young widowhood

Chapter Two



I am not much of a fan of the term, or the idea even, of a Chapter Two where life after being widowed is concerned. It implies that I didn’t begin my life until the day I met my late husband,Will, and that everything and everyone who preceded him was but a prologue to actual living. I was 35 when we married. I had lived quite a bit of my life, and it was not a half-existence. There were many chapters in the Book of Me before that day arrived. The idea that Will was my chapter one and Rob is now chapter two is almost archaic but in a quaint sort of 1950’s Ronald Reagan sexist pig sort of way.

I didn’t realize until today how much I resent this chapter motif as it relates to marriage and widowhood. I was/am significant as a person, a woman and a wife. No one facet of who I am defines me so utterly that it negates another part. Not woman, wife, mother, teacher, writer, runner, friend, sister, daughter, aunt or any other title I wear, mostly simultaneously, on any given day. 

I don’t know why this angers me so much. It has been a near constant theme running through the various forums at the YWBB since I began posting back in the fall of last year. It is not just the idea of a second chapter to lives that were already books by the time our spouses came along, but also the deification of our dearly departed that sets my teeth in a barely stifled snarl. One woman today wrote something along the St. Husband line today that nearly goaded me into to a rather cold-blooded response. 

“…..we were loved so completely, purely, intensely, simply, and eternally by our spouse…”

This is such a load of crap that I don’t even know where to begin with it, but I doubt that Mary Magdalene had it this good with Jesus Christ. 

My late husband was a really nice guy. Ask anyone who knew him and they will tell you that he would give the shirt off his back for a friend. He was a good husband too. He put me and our marriage first. But he wasn’t perfect. He lost his patience and his temper from time to time. He didn’t plan for the future and actually it was a tooth-pulling exercise to get him to consider life beyond next year or the year after, let alone plan for anything like he or I dying unexpectedly.  He was a smoker, despite my asthma, though he tried time after time to quit. He loved me, but there were times when he didn’t “get me” at all. The one time that I did manage to pin him down on the subject of the future came during a road trip the two summers before we got pregnant with our daughter. We were heading home from visiting his best friend’s family in St. Louis and we were talking about who we would name as guardians for the children we wanted to have. The conversation eventually came around to what we expected of the other should something “happen”. Such a silly euphemism for what amounts to a complete up-ending of one’s whole frame of existence but those were innocent times. 

“So would you remarry if something were to happen to me?”

“Yes,” followed by a sidelong glance in my direction when the silence made him realize he might have answered that question a bit too quickly. “I’m only 27. I love you but if you were gone would you want me to spend the rest of my life alone? Look at my mom and how unhappy she is.”

He went on to say that he expected me to marry again. Actually, he made it sound like an edict, and I understood why. His mother had been widowed at 32. She never married again. Her late husband just couldn’t be replaced. A truer statement than you know because Will’s dad was a violent alcoholic but with widow-goggles he became a knight all agleam and resplendent. I would never have known this but for Will. Both my mother-in-law and his father’s family had sanitized his father’s memory past recognition, and I was actually shocked to learn the truth from him. But it taught me something in retrospect and I am distrustful of people who have nothing that sounds “real” to say about their late spouses or marriages. Having been married, then and now, I know that there is no such thing as perfect. We may marry people on the most perfect day we have ever known but we live with them on all the other days for years, and hopefully decades, to come. 

I guess I understand why so many widowed people downplay the idea of falling in love again. Opening yourself up to the possibility of a new relationship is scary and it can be a cause for self-reflection. It is hard to look at yourself honestly and realize that the things about you that aren’t that attractive may have been things that your late spouse simply put up with gracefully because they loved you. 

It’s hard to admit that you aren’t perfect either. I had a hard lesson in that when I asked a widower friend on the board to review one of my first online dating profiles and his assessment was essentially  along the lines of “I am sure someone will find that intriguing”.  And I knew exactly what he meant. I was completely myself in that profile and unfortunately when given the chance to express myself via the written word, I am myself in THX. Will loved that I was a cut to the chase kind of girl, but I am more blunt than the candlestick that Miss Scarlet used to knock off Colonel Mustard in the drawing room. I know that. Still it hurt to be reminded that Will was an exception and I would have to put some effort into meeting such a man again. 

Rude awakenings await most widowed people. The knowledge that  you were loved not in spite of your “flaws” or even because of them is a concept that even the most elastic mind will have trouble wrapping around. Our late spouses simply loved us for all of ourselves because the option, not being with us, was as unbearable as our loss of them would eventually be.

In Sickness and Health



I wasn’t feeling well the other night. Running a slight temp maybe and achy. It ended up being a restless night with my husband up a few times to fetch an ice pack and ibuprofen for me. From my prospective it felt so nice to be able to be sick and not have to take care of myself. Having someone to rub my back and bring me a glass of water was such a change from years just previous when being ill was not any different from being well in that I was still having to take care of everything. This last spring I had a couple of sinus infections that flattened me a bit, but my daughter still needed to get to school in the morning and be picked up in the afternoon. Laundry didn’t do itself. Nor did the shopping or the house cleaning. And most of all, I didn’t get any of the real rest I needed to recover properly. 

Rob’s perspective though was far different.

He was very quiet all the next day, and we didn’t get much of a chance to talk until the evening as we were hauling furniture to Jordan’s new home in a little boomtown a about 2 hours south of us. But later when we did talk, he told me that my being sick had scared him, and that he couldn’t help but draw parallels between me and his late wife. I knew that anniversaries were coming. It is going on 11 months now, and he has been somewhat quiet about it all. From my own experiences, I knew also that the last weeks and days are etched on every fiber of your being and are more just memories. Your body remembers and reacts to the last days even when you have no conscious  thoughts to prod them. And I wish I could do something other than just listen. I wish I was more physically recovered from my own years of care-taking that a bit of missed sleep or a string of hot, humid days didn’t trigger my allergies or asthma. It makes him uneasy . Like most of us who lost spouses to long term disease, he thinks he should have seen the signs earlier or known enough to avoid the missteps that sometimes happen when you are navigating a healthcare system that sees the disease and not the person and is often more interested in the disease as a puzzle to solve and to learn from for the next time. It is hard to know that your loved one was just a another patient and is now just another statistic. You can’t turn off that need to be one step ahead and to be better this time. Faster. Smarter. In control. But the thing is that you were never in control, and the outcome had already been decided. You did exactly what you were put there to do. 

I don’t know how to reassure him any more than I know how to reassure myself. I have similar worries about him. I don’t know how a person could not. And I marvel at how we have pushed beyond these fears enough to risk losing again when it is still so fresh in our minds. But, life is inherently risky. Even if you never venture beyond confines of your own home, there is risk. You can’t cocoon yourself away from it, and who is the more foolish anyway? Those who stand back from the raging river thinking they are safer than those who take to the rafts to ride it. They forget that rivers can jump their banks and swallow land and lives for miles around them whenever they choose.

Today, we are back to our normal. Katy is dressed in her Tigger costume and watching cartoons. Rob is using an online crossword dictionary to finish yesterday’s puzzle, and I am blogging. There are groceries to get in town and dinner to plan because Farron is driving out for a visit. This is life most of the time, and we need to focus on the living of it more and the worry about the loss of it a bit less. Fortunately, we have a damn long time to do this.

My Husband and Daughter


I was watching Rob and Katy interacting at supper last night. We were out to eat, and Katy always sits next to Rob when we dine out now. Not because she has asked to however. Initially it was a strategic maneuver for behavior reasons. She just behaves better sitting next to him than she does next to me, but now she clearly enjoys sitting next to him. He helps her go through the kids’ menu and they color together. Last night she was telling him about a game she learned at kinder-camp this week. She loves it. It is called “What Time is it Mr. Fish”.  Rob remembered the game from his childhood but told her it was called “Mr. Wolf” instead, and when the time came in the course of the game to ask Mr. Wolf what time it was, he would turn suddenly and growl, “Dinner time!” My dear husband delivered the line in a deep growly voice and it startled Katy into a fit of giggles. She is at that age where scary is scary and an adrenaline rush of giggly fun at the same time. Of course she wanted to hear it again, and Rob obliged for quite a while with her giggling and clinging to his arm and begging, “Again, again.” For good measure he would throw in a growl and a snarl here and there, and it was just a pleasure to watch her have so much fun and being such a normal little girl being teased by her “daddy”.

She expects Rob to give her kisses and cuddles after I have tucked her in for the night. She likes to open the front door for him when he gets home from work in the evening and comes to give him a kiss and a hug before he leaves for work in the morning. On mornings she has slept in and misses him, she is visibly disappointed. She refers to him as “daddy” and has even addressed him that way on a few occasions already. But she has not forgotten her own father.

Will’s old recliner is in the living room, and she told me the other day that it has to stay there or he (Will) would be upset. Whenever she watches The Land Before Time, there are tears and calls for her dad (so we have stricken that particular film from the viewing list. Seriously, are kids’ cartoon-makers sadists?) And, she is frighteningly realistic in her views of mortality where fathers are concerned too. A couple of weeks ago Rob was working on his old white van, trying to get it running again because we needed two working vehicles, and she wanted to be outside watching, but since he had the van jacked up he told her it wasn’t safe. I was occasionally checking outside to make sure that he was okay and Katy noticed. I told her that I just didn’t want anything to happen to Rob, so that was why I was keeping an eye out and she replied,

“Yes because then we would have to get him a stone too and look for a third daddy.”

Cold-blooded? Perhaps, but children are mercilessly practical. When I told Rob about the conversation, he joked, “Well, now I know where I rate.” But he is as aware of the fragile nature of life and the people in our lives as I am and as, unfortunately, Katy is too.

It is interesting and a wonder to watch her change over the past few months and I wonder if it is just her age or an effect of my relationship with Rob and consequently his with her. Would she have been this child for Will too? 

My mother assures me she is a chip off my block though I don’t recall being as sassy or independent minded. Rob finds that amusing and I think, sides with my mom on this one. Still, it is good to see her being a child like other children (sassiness too) and not the somber, silent little one she was not so long ago.