young widowhood

I’m Skinny enough, Married enough, and Gosh Darnit – People Hate Me for That.


With humble apologies to Stuart Smalley/Al Franken, I will continue my spring cleaning here.

I don’t think anyone really hates me for having come through the hard times that I have because to have my life as it is right now, one would have to be willing to have lived all that came before – from day one. Our society has such a perverted view of what life after tragedy should look like that too many of us feel we have failed if we haven’t muscled our way through the bleak days to that happily ever after of the movies. If we don’t write a book or give inspirational talks in high schools and churches or if our lives haven’t morphed into block-busting films with Julia Roberts playing us and riding off into a CGI sunset with Brad Pitt or Tom Hanks, well then perhaps we just didn’t try hard enough. Dangit! Our lives just aren’t near as great as they were before when we used to be able to perform concertos and write inspirational literature in between our steady gigs as sex kitten wives and practically perfect in every way moms. What? That wasn’t you either? Good to know.

This fantasy life that doesn’t even exist on television anymore still seems to be the ideal we superimpose over women who appear to have all that we don’t. I was one of those envious types long, long ago in my pre-wife days. An especially good friend seemed to have the kind of life – wonderful husband and marriage. Perfect figure. Everyone loved her. Or that’s what it looked it standing on the sidelines. I imagine her version would not match my imagination. She is remarried now and truly happy. Her first husband is in prison for the murder of their son. 

Change is one of those givens of existence that is inescapable, and yet it is one of the things that most surprises us when it happens. The givens in life have a way of catching us off guard and upending absolutely everything because we all seem to think that we are the exceptions to the rule. Death is the biggest given of all, impacting every fiber of our being and reverberating out like water ripples from a stone breaking a calm reflective pool. With time and hard work, most of us fight our way back only to discover we are not the same. Some embrace the changes. Some lament them. Others crumble. 

Regardless, change in any form is not welcomed by many of us. Growing up, I was the fat sister. My two younger sisters were very thin with tiny waists and perky breasts whereas I was flat-chested with tummy rolls and thighs that rubbed together so much that the inseam of my pants wore thin from the friction. Eventually with a lot of work and self-reflection all that changed and my sisters have never really been okay with this even though I was merely normal weight as they were. Now that they are both heavier than I am, they are even less pleased. I get told to “eat” a lot and am scoffed at when I decline things that they both know I can’t eat because of my allergies. I seldom visit now that I am not inspected and found wanting. I am too thin. My hair was too blond the last time. This particular change is now closing in on two decades, and it still upsets their apple carts because it’s threatening. Whenever the original terms of any relationship are changed, the party not in control will probably not like it and let it be known. 

A while back a very wonderful woman I met through the widow board expressed her sorrow over not being able to give back some of the wisdom and comfort she had received there to newer members. She felt that because she was remarried, her words were disregarded. She was no longer perceived as a fellow widow. She was all better now. But the truth is more complicated. When widowed people meet other widowed people it is their mutual loss that brings them together on a common ground called grief. A widowed person then who moves on, whether it is into a new relationship or simply a new way of living with grief as a component rather than a driving force, is changing the nature of the friendship or acquaintanceship. Those not ready, or inclined, to move on will feel threatened and even betrayed.

One of the most insulting things that occurs when a widowed person falls in love and decides to marry again is the perception all around that he/she is now officially “over it”. The late spouse is just a blip on the road, seldom thought of and certainly no longer mourned. This reaction is most noticeable in friends and family. Most of whom are relieved because the new relationship frees them from worry and feeling responsible for the widowed person. (Widowed people face a certain amount of kid-gloving that frankly made me feel like I’d been brain-injured. People spoke to me more slowly and gave me these long doe-eyed looks that were actually a little scary.) There can be a certain amount of resentment from those who believe that the widowed person’s love for their departed one was not quite up to Romeo & Juliet standards – it’s not just Hindus who think a crispy fried widow is the best kind of widow but, by and large, the sense that all is now “normal” and “okay” again is palpable. 

And then there are the widowed friends/aquaintances of the widowed person. There are two camps. Remarried widowed who know what is about to come and are sad to see it happen but can’t quite put voice to the marginalization, even ostracization, that they know is coming having been through it. Being married again, a widow loses status and voice within the “community” because they are no longer perceived as being widowed. In the other camp are the widowed still. Dating or not. Interested in marrying again or not. The common view is that you are a widow only as long as you are alone and suffering. Heavy emphasis on suffering. Heavier emphasis on alone. They don’t give merit badges for number of lonely years out from the loss that one spends with degree of difficulty added for manner of death and number of children left behind to be dealt with – or maybe they do, and I just wasn’t widowed long enough to earn one. The remarried are not allowed to use their previous experiences with grief, the lonliness and the despair as entry into the widowed world. Remarriage has cured them of that and in doing so wiped those memories away.

Mourning is equated with love. Remarriage is equated with not having loved at all or been with one’s “soulmate”. A particularly vicious idea, it attempts to negate everything that is true about the remarried’s previous marriage in order to make another widow feel better about their own situation. It reduces everything to some sort of contest with shifting rules of dubious origin. Hardly helpful and rebuffing of any attempts for reasonable dialogue. This is especially true of what happens to people who remarry within the first two years of widowhood. Even though half of all widowed people under 55 will remarry and many of them within the first two years, they are still regarded as anomalous freaks, or worse, by their peers. 

Will was my first husband. He is Katy’s father. I loved him. I spent years watching him dissolve in front of me with very little sympathy or emotional support – mainly, I now know, because we are not taught how to help people when they are dying or their loved ones. I didn’t even have him to share the gut-wrenching moments with due to his incapacitation. I was alone. And like Atlas supporting the world around us on my breaking soul. I haven’t forgotten a moment. A day doesn’t go by where I don’t remember things. It would be easy to call up the tears, curl up in a ball and sob until I couldn’t breathe. It is a grave insult to me and to his memory to suggest that I am “all better now”, and yet it happens.

In our society we are quick to pronounce wellness and fitness. Remove a child from an abusive situation and be baffled by the lack of improvement in behavior. Clap a band or two around someone’s stomach and wonder why they still have food issues or body image problems. Remarry after being widowed and expect them to have forgotten what it was like to have irretrievably lost part of the cores of their beings. 

The gamut of life’s problems parade before you when you are a teacher. The longer the time in the classroom, the more you will see. After Will was sick and then again after he died, I began to look at the children and their families in a new way. I saw that most difficulties stemmed from a lack of communication and a refusal to take responsibility. Neither are easy skills to master, and so I became the teacher that the other teachers loathed because I gave more rope instead of just enough to tie into nooses. People come to their epiphanies in their own good time. Little by little I learn that this approach should be extended beyond my first limited use of it. 

I am not happy because of what the scale says. I am not happy because I have remarried. People do think that about me however.  I am happy because I choose to be. Every day. Because life is basically good regardless of the obstacles and pain and disappoints that can occur. And that was as true back in my caregiving/widow day as it is now. I am a work of art. A work still in progress – but my own nevertheless with all my faults and warts.  And I am an example, though I don’t really try to be any more, regardless of whether some people approve of me or not. We are all examples really. We find our own mentors in life. We choose the paths we want to be on and the people who will be accompanying us. We are responsible for where we are and where we are going.

Comparing ourselves to others is a waste of time that is better spent on ourselves and the works in progress that we each are. 

Sister-Wife


The wives of polygamists refer to themselves as “sister-wives”. I think this is meant to impose a familial relationship on something that could easily dissolve into something competitive and downright ugly were it not for the veneer of a pseudo-relationship that the term implies. Despite my own negative views on this subject, I began to wonder the other day if the term didn’t more aptly describe my relationship with Shelley.

Shelley was Rob’s wife. She died eight months after my husband, Will, back in 2006. Today is her birthday. She would have been 47 years old. Just a few months older than Rob and he never let her forget it. Now he must contend with being older then I am by a couple of years, and I am not sure why I think this, but I’ll bet Shelley is enjoying that particular turn of the table.

When I stop to ponder Shelley and Rob and myself and the circumstances that bind us, I know I could write a novel that would set me on Oprah’s sofa in a heartbeat. But life is not a book of the month, at least not this life that we share. Anyway I am not certain I am accomplished enough to find the words, craft the sentences and paragraphs that would explain us or if I could, that I would really want to.

I live in the house that Shelley called home. The colors on the wall and the decor are hers. The garden out back and the hanging planters grew things she planted. There is a room in the basement crammed to the ceiling almost with things that mostly belonged to her once and what isn’t there sits on shelves and in cabinets and hangs in closets upstairs and down.

Our kitchen is more and more mine now, but there are still elements of Shelley. The dining room too. However the bed where Rob and I sleep and make love was the place of similar activities when she was alive and still well. That last part doesn’t cross my mind much at all truthfully, but when it does it certainly gives a surreal twist to things.  

Her birthday fell on and around Mother’s Day every year and as is common when one’s birthday falls too close to a major gift-giving holiday, Shelley got more than her share of combination gifts in much the same way my friends and family tended to lump my birthday with Christmas whenever they could get away with it. As Rob was telling me this, it occurred to me that from this point on, I will share this holiday with Shelley. Our daughters have a common father in Rob now but though I might likely be grandmother to her children’s children someday, I will not be a mother to her daughters in the same way that Rob fathers my little girl much as I might love and care for their happiness and welfare. An awesome task though nevertheless, and I wonder all the time if I am doing a good enough job.

I wonder sometimes too if I had known Shelley would we have been friends. I don’t think so because I don’t make friends easily especially with outgoing people and judging by her oldest daughter, Farron, I think she was. She was deeply committed to her ideals and values. I am still figuring much of that out. A farm girl, she was handy in the outdoors. As an asthmatic with more allergies than should be humanly possible, I am more of a liability in any woodsy situation than not. Still, we both found love in Rob which suggests some mutual ground I have yet to discover though recently Rob related to me that Shelley and I have common ground in weight struggles. Though he finds my concerns now and hers of long ago a bit mystifying, like me Shelley was a fitness nut who made eating healthy a priority. Weight, gaining or losing, is somewhat of a stereotypical female bonding ground (of course it is also a source of much friction as well).

Sisters do not choose each other. They are born into families and learn to co-exist. Sometimes quite happily and lovingly. Sometimes not at all. More often than not such relationships fall somewhere in between understanding and merely shared heritage. Shelley and I did not choose each other. Rob choose us. First her and then me. In the earliest days here, I felt a presence that I can’t say for sure was hers but that seemed to be studying and watching. It was neither welcoming nor repelling. Just there. I haven’t felt that for a while. Perhaps I have been judged and found adequate. I choose to think that.

Happy Birthday, Shelley.

Sylvia Browne is Coming to Bilk Our Grieving Mothers


For those Edmontonian’s still searching for the perfect Mother’s Day gift, there are still great seats available for the Sylvia Browne show. I first heard that she would be further traumatizing the bereaved from a widow whose son attends the children’s group at Pilgrim’s Hospice with our daughter. She really wanted to go and had registered herself in a contest to win a free ticket. Ms. Browne generally doesn’t sweep the audience à la  John Edwards in search of the perfect cold reading victim. She has people picked out in advance and spends more time spewing her version of the afterlife than purposefully making contact. Although if there were an afterlife in the Christian sense of the word, it probably would recoil from her tentacles, hissing. 

I have seen Ms.Browne on the Montel Williams show. A repellent personality, brusque and quite unsympathetic, I didn’t know whether to be horrified or amused by her dismissive replies to the queries of obliviously distressed loved ones. She told one person that the dead don’t care about what happens to those that they left behind in anything but the most abstract terms. They “forget about us” because they are “in heaven and too happy”. Wow, there’s Christianity and all its virtues at its finest. Tough luck to those left behind ’cause I made it in. See ya. She has thrown some of the more fragile a bone of assurance that the deceased didn’t suffer, but that’s about the extent of the milk of human kindness that runs through her shriveled soul.

She and John Edwards both make me sick with horror for the most part. Playing people’s deepest pain for profit. Believing what I do about our souls and their journeys makes me particularly contemptuous, but hopeful that both of these truly evil people get a good dressing down and a century or more of remedial training before they are set loose down on earth among human beings again.

I understand the need to know that a deceased loved one is safe and happy and to have the chance to exchange unspoken words, but most people could do that as easily for themselves rather than waste their money and expose themselves to charlatans like Browne. I tried to ask the young widow at hospice group if she had tried talking to her husband herself and she assured me that she did all the time, but I think she is still too raw and traumatized to listen and look for his reassurance. I was about as far out as she when I finally was able to see and feel my late husband’s little incursions into our life. Perhaps it will be the same for her. I hope so.