young widowhood

100 Years From Now We Will All Be Forgotten


Dandelions and Forget-Me-Nots In a sycamore co...

Dandelions/Forget-Me-Nots (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Roger Ebert blogged recently about a streak of loses among his friends and relatives that got him thinking about how and why we remember those who have died. In his musings, he touched on something that rang true for me:

Early one morning, unable to sleep, I roamed my memories of them. Of an endless series of dinners, and brunches, and poker games, and jokes, and gossip. On and on, year after year. I remember them. They exist in my mind–in countless minds. But in a century the human race will have forgotten them, and me as well. Nobody will be able to say how we sounded when we spoke. If they tell our old jokes, they won’t know whose they were.  That is what death means. We exist in the minds of other people, in thousands of memory clusters, and one by one those clusters fade and disappear.

The idea that what constitutes are immortality is as mortal as we are makes a lot of sense. It explains in a small way our fear of dying and our fear of letting go of those who have died. When we can no longer bring them to life in our mind’s eye as clearly as our home movies on the flat screen, they are truly gone. because even the photos and audio-visual facsimiles will eventually belong to those who never knew them in the flesh and to whom they are nothing more than curiosities from someone else’s past.

One of the comments on the Ebert’s post had this to add:

Many Native American peoples had two words to describe the dead. One word for those who had died- but still had someone living who remembered them, and another word for those who have died and no living person was left who remembered them.

Implication being that there is no immortality on this plane anyway.

 

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Dating While Widowed: New Relationships are NOT a Form of Grief Therapy


English: Comfort in Grief

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There is an unsurprising, yet disturbing, number of dating and remarried widowed folk who seem to feel that coupling again is part and parcel of the “healing process”. It’s something to be done for distraction’s sake, or to ease the emotional aches and pains. They regard new partners as means rather an ends, who should give way to urns as centerpieces, constant chatter about the past and memorabilia of all shapes and sizes.

Let’s be clear. Dating is about seeking new companionship – casually or for the long-term – and can only really be about the two living people engaging in the relationship. Your late spouse is not part of the equation in any active sense of the word.

Recently a commenter voiced the common lament of many widowed back out in the dating trenches,

If you truly love us, you would embrace our lost love as much as we do.

And if you loved them, you’d not expect such a thing because though a new partner can be understanding, sympathetic and even feel bad for what you’ve been through – grieving isn’t a date night activity. They can’t feel what you feel and to ask them to periodically put the brakes on their romance to cater to your heartbreak over someone else is cruel.

At some point, in order to truly be ready to open up to love and a relationship, a widowed person needs to deal with the past and then put it away. In some cases, this packing up includes tangible objects. No one should expect his/her new love to live in a museum to a dead love or to man up daily against feelings of jealousy or inadequacy.

There is nothing obvious in our home that points to the fact that both Rob and I have deceased spouses. We are five years into a relationship that with luck has decades to go. In order for our relationship to flourish, it needs its own space to grow. It needs to be free of shadows, comparisons, and artifacts that speak of past marriages.

Even though we both understand that memories linger, you won’t catch either of us expecting the other to share feelings about a past with which the other wasn’t privy.

Expecting a new partner to listen to endless references or stories is unfair to them and ultimately unproductive if the aim is building a new relationship. Don’t use someone. You are not entitled to make yourself feel better at someone else’s emotional expense. And if you aren’t ready to put your late spouse in your past where he/she belongs, don’t date. You aren’t ready.

A new love should inspire you to make room and dream about the future.

 

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The Dead Mother: Trope or Cliche?


"The Journey": Illustration depicts ...

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As a storytelling device, the dead mother is omnipresent in children’s literature, television and film. And I understand why. The point of the narrative is to play on the legitimate fear children have of losing a parent to death. Mom especially.

But lord, it’s tiresome.

Dee loves to check out dvd’s from the bookmobile and as she has yet another 3 day weekend looming, she needed to stock up last night. By chance, I noticed a dvd we’d seen recently at Walmart and she decided that it would serve. She’d recognized one of the teenage actresses from a television show she likes to watch on the odd occasions that she has access to commercial television.

I came home from teaching my yoga class at the community hall to find her disgruntled in front of the flat screen with said movie playing.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“I cannot believe this, “she said, her arms folded in disgust. “There is another dead mom.”

“Excuse me?”

She pointed to the actress on the screen.

“Her mom is dead,” she said. “Why are all the moms always dead?”

A good question.

Later I began to read to her from a novel that she was most anxious to acquire because she’d recently met the author at the Young Author’s Conference and on page six … dead mother.

“Seriously?” Dee asked.

I shrugged sheepishly and Dee just shook her head.

Trope or cliché? I think Dee would opt for the latter.