remarriage of widowed people

A Month from Today


Wedding Dress For Happy Couple in Love

Image by epSos.de via Flickr

On the morning of June 27th at just about this time in the morning, I will have been married for just a bit more than half a day. Rob and I remind ourselves often that time is too precious to wish away, but as I gear up for another week of separation I wish I owned a Toynbee Convector.

 

There is an old Ray Bradbury short story that I used to teach to my seventh graders back in the day. It is about a man who fakes a trip to the future in order to give the world hope of a better world to come. The faked proof he presents inspires people to go out and actually create the world he only imagined for them. I remind myself when I am feeling impatient and missing my love’s physical reassurance that what we are doing in our time apart is giving substance to our dreams.

 

You can’t build a future if you aren’t able to envision it in your mind’s eye.

 

 

Facing the Truth


Heaven

“He’s dead, Jim,” Dr. Leonard (Bones) McCoy (2227-?) chief medical officer on the starship, Enterprise

During the first year, when I was trapped by responsibilities I did as best I could to keep hopelessness at bay and anger to a minimum. But I longed to live life again. To be happy. To set goals and reach for them. To be out in the world and experience things again. Certainly I would have preferred to have had Will by my side, but that wasn’t the reality. He was gone, and I was still here.

Why do some of us see the world for the possibilities it holds for us as opposed to some sort of solitary confinement to be outlasted?

My husband’s dead. I don’t expect phone calls. He isn’t going to turn up in the kitchen one morning when I come down to get breakfast for my daughter. Although there are moments in the beginning when there is a Twilight Zone feel to this, I have a difficult time with widowed people who are further out than I am and still talking about grappling with the reality of their now. They talk about “diverting” themselves with projects and dating and getaways. How does one “divert” grief? It hangs on you like a too large coat, smothering you almost with its omnipresence. I guess what most annoys me about statements like these, and it is annoyance because I can’t empathizewith it  and it is for the rare one that I feel pity, is that they refer to life as a distraction. Living is a distraction? Reality is a time filler on the way to the grave?

Reunification seems to be the goal of many widowed people. While it is a nice thought, I am not so sure that it is the reality that awaits any of us when this life is over. I often have the feeling that Will is farther and farther away from me all the time, and that he is moving forward in much the same way that I have. A dear friend of Rob’s told him that he shouldn’t worry about the configurations of the next life in terms of our earth bound relations. The next plane is not bound by the rules that reign here. I don’t worry about it much myself, but I wonder how I could ever give Rob up. He is too precious and too much a part of me now.

A common question of the widowed is how do you make room in your heart to love another? There is a feeling that a broken heart is just not capable of being repaired to a point where this will be possible. The thing is, though, that your heart isn’t really broken. It still beats. It still feels and aches and has love to give. There is just no one to ease the ache or accept the love anymore. Fear is what holds us back from loving again at some point. Those who have trouble reconnecting with their ability to love and risk not being loved in return more than likely had difficulty with this before they married. I know that when I first tried to date I fell back into the bad relationship habits of my life before Will. It was as though I had forgotten everything I had learned from him and with him about relationships. It was only when I stepped back and acknowledged what I was doing and made an effort to put the lessons of my marriage into practice again that I found my footing and ultimately was able to build a relationship with Rob.

Often I hear widowed people say that though they are in a new relationship, or open to one, they will never love someone else as much as they loved their late spouse, or be loved as comparably. I just cringe. I love Rob as much as I ever loved Will, and I feel as loved as I have ever felt. Beyond that I can’t make any other comparisons. It is not possible and it’s not wise. “That was then and this is now.” Mark says that to Byron in the S.E. Hinton novel of the same now when he is asked why things can’t be the same between them. In the novel it is a rather cynical and very hard assessment of the reality experienced by these teen-aged characters. The two boys had survived hard childhoods and yet the severing of their near-familial relationship was one of the most difficult challenges either had faced yet. Life is hard sometimes, but reality must be acknowledged for what it is. Life is not static. It is ever changing, and it’s direction is only marginally ours to control.

I can’t imagine who I would be were it not for Will. I can’t imagine a future without Rob. My truths.

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Victoria Day


HDR IR Victoria Day, Toronto

Image by Lone Primate via Flickr

Rob is here for the the week. He arrived Saturday afternoon, and my daughter and I picked him up at the airport. His flight was a bit delayed, so we walked around a little as we waited, a very little, as it is an extremely small airport made smaller by the fact that you are no longer allowed up in the main terminal. I think terrorism is currently a yellow color, and what passes for security was a tad more attentive though their vigilance seemed only to extend as far as luggage that sat still for longer than a minute. Dee too was especially interested in the suitcases as they wheeled by us.

 

“Black, black…..red….black,” she would say as she tallied them up.

 

“What are you doing?”

 

“I am looking for a green suitcase. Rob’s is green,” she explained to me in a tone reserved for the stupid.

 

I explained to her that Rob would be with his suitcase. It wouldn’t be arriving with someone else. Still, we had to go to the baggage claim and look there as well.

 

When he arrived, there were hugs and kisses, and I felt whole again. I hate the time we spend apart. Even though we both put much time and effort into staying as connected as possible, there quickly comes a time when phone calls, emails and IM cannot substitute for hugs and kisses and looking into his eyes during a conversation.

 

Being a family too is not a distance thing. It should come as no surprise that my daughter has taken to Rob like a duck to water. Last week one night as she artfully resisted bedtime, she tried to convince me that she needed to spend the night in my bed with me. Although I didn’t need to point out to her that she is a big girl who has her own bed in her own room, I did anyway. Repetition is the key to instruction. Cleverly, she agreed, but pointed out that since “our dad” was not here, it would be okay for her to bunk in.

 

We spent the weekend quite like a normal family. The babysitter came at seven on Saturday evening, so we could have dinner out with friends of mine who wanted to wish us well on the upcoming move and wedding. Sunday was Shrek the Third at the multiplex at the nearby mall and a walk around the fishpond outside before ice cream and home. Sunday was tidying up Will’s grave site and decorating it for Memorial Day as we will be in Edmonton for the holiday…….okay, maybe that’s not what a “normal” family does as on a Sunday afternoon many families are trading the kids back at the designated drop off according to the visitation schedule per the divorce decree…….and yes, that wasn’t nice. But, I wonder sometimes about “normal”. A year ago a normal Sunday was spent with me on the Internet and my daughter watching cartoons. The year before that our normal was going to the nursing home and her watching me spoon feed her father his lunch.

 

When did the standard for what constitutes a normal family become a mother, father and 2.3 children, and why does this standard persist when that clearly is not the norm anymore?

 

Peggy Drexler, a gender scholar who lives in New York, has a piece in the current Newsweek magazine discussing the idea of what makes a family appear normal. A product of a single parent upbringing, her father died when she was three and a half, she discusses the insecurities and inadequacies brought about by the overt and subtle messages that society sends to children and parents who are living outside the Christian Coalition’s definition of what makes up a proper family. She raises the point that growing up she felt that somehow they were a lesser family due to loss of her father, and although that is true, to my mind it is only true in the sense that she, her mother and her sisters missed out on the love that would have been theirs. They were a family regardless.

 

The article, No Such Thing as an ‘Average’ Family, discussed research Ms. Drexler conducted as a graduate student that concluded that family make-up is not a one size fits all and that “damaged” children are not necessarily the outcome of families that fall outside the traditional structure. As a public school teacher for twenty years now I would have to concur. What we would term “good children” comes primarily from “good parenting” and this can occur in any type of family.

 

Victoria Day or Fête de la Reine is a Canadian holiday celebrated on the last Monday before or on May 24th in honor of both Queen Victoria’s (1837-1901) birthday and the current reigning British Monarch. Although it is often thought of as a purely Canadian event, it is also celebrated in some parts of Scotland. I mention this only because next year we will be celebrating it as a family, or maybe not, Rob tells me that this Monday is usually the day spent traveling back from wherever you have been camping. We will be our version of a family. No better or worse than what we would have been had Will not died or if Rob and I had never found each other. Just a family, like so many others that live and love from day to week to years on end. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then so too is what makes a family.