Widowed: The Blog

When Harry met Sally


Someone at YWBB went and dug up an old post of mine from my online dating days and it has clung to the social forum with tenacity for a couple of days now. I was not at all pleased to see it. I really don’t like to be reminded of the games I played with people’s feelings as I ventured back out into the world a few months ago.

Gosh, and it WAS only a few months ago. It seems much longer.

And I was playing. Callously too.

It is as easy to detach from the faces we can’t see on the other side of the computer screen as it is to become attached to them.

Can men and women just be friends? I have had male friends at different moments in time going back nearly as far as I can remember. I can’t remember not having at least a tiny crush on nearly all of them. Though I can’t recall one single time I ever acted on the feeling, I remember a few instances where friendships ended or changed drastically when I was on the receiving end, but those were times when I didn’t return the feelings at all.

So, I suppose my own experiences confirm what most of the respondents thought. That there is almost always sexual tension underlying male/female friendships for one of them, and that when both have feelings, sooner or later action will be taken. Still, sometimes friendships are more important or should be.

All the times that I never acted on impulses even when opportunities presented count for something too.

I think of my friend and wonder if I am better off keeping things at the stage they are at instead of moving into more risky territory. Then I wonder if that is just widow fear talking.

In the movie When Harry Met Sally the title characters were friends for years. Wasted time some might think. But, it was the slow build of friendship that allowed them to learn and grow together and be able to recognize similarities under all the differences. Maybe the question is not whether or not men and women can be friends but whether or not we were meant to be friends first.

Checkbooks, late payments and shoes


I am developing a phobia in regards to money. Finances. In the past I have been almost anal, okay really anal, about paying bills on time, balancing my checkbook, and keeping important tax relevant documents together.

Bills are still being paid. I balance my checkbook when I have to be paying bills. I have the feeling that some of the papers I need to give Fran, my poor tax preparer, are buried in the spare bedroom…somewhere…I think. Read Full Article

My Dad is Sick


My younger sister called me tonight to tell me that she and mom were taking dad to the walk-in clinic.

Dad has been ill since just before my husband went into hospice in the fall of 2005. He’d suffered a series of TIA’s which are small strokes caused by an ulcerated artery in his neck. He had recovered but for a limp by the time Will died in January of 2006, but in March of that year complications from a routine surgery set him back. Soon after he developed plumonary disease.

Though the doctors told him he wouldn’t last out the summer by fall he was recovering nicely again. When I saw him at Christmas he looked good but for a more noticeable limp.

This past week though he has developed a hacking cough and now has a fever. Hacking cough could be a bad cold or bronchitis even but fever means flu or pnemonia.

Will died of pnemonia. Not really all that unusual for the chronically ill. It is not a pleasant thing to watch. It is not something I think I can watch again.

Last spring when dad was in ICU and my uncle’s wife was dying of heart failure in the room next door, I told my sister that I didn’t think I could be in the room if dad’s conditioned worsened and he seemed likely to die. She said,

“You will be in the room because you have to.”

and I didn’t answer her because she didn’t give me the chance. She walked away to get back to work (she was a technician in the hospital’s lab) and left me standing in the hallway.

If she had waited for an answer, she wouldn’t have cared much for it.

I can’t watch someone die again. Not then. Not now. Maybe not ever. And I think that is what holds me back from the idea of having a relationship again that has the potential to be serious. Seeing Will suffer like that. Watching him frantically gasping for those last breaths of air to fill already stilled lungs.

It seared my soul and the new skin that has only very slowly grown back is still too delicate.

My dad is a cat. Nine plus lives but even my grandma’s tenacious DNA has its limits. Hopefully they won’t be crossed once again.