second marriages

Traditional Marriage


Stumbled across this post at DoubleX yesterday. Group of young feminist bloggers trash talking marriage and all things wedding mostly, but what struck me about it was the focus on details. As if tossing bouquets and ugly bridesmaid dresses were the point of relationships and marriage at all.

“It’s details,” I complained to Rob. “Why do people get so bogged down in minutia of marriage that they miss the point of the relationship that marriage is supposed to be all about?”

“Everyone can’t be as enlightened as we are,” he replied.

I know I’ve beaten this horse before, but intimate relationships are built on communication and an understanding of expectations by both parties. Whether a woman keeps her maiden name, wears white or decides to stay home with babies is really beside the point. It’s like shaved legs.

Shaved legs?

I wrote a post for 50 Something a week or so back about the fact I don’t shave during the winter. It’s pointless, as no one sees my legs really and it’s itchy besides. In my post I stress that my hairy legs are just hairy legs. It’s a practical decision that in no way should be misconstrued as a feminist statement. Things are simple, and female, should take care to avoid “statement” status in the realm of feminism because they usually become so entangled in nonsense they end up undermining feminism’s real point – equality.

The same can be said of these ridiculous debates on the “tradition” of marriage. Marriage is just a formalizing of an ongoing intimate relationship. The trappings are details. That’s all. They reflect personal or religious tastes – for which there is no accounting.

Whether a couple goes Disney princess or jeans/t-shirt on a mountain top doesn’t matter as much as the journey that brought them there or the continuation of it after that moment has passed.

I am no less equal to my husband because I took his last name or wore white. Getting married in a church or on a river bank surrounded by mountains (and I’ve done both – in white) was a moment – shining and special, imo – in something that began earlier and will continue until one of us is gone.

I suppose it is important to define one’s self, but turning everything into a symbol or anti-symbol seems a waste of energy better spent elsewhere.

Ghosts of Our Lives Past


Wednesday morning I was waked by a finger poke to my side. It wasn’t painful but meant to get attention. I was startled but thought it was Dee, even though she wouldn’t come into our bedroom at such an early hour. We trained her long ago to treat our bedroom as off-limits. I had an open bedroom policy for her when she was little and it was just her and I, but once Rob and I coupled, I decided it was time to go old school like my folks. We kids weren’t allowed in their bedroom under pain of pain. I can remember standing at the door in the middle of the night, sick as a dog and still not daring to put so much as my big toe in their room without permission.

Dee knocks, a very soft rapping, or if she is unwell, she calls from her room.

I half sat up and found no one.

They’re back, I thought.

The house has been quiet and empty of spirits for a while. That feeling of being watched had disappeared after the cat incident on Rob’s birthday. But that poke in the side woke more than just me.

I didn’t mention it to Rob. It was just a poke. There was nothing behind it other than a call to attention, and I figured I would know what I was supposed to be paying attention to so enough. Ghosts, I have come to discover, are resourceful.

The next morning was 6AM Ashtanga. Yeah, I get up at five and drag my sleepy self out into the cold, drive into town and pretzelize myself with a vigorous yoga workout for an hour. Rob, sweetheart that he is, sets his alarm to wake me because my alarm is alarming and lost since May when we ripped up the hardwood in the bedrooms to prepare for new, smoothly delicious looking hardware (which is down now and gorgeous in case your mind was inquiring).

Shortly before five, I hear the soft knocking on the door that I associate with Dee. I am instantly awake and waiting for her voice, but I hear nothing. I sat up and looked toward the door, thinking that I would see light. The doors are back up but the trim isn’t and if Dee’s light is on, I can see it.

It was dark.

I laid back, thinking that the alarm should be going off soon and pondering when I heard the stairs creak. Our stairs are in needing of a good screwing down and make quite a distinctive sound when anyone comes up or goes down. This time, the creaks were descending and as Rob’s alarm went off, I found I was not in a hurry to follow.

Now I have never seen a spirit/ghost/whatever your preferred pc term is in the time I have been living here. Heard a voice. Being shoved and poked and watched, but haven’t seen anything.

“What is that overhead?” Rob asked.

I looked straight up and there was a white light twirling just about our pillows. It reminded me of  similar experience Rob had in the early morning hours last year when we were in the midst of dying fathers through the fall and end of the year. The light swirled like dust caught in a sunbeam.

“I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t tell him about the knock on the door. Mostly because I didn’t think the sign was for him at the time.

Reluctantly I crawled out of bed and headed downstairs. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d seen someone in the living room or office at that point but saw nothing but dark. I put on my yoga togs, had some tea and toast and headed into town with a bit of trepidation because the early morning traffic that races by our hamlet on the way to the plants is careless and will someday kill someone. I crawled through the intersection and drove in no great hurry to town.

The street where the yoga studio is located is deserted at just before six in the morning. The building is right next to a bar/flophouse where the clientage run mostly to people who flirt with homelessness on a monthly basis. I have been heckled and ogled and generally creeped out by the inhabitants to the point that I avoid walking directly past it, so I park right in front of the studio.

Yoga passed and I did not fall over from exhaustion but I was tired. I’d lost a lot of sleep with Dee’s being ill. She had been up in the night and I was running on not quite six hours. In days of yore, I could do 4 or 5 hours of sleep a night for weeks on end but these days my body will not stand for the abuse. It literally punishes me with all manner of threat of collapse.

After yoga, I climbed into the truck, wondering still about what I was supposed to be paying attention to. The radio was set to the XM 70’s station and the song that came up first was Cheap Trick’s I Want You to Want Me. I first heard that song the summer before high school. The next door neighbor’s had a grand-daughter visiting from California who was my age. She attached herself to me without my permission and I was forced to entertain her for the month she was there. She was vapid, willfully illiterate and thought poking sticks at the local in crowd was a fun pastime. Her only redeeming quality was a collection of the latest hits on cassette tape. She had a Cheap Trick cassette that she let me borrow and copy which is where I first heard this song. Decades later, I marry Rob and come to discover that this same song was “their song”. That love song that all couples have. The one that played when they first met or danced or kissed or had sex or simply dogged them through their first weeks/months together.

Now I am confused. Why would I get a song sign from my husband’s late wife?

Later in the morning during one of the several phone conversations Rob and I have during the day (we used to email back and forth all day when I was in Iowa and he was here – now we call each other), I told him about the poke and the knock on the door. He had no explanation, but later called me back to say that perhaps our house was s conduit for recently departed spirits. An older gentleman down the alley had died recently and maybe it was him.

Loathing that idea very much, I told Rob about the Cheap Trick song.

“Well, that shoots my theory to hell, ” he said.

Which was fine with me because I do not want to live in a conduit for the recently deceased.

That evening as he was going through his blog reader, he happened upon the posting of The Zoo for the day and what was their song video du jour? Yeah, Cheap Trick.

There has been nothing since. I don’t know if we were just getting Christmas greetings or if it was a heads up. And you might wonder why Shelley would contact me first instead of Rob but it’s not much different from Rob getting dream visits from my late husband as opposed to Will showing up in my dreams. Our passed on spouses appear to be quite comfortable with our choices in second mates.

It’s all very fitting for the season I suppose. Very Dickens. We haven’t neglected Christmas here this year but it has been rather lackadaisical and low-key in terms of preparation. I believe this is an outgrowth of our discomfort with the materialism though.

If I should discover deep meaning in the visitations and signs, however, I will let you know.

Letters From Widowed Readers


I don’t get much feedback from widowed people on the grief-related articles and posts I write. There are times when my blog stats show an unusually high level of activity for the oldest posts or those that are specifically tagged young widow or death of a spouse. I get a lot of searches on dating and remarriage in general or specifically relating to widowhood. But no one comments and I never know who these readers are or what brought them to my blog.

Sometimes I get emails though and usually they detail the person’s loss and what they are currently experiencing. I always write back. I remember what it was like when I was the only young widowed person I knew. It’s very lonely and isolating. It’s a near constant out of body experience in some ways. At least it was for me.

Which is the point of this post. I only know widowhood and remarriage from my own point of view. I can only tell you how I felt, what I did and what the outcomes of my actions and beliefs were. There is a list of the most common touch-points where losing a spouse is concerned, but that’s all it is. A list. Not even carved in stone or handed to people by an ordained prophet.

Rob likes to half joke that most rules and laws are merely guidelines and that the thoughtful person is wise to remember that when applying or ignoring them. My years in the classroom back this idea up for the most part. Rules/laws are designed for people who don’t – for whatever reason – think before acting or speaking and for those who are heedless of the fact that the world is made up of a lot of other people whose existences should be credited and considered.

I received an email the other day from a widowed person who’d read my piece on DoubleX about remarriage. This person was recently widowed this past summer and found him/herself in a relationship now with an old friend. Not something anticipated or sought, it just happened.

Back on Ye Ole Widda Board there is a particularly annoying woman who rails against the notion that a relationship can simply happen without conscious effort on the part of two people – but since she is mostly full of her own self-importance, I will almost respectfully disagree. I know when I was a truly single girl, I hated being told that relationships come – not to those who wait, but to those who aren’t really paying any attention at all. I still don’t like to admit that for most people, this is true. All that’s required for a relationship to “just happen” is an openness to the idea and being in the right place at the right time. This widowed person was at a social gathering, struck up an old acquaintance and soon found there was more to be had. And that indeed does happen though I think that love is a place where two people land after the initial excitement and overall wonderlicious giddiness rather than someplace they fall.

This person wanted to know if there were others who’ve experienced the arrival of a new love on the heels of the loss of a spouse. And I assured him/her that it has happened. Some worked out. Some didn’t. The odds are the same for the widowed as the never widowed really. Being widowed young isn’t a special handicap, it’s just a different life experience than most people are handed these days.

I was telling Rob about the email and I admitted that I am not comfortable giving advice on the subject of falling in love again or remarrying. A shocking admission, especially to those who think they know me from the widda board days. Back then I was quick to defend those who dated and seriously recoupled, but not for the reasons people ascribed to me. And it really had nothing to do with my own situation or a belief that remarriage was the gold standard for healing. Grief isn’t healed. It’s incorporated into who you are. And if you believe that being partnered is important for you to be the best you can be then that is your truth. Why it would matter to anyone else is beyond me.

In my reply I mentioned that I felt that grieving and falling in love again were separate issues. One really has nothing to do with the other although like most things in life, they will affect each other on occasion.

I always think that making a new relationship a priority through communication – especially of expectations and needs – is crucial, but that is true regardless of circumstances. As is the fact that a person’s intimate relationships are not a matter of public debate nor should outside input be allowed unless specifically requested and then with the understanding that it might be completely disregarded.

And I was honest with this person about how hard it is to fall in love again. It is not for the flowers and paper hearts crowd because there is real work involved. Of course, anyone who thinks love’s basis is romance and chemistry should steer clear of it, in my opinion.

I am not wise. I have lived through a lot of things. Some experiences have made me a better person and some are simply events that have added to the body of who I am.

I pointed the reader in the direction of some blogs and the widda boards (with a cautionary note there because at Ye Ole Widda Board, early daters are routinely fileted – flayed? – by the Widda’s Who Protest Too Much) and wished him/her luck. Not because I think luck is needed. Relationships succeed or fail based on two people’s ability to parlay mutual attraction and interests past the biology that blinkers us all. No, I wished him/her luck because that’s what you do. Share your experiences and allow people to learn from their own.