remarriage of widowed people

Sister-Wife


The wives of polygamists refer to themselves as “sister-wives”. I think this is meant to impose a familial relationship on something that could easily dissolve into something competitive and downright ugly were it not for the veneer of a pseudo-relationship that the term implies. Despite my own negative views on this subject, I began to wonder the other day if the term didn’t more aptly describe my relationship with Shelley.

Shelley was Rob’s wife. She died eight months after my husband, Will, back in 2006. Today is her birthday. She would have been 47 years old. Just a few months older than Rob and he never let her forget it. Now he must contend with being older then I am by a couple of years, and I am not sure why I think this, but I’ll bet Shelley is enjoying that particular turn of the table.

When I stop to ponder Shelley and Rob and myself and the circumstances that bind us, I know I could write a novel that would set me on Oprah’s sofa in a heartbeat. But life is not a book of the month, at least not this life that we share. Anyway I am not certain I am accomplished enough to find the words, craft the sentences and paragraphs that would explain us or if I could, that I would really want to.

I live in the house that Shelley called home. The colors on the wall and the decor are hers. The garden out back and the hanging planters grew things she planted. There is a room in the basement crammed to the ceiling almost with things that mostly belonged to her once and what isn’t there sits on shelves and in cabinets and hangs in closets upstairs and down.

Our kitchen is more and more mine now, but there are still elements of Shelley. The dining room too. However the bed where Rob and I sleep and make love was the place of similar activities when she was alive and still well. That last part doesn’t cross my mind much at all truthfully, but when it does it certainly gives a surreal twist to things.  

Her birthday fell on and around Mother’s Day every year and as is common when one’s birthday falls too close to a major gift-giving holiday, Shelley got more than her share of combination gifts in much the same way my friends and family tended to lump my birthday with Christmas whenever they could get away with it. As Rob was telling me this, it occurred to me that from this point on, I will share this holiday with Shelley. Our daughters have a common father in Rob now but though I might likely be grandmother to her children’s children someday, I will not be a mother to her daughters in the same way that Rob fathers my little girl much as I might love and care for their happiness and welfare. An awesome task though nevertheless, and I wonder all the time if I am doing a good enough job.

I wonder sometimes too if I had known Shelley would we have been friends. I don’t think so because I don’t make friends easily especially with outgoing people and judging by her oldest daughter, Farron, I think she was. She was deeply committed to her ideals and values. I am still figuring much of that out. A farm girl, she was handy in the outdoors. As an asthmatic with more allergies than should be humanly possible, I am more of a liability in any woodsy situation than not. Still, we both found love in Rob which suggests some mutual ground I have yet to discover though recently Rob related to me that Shelley and I have common ground in weight struggles. Though he finds my concerns now and hers of long ago a bit mystifying, like me Shelley was a fitness nut who made eating healthy a priority. Weight, gaining or losing, is somewhat of a stereotypical female bonding ground (of course it is also a source of much friction as well).

Sisters do not choose each other. They are born into families and learn to co-exist. Sometimes quite happily and lovingly. Sometimes not at all. More often than not such relationships fall somewhere in between understanding and merely shared heritage. Shelley and I did not choose each other. Rob choose us. First her and then me. In the earliest days here, I felt a presence that I can’t say for sure was hers but that seemed to be studying and watching. It was neither welcoming nor repelling. Just there. I haven’t felt that for a while. Perhaps I have been judged and found adequate. I choose to think that.

Happy Birthday, Shelley.

Running Errands with My Husband


Rob took the afternoon off today, so we could run over to Northgate Centre and visit the Service Canada Centre there. It’s amazing to me the number of  things one can find in malls here that have nothing whatsoever to do with shopping. At Northgate not only can a person apply for unemployment, Social Insurance Numbers (as I did today) and passports at a Service Canada outlet, so to speak, but there is an outreach high school, a fitness center for moms and kids, a doctor’s office, a dental office and an insurance agent. Quite a different take on such a faciality then I am used to being from the Midwest of the United States. Perhaps it is a big city thing, but I have noticed that Canadians make the most of their strip malls and malls. It’s not just a shopping thing. For example the strip mall we visit to shop at the organic grocery, Planet Organic, also contains a police station and a person can find registeries – for birth, death, marriage, driver’s, auto, hunting/fishing licenses and certificates just about anywhere as the government outsources those tasks to private companies. One thing the Canadian don’t have though is 24 hour service. That is rare. They also don’t get the American idea that Saturday should be as convenient as Monday thru Friday in terms of access. Saturday has many stores closing at 5 or 6 and the mail just doesn’t move. Sunday? Well, Canadians aren’t religious really but the day is still the Lord’s where work is concerned. Noon to five are the hours on anything that happens to be open for the most part.

So now that I have that digression off my chest, let’s return to my errand running with Rob. We got my SIN (social insurance number) to obtain for filing my taxes up here. No I haven’t earned a dime since coming here but every adult has to file and surprisingly we all file as individuals. Canada doesn’t recognize the concept of filing as a married couple. The SIN is just a temporary one. Once I have my residency, I exchange it for a permanent number. It works just like the SS#’s in the U.S. except they have numbers for permanent residents and citizens that start with a different prefix than those they assign to temporary residents and workers. Neat, huh? America could learn a thing or two from the Canadians.

I love spending time with Rob in the middle of the day – just the two of us. Even if it is as simple as a run to the mall, home improvement store and then the grocery for foodstuff to make pizza, it’s just nice to be together. Our conversation wasn’t extraordinary. We weren’t more affectionate than normal (because our PDA standards are above the norm for people our age anyway). It was just the spending of time, holding hands and talking about all the regular things couples talk about as they go from place to task to another place again. The normalcy and who would think that such a thing would be worth commentary? But it is.

 

Something in Common


I seldom buy The Edmonton Journal these days. I am a Globe and Mail girl. However this last weekend I was compelled not once but twice to grab it as I hustled in and out of the Safeway. The Saturday Edition featured the story of a young (very young) widower on the front page. His wife had been murdered by his brother and it inspired him to crusade on behalf of the victims’ rights movement which inadvertently has become the start of a promising political career. My friend, Marsha wrote a blog piece recently about finding the good in tragedy and this young man is a prime example of this idea. An idea that not everyone shares but I believe is true. Something good is meant to come from loss. Even it doesn’t then the lesson was lost and the tragedy is magnified. Lessons? Yeah, lessons. We weren’t put on this earth to accumulate stuff and make imaginary friends on Facebook. There is a higher purpose.

The Sunday Journal did not appear to have any widows hiding in it, but on the inside of the Culture Section there was an op-ed that first ran in the NYTimes by an author named Patty Dann. The piece detailed her relationship with another widower and how it went from the sharing of a mutual experience to friendship and love. He had written a review online about the novel she had written detailing her late husband’s illness and death. She sent him a note and they eventually became e-mail pals. The whole thing reminded me of Rob and I. How we’d started out on the e-mail and somehow what was just support and an opportunity to “talk” to a like-minded adult of the opposite sex subtly and suddenly became oh so much more. As often as I was told back then that it wasn’t possible to know something through their written words it’s nice to be validated by Ms. Dann’s story. Not that it surprises me. She and her husband to be are writers and Rob and I too. People who don’t know how to make themselves heard through the printed word or to hear someone in kind couldn’t be expected to understand how powerful a medium the writing is.

I am not sure why but I don’t relate to every widowed’s story. I understand the emotions because they are common to us as a group but the deaths themselves are so varied. The young man whose brother killed his wife had no warning. His brother was a drug addict with a mental illness who’d been released from jail on bond without any warning to his family despite his harassing them. That’s awful and too common but not something I can relate to. Just as I know that very, very few widowed can understand what it is like to care for a 29 year old man with dementia or be married to a non-responsive invalid you only see on weekends in the nursing home or hospice. I was widowed long before my late husband actually died and will never accept the idea that was so forcefully pushed at me that there is no such thing as anticipatory grief. It’s real. And I know that from ugly experience. So I find what similarites I can with others who lost spouses to long illnesses but know that I likely won’t find anyone who was emotionally and mentally cut off from their spouse for years prior to the end. One thing that draws me to some widowed people are tales of their loved one who changed mentally. Personalities flip-flopped by diseased brains. Ms. Dann’s husband had glioblastoma and lost his memory. My late husband’s memory was wiped clean by a neurodegneration caused by an inherited metabolic disorder called x-ALD. Her husband was terminal from day one. So was mine. It’s different when there is no hope. It just is.

She was luckier than me though. Most people with determined outcomes are. Her Willem understood what was wrong with him, and my Will never did. He was able to help her make final arrangements for himself. I had to do that alone, guessing at what he would have wanted as we’d never had a whole conversation about it. I dug through my memories for anything I thought might help. The only thing he did give me was the headstone. I knew that he wanted one and a place to put it. She got to make love with her Willem again and I did not. Will was uninterested in anything but pacing in circles and Mountain Dew, which he would have consumed non-stop had I not hid the cans. He didn’t know who I was. He called me “Babe” and called to our daughter as though she were a puppy  “SweetiePie. Here Sweetie Pie.”

Ms. Dann wrote a book about her experiences. It seems to be what widows do, if they have any inclination or ability (and even when they don’t have the latter at all). I honestly haven’t read anyone’s first-hand account of widowhood in book form even though I know that I need to write my own story and might benefit from seeing how others have done it. Or not. 

For now though, I have found a widow with whom I feel a bond. We fell in love again with men who wrote us e-mails.