young widowhood

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.

The Widow of Saint-Pierre


Rob and I haven’t had time for movie watching lately, but he grabbed a couple of dvd’s from the book mobile on Wednesday after returning books. Normally book mobile duty is mine. I take Dee, return whatever, retrieve anything we’ve ordered via the county library’s online catalog and check out the dvd shelf for new or interesting offerings. I think the story has been told, by Rob on his blog or by me here, that he wasn’t allowed to go to the video store by himself anymore after returning one time with spectacularly poor choices. Well, The Widow of Saint-Pierre doesn’t quite merit such a prohibition, but it does beg the question of what was he thinking?

Based, supposedly, on the true tale which took place on the east coast islands new Newfoundland that are still a part of France today, it endeavors to tell the story of Madame La and her husband Jean. The year is 1849 and Jean is a captain of the French forces stationed on the island to keep the peace. A senseless murder of a local by two drunken fishermen has taken place and Jean is charged with warehousing them until a guiotine can be shipped to the island for the execution of the man who wielded the knife, Neel Auguste. His accomplice is killed by a mob as they are being transported to the army compound. The island people regard the remaining murderer as a barbarian for whom redemption is not possible.

It’s never made entirely clear why Jean is stationed at Saint-Pierre. He is clearly a cut and a half above his men and even the men who make up the local ruling class including the Governor and his councilmen. There are hints that his being there is a punishment and that perhaps it has something to do with his wife. Madame La is clearly ahead of her time. She believes that not only can Neel be rehabilitated but that the local population can be re-educated towards him and the idea of executions as a way to maintain law and order.

The movie begins at the end with Madame La in widow weeds, but it’s misleading because in that time the guillotine itself was also know as “the widow” and the island of Saint-Pierre is rife with widowed women due to the hazards the local occupation of fishing poses to the male population.

Madame La is drawn to Neel for reasons that don’t always seem altruistic but she and Jean are very much in love and quite lusty.

“Maybe this is porn,” Rob suggested as the film wore on.

“French period piece, sub-titled porn?” I asked.

I puzzled over it quite a bit the next day. I wasn’t sure what the message was supposed to be. Essentially in trying to save Neel, Madame La sacrifices both him and her husband without realizing until too late what she has done when it becomes clear that her husband has been shielding her from the displeasure of the Governor and his men who appeal to France to remove and court-martial Jean.

Jean loved his wife so much that he could not ask her to be anything other than who she was – even though her actions put them both in danger and cost him his life. Madame La, though she loves her husband, does not really take notice of the depth of Jean’s love for her nor does she return it in kind really. She takes Jean’s devotion and protection for granted.

I can’t say that I liked the film, but I didn’t dislike it. It gave me one of my new favorite lines however.

The rich and powerful of the town gather on Sundays for brunch and entertainment at the Governor’s home every Sunday. Jean and his wife do not regularly attend but on one occasion Madame La overhears the men in the smoking room discussing Neel and she enters to challenge them. Naturally she offends them and Jean comes to her rescue, verbally boxing one man and forcing him to admit he was wrong and apologize to Madame La for all those gathered – men, women and children – to hear. After Jean and his wife leave, the Governor’s wife remarks to the other women – loudly enough for the men to hear as well,

“Le Capitaine doesn’t even have to fuck us to make cuckolds of our husbands.”

Classic.

Conversations with Dead Husbands


Just to clarify, I get song signs from my late husband, Will, and that’s it. There’s never been anything more aside from a couple of dreams here and there where he has more or less been just an extra. He doesn’t speak to me or rattle windows or make the floorboards squeak. In the early months after his death, he – according to Dee – would stop by and play with her and there was that picture he showed his face in, but he saves visitations for Rob.

I’m not kidding. He visits Rob in dreams.

I woke Friday morning to find that Rob was up even earlier then usual and dressing in the shell of our not quite finished walk-in closet. Allergies are currently beating me about the sinuses and ear tubes due to the fall harvest ringing our little hamlet with a thick dusty residue making uninterrupted sleep impossible, so I lay in bed for a bit to get my bearings. The other night I’d heard my name being called from the corner of the room by the wall cupboard and for some reason I glanced over there this morning. I saw a bright glow behind the door that quickly skipped to the middle of the room and vanished on a run towards the blinds.

“Was it headlights maybe?” Rob asked when I told him.

No, headlights aren’t yellow or perfectly round and they leave streaks.

But I digress because I only mentioned the voice and the light to Rob after he told me about the dream that woke him up early.

“I was sitting at a lunch counter with Will,” he said. “He was on one side and I was on the other. There was a third person too that I didn’t know and seemed to be facilitating our conversation.”

I searched the first husband archives in my brain for a place that matched the description. Nothing matched. We didn’t have haunts like that though something makes me believe it was a place where Will used to play pool. Perhaps in one of the little hole in the wall southern Iowa towns in Warren county.

“I wasn’t sure it was him at first because he had longish hair and was leaning forward so the hair covered the sides of his face,” Rob continued.

Will started losing hair shortly after we were married. It vexed him horribly because male pattern baldness ran on both sides of his family and, in addition, he was sprouting hair on his chest for the first time.

“I’m going to be bald and have a hairy back,” he would complain. “Great.”

But when he was young, and unemployed, he had long hair and really wanted to find a job that would sanction long hair. He kept his hair short – sometimes shaved to the wood – for comfort in the stuffy warehouse were he worked and then later because of the fact that his hair was falling out, but he really was a Kurt Cobain wanna-be with his flannel shirts, dreams of long locks and a dark inner poet.

“We had a long conversation, and I don’t remember it all but two things stood out,” Rob told me. “He said he wanted to take a bike trip in Mesa Verde with you and that he thought I was doing a great job with Dee.”

Will talked a lot about the Boy Scout camp down in New Mexico. It was his favorite place after the mountains. We schemed for a while about making a move to Denver after we were married, and he always talked about wanting to make sure that at some point we took our children to visit his favorite places out West.

“And then there was a group hug at the end,” Rob finished.

The last time Will visited Rob in a dream, he hugged Rob. Hugging was something he picked up from my mother – who basically forced the whole huggy culture thing on our family when she went through her middle-life crisis and was a Charismatic for a while. The hugging stuck and the talking in tongues mercifully faded into family folklore.

I have to admit that sometimes I am a bit annoyed by the surreptitious way Will keeps tabs and inserts himself. However, I am glad for the mini-updates on him, knowing that he is getting on with his existence on whatever plane he is residing and is happy with the way things are going here.