The worst day of the week is Sunday. It’s for family and friends. Something that you are in short supply of after you lose your spouse. I don’t know how it is for people who lose their loved ones suddenly. I would imagine that the shock compells family and friends to hang around for a while but perhaps not. I know plenty of widows and widowers who lost their spouses tragically who can attest to the fact that very quickly the phone stops ringing, cards stop arriving, and people they thought they could count on disappear back into a life they are no longer a part of. It’s like losing your membership in a club. One day you are one of them and the next you are one of “them”. Sundays are the longest day of the week. Not that the rest of the weekend doesn’t carry its own special tortures but generally, you can shrug off Friday night without too much effort. You’re tired and by the time you’ve gotten children home and fed and maybe hit the gym for a workout, it’s easy to kick back and call it an early night. Saturday is for errands and housework and yardwork and kid’s birthday parties and playdates that can easily keep a person running into the early evening. But, Sunday is a blackhole that waits for you all week long and swallows you. A wormhole to hell. If you go to church, you are assailed by families, whole and happy. If you avoid it, as I do, you are left with that many more hours of the day to fill. Say what you like about mass, but it is a guaranteed time sucker. When I was a child, I never knew a priest who couldn’t conduct a service in less than 35 minutes. My father’s uncle, Father John, was the master of eclesiatical efficiency. Twenty minutes and this included the homily. My cousins and I used to time him. We never caught him going long. When my aunt’s husband died, I remember my father telling one of his brothers, who was worried we wouldn’t make it across town to the cemetary before the noon traffic began, that he shouldn’t worry because Father John never ran long. The marriage ceremony he performed for my parents was probably the longest mass he ever gave. It lasted about a half hour, but he was drunk. Today, if it weren’t for the consecration, you couldn’t tell a Catholic Mass from a Protestant service. Quanity over quality. Sunday is a day when you cannot call up friends and finagle an invite or a playdate. It is a day when you will run into couples and families wherever you go. It is a day when you remember most keenly that you are not like them anymore.
grief
I ran into an old coworker last weekend. I had ventured out to watch a colleague’s funk band at a local venue and she was there with her new boyfriend. She met him on Cupid.com. A widow herself, she told me that “when you feel ready to get back out there”, she thoroughly recommended online matchmaking.
“Back out there”. Sounds innocuous enough. Though not an actual place, it is often made to seem like a real destination and somewhere you should want to strive to get back to. There is that scene in the movie “When Harry met Sally” where Marie asks her fiance to promise her that she will “never have to be back out there again” and he readily assures her she will not.
So, “back out there” is not prime emotional real estate but a place where the unattached are banished. Kind of an east of Eden thing. The man she was with seemed pleasant enough, if a bit drunk for my tastes. After my experiences with the relationship Nazis at eHarmony, I was not keen on the idea of another dating site.
To me it seems much too like the ads you see of Eastern European girls looking for husbands. And the basic premise of online profiles seems to be that you should be as much unlike yourself as you can get away with so as to attract someone who maybe will be okay with who you really are. Fine line walking.
Cupid has some plusses that e did not. You don’t have to take a personality test. You can browse profiles rather than wait for them to be selected for you. You can send generic interest messages to men you think you might want to get to know even without paying for the service though the downside of this is that if the man in question isn’t a paying member, he won’t be able to respond to you. It’s a nicer way to waste time than e. Aside from that, it is not proving to be much fun. Online dating is just not fun. Not that I remember dating before my husband as being incredibly entertaining but it had a social element that web-dating does not.
A few people have looked at my profile. A few of them have “winked” at me. One guy sent me an email that practically asked me to go “steady” with him. I deleted it. Most of the men are old. So am I now, I guess. They are divorced. They have kids. Why this bothers me I am not entirely sure. I don’t have expectations of finding men “out of the box”, not at this point in my life, but part of me still wishes I was young enough for that to still be a possibility.
I think that I am still getting over the feeling that I lost a lot of what was left of my youth to my husband’s illness. I still want that back. Seeing what I am stuck with (got to get over that) for dating and relationship prospects just reinforces my new status. Another plus is that they sponsor speed dating events though it looks like it is hard to sign up for them. The women’s slots are taken up very quickly which just reminds me that the field of competition is densely populated and competitive in my age group.
The downside of Cupid is that it nags at you about your profile. Mine is apparently not “positive” enough which I think means that I am being too honest. It also lets people block your profile which is supposedly anonymous, but I sent a “wink” at a guy and now his profile has disappeared, so it is not that anonymous. Even online, rejection sucks.
You are also expected to fork over a significant fee for the privilege of what amounts to blind dating. Not flush enough at the moment for that. Finally, it is still impossible to get a read on any of these guys from a photo and a badly written essay. That personal touch is just so important. Eye contact. Tone of voice. Tilt of head. Whiff of cologne. How can you judge anything without chemistry? But, as long as it is free, I will mess around with it. It is at the very least, something to do.
In the beginning, people call and ask you out to lunch or over for dinner. They offer to help out and babysit for your child. They treat you like you are made of something very fragile that would break with a cross word or a misinterpreted action. And they are constantly bucking you up not because they believe that your sadness is unhealthy for you but because they are so acutely uncomfortable with what has happened. They have been awakened to the possibility that there but for the grace of God they may go to, and they don’t like it. They don’t like that you are not strong, that you need so much time, that you are frozen in a moment that you relive endlessly, and that you are quite probably infecting them with whatever bad karma has brought death to your door. The further out from the early days you travel the less they are there for you. Impatience replaces kindness and understanding. Why aren’t you taking steps to rebuild your life? Why aren’t you returning to the accepted standards of self-reliance? Why are you still sad? And lost? And needy? And taking up my time? Time that is better spent on things that aren’t tainted with grief and death. Past six months they think they are being kind when they offer you advice on what you can do for yourself as opposed to offering assistance with what you need done. They think that you would get over your loved one’s death faster if you would join a club or go to a singles’ function. They equate the lose of the person who loved you more unconditionally than your own parents ever have with breaking up with a lover or getting a divorce. You should be cried out by now. You should not be bothering me with this anymore. But, they don’t say that because they know that they are wrong to think and feel the way they do, and that you are in the right to mourn. They stuff that down deep; they way they wish you would stuff your grief. And eventually, you stop asking them for things because it is just easier. How are you? Fine. I’m okay. Even though I am not okay. The numb disinterest in everything is gone now and replaced by a raw, scraped feeling that makes you a lightening rod for every heightened emotion that filters past daily. In the beginning you turn inward and sought the cocooned safety that the emotional distancing of grief provides in much the same way burn victims are shielded from the agony of their smoldering flesh by a shutdown of the pain receptors. But the receptors switch back on in time to witness the desertion of family and friends who withstood the waves of heat rising off your blistering soul while you were oblivious to it. Because of this, you can’t easily label them traitors and cast them aside. They were there at one point. It was, unfortunately, a point at which you weren’t paying any attention at all. And now you really need the shoulders, the help reconnecting with society at large, and they are tired and ready for you to be normal again. And the ironic thing is that they know as well as you do that you will never be that kind of normal again. And the more ironic thing is that I am not sure I want to be.
anniegirl1138 