Widowed: The Blog

W.E.T. – Widows in Transition


I joined a group of widows the other night. I have moved from the relative comfort of online anonymity to the discomfort of open face to face forum. My naturally shy nature cringes away from any type of large group setting. It is only rarely that I fit in. Even in a group such as this one, which is primarily for younger widows, where the odds of fitting in are at about 99%, I still manage to feel like an outsider.

I came to W.E.T. (widows in transition) via the Young Widows Board, which was founded by 911 widows. I responded to an appeal for Iowans by a woman named CJ and was quickly invited to the monthly gathering of W.E.T.

I have to admit to being excited about it. I have never had the opportunity to be “normal” during this entire journey. In a room full of widows, surely I would feel a kinship and at home. Not really. Not that everyone wasn’t nice. They were wonderful and inviting. The group’s founder, Sandy, was genuinely happy to see new members and greeted both CJ and I warmly. Others, who were already there or as they arrived, made more than an effort to engage us.

CJ turned out to be one of those naturally extroverted people who can make talk, small and large. She easily worked the room. A kitchen with an island overflowing with food and crammed to standing room with widows.

I am not so gifted. It was one of the things I loved about being married. Someone to shadow without seeming to. I could hang by my husband’s side and not worry that anyone thought I was being stand-offish when in reality I was just painfully uncomfortable being in a situation where I knew no one and hadn’t the opportunity to assess the “danger” beforehand.

I don’t believe in shyness really. What people call shy, I just call self-preserving. I am easily overwhelmed and overly sensitive to my environment. When I have the time to size things and people up, I usually find a way to turn down the volume on my inner alert system and interact. When I don’t, I retreat. I am much better one on one and perhaps that is why I do so much better on the boards.

Even though the numbers are larger in reality, you can only deal with one person at a time. The thing that struck me about this group, aside from their welcoming ways, was the fact that many of the women seemed to enjoy telling their stories in much the same way that a group of new mothers gleefully recount their L&D stories. And maybe that is just the way of it. War stories are inevitable in like company.

I find it hard to tell my story anymore. I give the short version. I skim off the top. I downplay or simply don’t play at all. There was a time when I would recount the whole thing chapter and verse but now I would rather not. I am so consumed by where I am and what I want and trying to build the bridge between here and there that telling my story almost seems a burden that holds me back.

I had a husband. He died. We sat in a circle and introduced ourselves and our husbands. I cried through mine. It is harder to hold up the shields when I know I don’t have to and also, there was some relief being somewhere that I don’t have to.

I barely listened to the others though. At least not enough to recall much. It was too much. Pain. And I recoiled from a lot of it. It terrified me to think that women months and years ahead of me could still be in so much pain, and not want to move past it.

One woman was three years out, remarried and still not happy. How could that be? If you never learned to live again, what was the point?

I took my daughter to a children’s group today. Founded by the same woman, it gives children and their moms an opportunity to grieve safely among their own kind. My daughter is young. All her memories of her father are primarily images and ideas that I planted in her mind. She is a few years away from really comparing her life with that of other children and realizing what she has lost.

But, I could see it in the faces of the older ones, and in the faces of the moms. Do I look like that? I don’t want to. I want to be… I don’t know. I can’t not be a widow.

The other day the substitute for the man I normally work with inquired whether I was a Mrs. and I hesitated before saying, “Not anymore.” Normally I would have told him that I my husband was dead. I don’t use the word widow as a self-reference. But I did neither. Because I don’t know who I am.  So, once again I don’t truly fit in. Story of my life.

What Death Really Looks Like


I went and saw the movie The Prestige last night with a friend. There is a scene early on in the film where Hugh Jackman’s character watches his wife drown in a water tank during an escape trick gone bad. As the scene went on I could feel the balls of my feet bracing against the floor and pushing me back in me seat. My arms drew up into a x across my chest and my hands covered my mouth. I could feel my friend’s concern as the scene progressed and Jackman’s character tried to first revive the wife and then dissolved into disbelief and tears. After the scene had passed I relaxed and slumped a bit in my seat.

There were other uncomfortable scenes but this one stayed with me. It reminded me of watching my husband die. It did so because of the terror of both the husband and the wife. I was so afraid of being with Will when he died and equally terrified that I would not be there.

The hospice workers tell you exactly what to expect. Even as his body began to cool, extremities first, and his skin mottle from lack of oxygen, behind the back of the knees is where it starts, I was still not prepared for the last minutes.

His arms and legs had contracted with each stage of his illness. He was so spastic that his arms and legs refused to bend at all by the end. As he slowly lost that last battle with pneumonia, they relaxed and unfurled. I had forgotten how tall he actually was until I came back that evening to stay the night with him and found him completely relaxed with arms and legs straight and loose.

The breathing begins to be less obviously labored and slows. The urine output is negligible and bubbly. As the strength required to draw breath in wanes, the chest stops its rise and fall and the effort shifts to the diaphragm. The nurse on duty that night pointed it out to me. I asked if it meant that he was going to die soon, but she told me that this was unlikely and this could go on for most of the night though she was sure he would not still be struggling so when morning arrived.

He looked waxen and even less like the man I married than usual. I was alone with him when I noticed the odd way he was gulping. Like a fish when it is lying on a dry surface. It seemed almost as if he was using his tongue to pull the air into his mouth and force it down his lungs. I watched for a minute, maybe two more. His head now hung limp and he was facing me with glazed eyes.

I hit the call button. The aide took forever, though really a couple of minutes, to arrive. I pointed to him, asked if that was normal. She didn’t know. New? I don’t know. I never saw her again. She went for the duty nurse. By the time she arrived I was sitting on the bed holding his hand with my other placed on his chest.

“Is this it?” I asked.

“I didn’t think it would happen this soon,” was the reply.

“Tell him it’s all right to go,” she told me.

I could feel his heart speed up, an uncountable number of beats. I repeated what I had been told. I told him I loved him.

Suddenly everything is moving very fast. The worst was watching him try to breathe frantically through his mouth. Trying to bring air to lungs that were still. There was no sound. I am grateful still for that. I can block out the image when it pops up but know that I would be defenseless against sounds.

And then it was done. A deep sigh. His head hung limply, eyes half open. I felt the heart beat just a few seconds longer. Then he wasn’t there anymore.

I just cried. I would rather endure just about anything other than to cry in front of someone else but I didn’t even notice that the nurse was still there until she came around the bed and sat down behind me and gave me a hug. Then she left me alone. And I was alone. He wasn’t there. I wanted to believe that he was still in the room with me and finally able to understand what I was saying to him but I am not so sure. I didn’t feel him at all and I would know him anywhere. I stopped crying almost as quickly as I began and didn’t cry again for nearly a week.

This feeling of disconnected numbness settles in and it stays for quite a while. I still sometimes feel so removed from myself and my actions that it is like watching a movie. I can do such dumb, self-destructive things then.

I avoid movies and television for the most part anymore just because of what happened last night. It’s not real and doesn’t even look real because I know what death really looks like, but it’s enough like reality to pull me back.

And I want out.

Sundays


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.