young widowhood

Send Your Cards and Letters


With Mother’s Day approaching I was struck by the impulse to send Will’s mother a grandmother’s card from Katy and some pictures of her. She had asked for pictures in the letter she’d sent me at Christmas time. The one where she all but said she still hated me though the Christian in her could only forgive me. The length of time between her request and my impulse was not influenced by the less than pious tone of her only letter – only form of contact really – with me since the infamous phone call of the fall of 2006. The one where she’d found God and wanted us to exchange forgiveness. That was 9 months after Will died and the only contact she’d made herself. She had preferred to conduct her business with me through emissaries but I had put an end to that at Will’s service and informed all her lapdogs that I wasn’t talking to her “people” anymore as she knew my number and presumably my name as well as being able to dial a phone herself. Have I ever mentioned that she and I don’t quite mesh? Everything is personal with her even when it has nothing to do with her at all. She sees slights and outrages between every line written or uttered and no one has suffered the pangs of neglect and loneliness as she has. She could be my youngest sister’s long lost twin. She is the incarnation of every victim mama I hand-held through their child’s middle school experience when I was a teacher. I have limited patience for such things.

Lately though I have come to the conclusion that it isn’t much of an effort to send her photos every few months. She has been sending cards fairly regularly since Christmas and though Katy hasn’t shown the slightest interest when I have given them to her and explained who they were from (she remembers quite well who her paternal grandmother is and is her mother’s daughter when it comes to shrugging things off). there may come a time when she might want to correspond. Visits at this point are not under active consideration. (Truthfully, Rob can’t even prevail upon me to be much more civil and if he can’t – no one can.)

The card I chose was as generic as they come. Not a word about fond memories or love or affection. Just happy mother’s day grandma. Very matter of fact. Though interestingly warmer than the tour guide chain letter I typed up to describe the pictures events and tell a bit about Katy. Rob noted that there was no greeting or salutation even. I printed a second copy to send to Will’s aunt. No card there though.

“Not signing them even?”

“Do I have to?”

I find my former in-laws to be almost as much a burden as they were during Will’s illness when they could never find time or inclination to help out on the rare occasions I bothered to ask (because the answer was always – “Sorry but we’re busy”). I wish I could neglect them completely but as indifferent as I am to the idea of them, I do think they are interested, a bit anyway, in their deceased brother’s only son’s daughter. A bit.

My mother-in-law is living in a nursing home now. I found this out from my best friend who works for a care service that has been providing in-home care for MIL until recently. Apparently MIL can no longer live on her own due to her health and has no family or friends to help. This can only mean she has finally used up everyone she knows. People only mean as much to her as she can get out of them. I know that Will would be disappointed that I can’t get past the past and help her out, so I will do this photo/update thing to assuage that – not guilt because I truly don’t care about the woman at all – feeling he would be upset with me.

Everything will go into the mail in the morning. It might be there by the weekend. Sending mail from here to there is an imprecise thing.

The Rules – A Hump Day, Hmmmm


I was visiting Julie Pippert at The Artful Flower last Friday and caught the hump day topic before the fact for a change and thought I might give it a go. I don’t do MEME type stuff generally because I am an all-about-me kind of blogger, but I loved the topic. Rules. And this is what Julie has to say about it in the form of a prompt:

Notes: Next week’s Hump Day Hmmm. Mamma Loves suggested “The Rules.” Call them rules, call them mores, or maybe even call them ethics. In general, we all understand there are certain rules and most of us try to follow them. Something to do with being good. But…are we all playing by the same rules? Do we all have to answer to the same rules? Are the rules applied equitably, and enforced equitably? Are we even all playing the same game? Are you a rule follower? You tell me.

Growing up Catholic, and a girl (the two most incompatible things ever by the way), life was an onslaught of “thou shalt not’s” and double standards. There was one set of rules for boys and another for girls, and the girls’ rules always sucked in a big way by comparison. Life if you were male was like five on five full-court, but if female it was six player. Three on three. Half-court only. You were restricted to either shooting or blocking the shot, and if that wasn’t binding in a Chinese shoe kind of way, there was that little two-dribble and pass thing. Boys could be altar-servers. Girls were lucky if they were allowed to step foot on the altar to help clean it. Boys were priests and ran the parish while girls were the nuns who took orders and did the heavy lifting. Boys were husbands and heads of household. Girls were fashioned from their ribs to be Stepford Wives their (junior) partners aka wife. When I was 8 I wanted to play shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates, but I was told I couldn’t because I was a girl. When I was 9, I wanted to be a priest and was offered the nunnery. When I was 10, I wanted to write and was told I wasn’t any good. I equated that with being a girl and laid low for a good deal of my life thereafter.

Rules were woven into the essence of my being from before conscious memory, but I never willingly followed. I conscientiously objected. Quietly. Passively. Aggressively. I quit the basketball team in grade 10. It wasn’t really basketball anyway if you couldn’t run the court. I stopped going to confession that year too. If God could hear my prayers, couldn’t he hear my sins straight from my mouth as well?

In school, high school and university, I learned that rules were more guidelines than anything else, and the more talented you were the less they applied to you. This was reinforced by my years as a teacher. If I got the job done, it didn’t matter if I was a team player or a maverick. Results were everything. Who you knew mattered – a lot. The objector in me began to wonder who had come up with this neat little scam called “the rules” because they sure didn’t apply equally or sometimes even at all.

I am not a rules girl. I don’t get the Sex in the City approach to love. I am not Gordon Gecko enough to crave out a slice of the American Dream for myself and my family. I was too busy surviving while my first husband died slowly in plain view to coif our suburban yard or join the right play groups or volunteer at the church. There was always something more important to do than identify the feet I should have been annointing with perfumed oils and drying with the long tresses of my hair. Life would have been easier if I had colored inside the prescribed lines and known which way the wind was blowing and who was releasing all that hot air in the first place.

When I became a widow I was blithely unaware of the fact that there were more “rules” waiting for me although surely the one time in your life you need a little wiggle room wouldn’t be the time to slam the door behind you, right? I didn’t know a single widow under the age of 55 but when I went looking for my “own kind” I thought I would find comraderie and found instead a curious culture with a shitload of rules. It was like being back in Sr. Marilyn’s homeroom at Resurrection Grade School in 1976. That inner passive aggressive middle-schooler is never hard for me to locate and channel, and I did what I always do when confronted with a rigged game.

I understand the reason for law and societal norms. They are necessary because so many of us would rather be told what to do than to think for ourselves. The civilization that results is patchy at times but works, more or less. When I think of rules however, the aforementioned laws and norms is not what comes to mind. Rules are the norms within norms. The cliches and gangs that spring up in the gaps like weeds in a cracked cement driveway.

Death at a Funeral


Frank Oz directed a British movie called Death at a Funeral which Rob and I actually watched on purpose last Saturday night. The basic plot revolves around the death of an older man and the funeral service his wife and sons hold for him at their home out in the country. The movie is a comedy, and it is the first death movie that we have viewed, on purpose, since we watched Catch and Release back in the fall. Watching funny movies about the passing of a spouse and father is definitely on the order of gallows humor and oddly I find this type of story even a bit funnier now that I have a first hand perspective of some of the situations at which fun was being poked. For instance there is a scene where a close friend of one of the sons is sitting with the newly widowed mother in the garden – clearly uncomfortable – and trying to cover it with small talk that, as many widowed people can attest to. leads to questions about whether or not the widow/er has thought about remarrying again. As the friend puts it, “You’re young – relatively. Do you think you might marry again?” Withering look of disbelief. “Oh, right. Too soon to talk about that.” I know for myself I was being asked about dating/remarriage prior to my late husband’s death even and at four months my younger sister was inquiring as to the state of status, “So, dating anyone?” Rob’s late mother-in-law let him know at his late wife’s funeral service that she was okay with the fact that he would find someone new someday. Tactless takes on a new meaning from this point of view. It also further illustrates to me just how poorly equipped we are when it comes to dealing with death and the grieving on both sides.

Throughout the course of the family, tense family dynamics are revealed including a secret about the late husband. While it is over the top in that understated English way, it rings true. Family members have roles and almost set in stone ways of reacting and interacting and when something out of the ordinary occurs (although what can be more ordinary than death?) everyone is shaken loose from their moorings and things are done and said that can be more honest than the family business as usual even as they change things for everyone involved.

It was a good film, though, providing laughs and insight.