of one of his close friends had killed himself around the same time as well. The poems are dark and painful. He shared them with me one day not long after we were married. He had been to his mom’s to clean out his old room and discovered them in an notebook. He had wanted to throw them away. He didn’t think they were very good, and they reminded him of the day when he had almost committed suicide himself. I convinced him to save them. I am not yet sure if I am glad I did. I don’t know much about that time of his life beyond what he told me. But right now I am not able to throw away anything I come across that he wrote.

 

I even saved a letter that former girlfriend wrote him a few months before we were married. She was a foreign exchange student he met in high school and their correspondence spanned about 7 or eight years. He stopped writing to her after we became a couple. Not because I asked him to but because he considered her a chapter in his life that was closed. She wrote a few more times before she reappeared about two months before our wedding expecting him to be free to pick up their on/off more romantic on his side than hers relationship. I think something about seeing she and I together made him finally realize that he had been used. I don’t know what she thought. The letter represents another time in his life I don’t know much about either. I realize now that there were a lot of things about him I didn’t know.

 

Periodically Will would initiate a shopping trip strictly for the purpose of acquiring new pens. He would normally purchase several at a time because as a route salesman he knew that they would eventually be left at a stop, lost in the seat of the truck, or drop from his pocket as he loaded and unloaded his cube van. I still have his favorite one. It’s maroon and black and though it doesn’t work very well anymore, I can’t throw it away. Like the poems and that stupid letter from the spoiled little Dutch girl.

 

Our daughter seems to have inherited his love of writing utensils though she loves mechanical pencils just as much as she loves pens. Will didn’t like pencils at all. He even balanced his checkbook in ink. We are forever collecting pencils and pens now. Her favorites tend to be girly with sparkles and feathers. It never ceases to amaze me how much she is like him when she never really knew the man that I fell in love with. He was long gone by the time she was born. She only ever knew her father as a sick man. Confused. Frail. And then wheelchair and bed-bound. Finally unable to talk, see, feed himself. “Daddy never talks to me,” she would say when I asked her if she would like to visit him in the nursing home where he spent over a year of the last fifteen months of his life.

 

The pen I saved is one she uses sometimes though often she will decline to use it because “that’s Daddy’s.” It’s funny the little things that pull up memories you forgot you even remembered. Articles in Oprah, god would he have laughed about that, and fountain pens.

An Ideal World


Pearl S Buck house .

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“Life without idealism is empty indeed. We just hope or starve to death.” – Pearl S. Buck 

 

A friend told me last week that I should stop trying to create an “ideal” world. This was in response to a note I sent him about his reply to one of my last posts on the YWBB. He was critical of my stance on the negativity that finds such an easy foothold on the board in part because of the grief but also because those of us who know better are too slow to correct the naysayers and voices of despair. I told him, no, because I am not going to stop trying to share my own experiences or hoping the world will become a better place. I am not going to let darkness prevail. To which his response was that I was going to do well in Canada.

 

Americans and their right-wing ideas about Canadians aside, this got me thinking about whether I am truly an idealist or not. I have certainly copped to the Pollyanna label but rose-colored glasses might not be true idealism.

 

The googled definition of an idealist reads like this:

 

“One of the seven attitudes. Its positive pole is coalescence; its negative pole is abstraction. Idealists view the world in terms of how it could be changed for the better.”

 

Rob thinks that I fit that definition but that I haven’t really had much of an opportunity to action simply because I haven’t had a solid foundation from which to work for a very long time now. I would agree that on my good days I generally am trying to rally the troops (interesting analogy – would an idealist use a military analogy?) to a common cause and that at my least focused I tend towards the unrealistic in terms of ideas and implementation. But to just give in to the general malaise and admit defeat in the face of odds small or overwhelming is not something I can do. I don’t deny my own dark moments when it seemed to me that I would never feel anything but misery again. It’s disingenuous to tell someone that tragedy won’t affect us and change who we are, but Anne Frank wasn’t wrong when she stated her belief that deep down people are good. And I am not wrong when I add that the world is a good place too.

 

I think that grief makes it too easy for us to quit. We say to ourselves that since life will never be the same then it will never be as good either. This allows us to not even try because if we try and fail then that is a reflection on us, but if we give ourselves permission to not try at all then we can hide in our widow weeds, safe from self-loathing and worldly expectations. There is a reason that society both close and far puts pressure on us to “get over” our spouse’s deaths and it is not just to ease their discomfort. It’s not good for us to bog down. Get stuck. There is nothing emotionally healthy in viewing life as having been spent and seeing the time ahead of us as something to merely be marked. In encouraging us to look to a brighter tomorrow and to lay aside our negative feelings and outlooks, we are being urged to embrace life. And is life perfect? No, and it wasn’t before, but it is and always has been a product of hope, imagination, and some effort.

 

From time to time I need to step back from the idea that I can make a difference on my own. Teaching is an example of that. After 20 years I have resigned from my current position and will not be teaching when the fall finds me in Canada. Teaching is a profession that demands a lot of “give” on the part of the instructor and very little “give back” from the students, but if you are doing it correctly you should burn out periodically and need to change venues by way of changing schools, grade levels or subject areas. If you are passionate about what you do, it should show. I am probably a little past my prime when it comes to letting my love of a job consume me. I have other more important things in my life, but I still think that what you choose to do for a living should matter and make a difference in your little acre of life. You can’t make anything or anyone be perfect but you shouldn’t settle either.

 

Could it be that my unwillingness to settle is what others call idealism? Even when faced with ample evidence to the contrary, I have still found it hard to accept that people can’t change, the world might never be a better place and that tomorrow isn’t another day. My Scarlett side, I guess. Because if we all just gave up, decided nothing we could do or say would make any difference or improvement, wouldn’t our world just spiral – negatively – into a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom and gloom?