young widowhood

Every Day But Today


An almost burnt-down lit candle on a candle ho...

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Every year without fail that day pops up and I generally don’t notice until it’s smack dab upon me. It’s not that I’ve forgotten I had a husband before Rob and that he died in January. I just lose track of the days and suddenly it is the day, and six year after the fact, I am once again left to wonder what to do with it.

When I remember Will dying, I recall that it was Monday, the day after the Steelers won the AFC championship. It was unseasonably warm. I had strep throat and Dee had an ear infection. I was tired. Annoyed that once again I had to cajole family and friends into being even the tiniest bit useful, and that  – as always – most of the heavy lifting was mine to do alone.

That’s what I remember.

What I felt was just tired and relieved and free. It was over. Finally. The day I didn’t think would ever come, came, and it was everything I expected and nothing I expected.

When I first began creeping about the Internet looking for signs that I was not the only young widow on the planet, I stumbled upon terminology specific to grief culture. One word in particular curdled my eardrums: sadiversary. A cutesy-poo term for the anniversary of the date of death. I refused to use it, but it is an integral part of my yearly dilemma. This idea that the day a person died should be honored in some way, which is quite Celtic really. In that ancient culture, birthdays are mourned and dates of death celebrated because your birth into this life is your exit from the better alternative of “heaven”. Therefore your departure from this life is your rebirth somewhere much better. But that’s not why people memorialize.

I don’t write mournful dirges of what I lost or how I was cheated or how death is unfair or widowhood is wrong. Not that any of that is untrue in this or that way depending on a person’s circumstances, but it’s not true from where I stand.

I don’t light virtual candles, put up pictures on Facebook or change my profile pic there in memorial.

Rob goes and leaves a note for her on the guest book page of her virtual memorial. The girls do too, and they update their statuses on Facebook or put up pictures. There is a bench in a park in the city for them to visit. It bears one of those memorial plaques. The kind that just have a name and dates and makes a person wonder who this person was and what moved someone to claim a park bench in their name. It works for them.

Will is buried in a little town that is home to the bar where he played for a pool league. He is only buried at all because his family hounded me about it. I haven’t been to visit his grave in almost four years. It’s a literal millstone and I resent it’s very existence.

What I feel about today and the few days on either side of it is anger. White searing hot effing anger.

Not that he died. He had to die. There wasn’t ever any option not to and both he and I are in far better places because of it.

No. I am angry at all the people who made his dying so much harder for me.

For most of the year, I let it go. I remember that people are just people. Frail, fallible and of varying mettle. But this time of year, I remember the people who wouldn’t come to sit with me while he died. Or who came but spent the time talking about their own problems – the boyfriend who had a panic attack and had to go to the ER, the abusive mother, the time when this or that other person died and how hard it was for them. I remember standing in his hospice room, death rattling in my ear with a cranky, confused three-year old on my hip and a cell phone to my ear listening to one excuse after another of why so-and-so friend couldn’t come and take my little girl home and watch her until my mother arrived from 300 miles away.

The condescending tone of his mother’s friend as she relayed my mother-in-law’s queries to me because his mother still refused to talk to me on the phone personally. The whine of the hospice social worker who was more concerned about my maintaining contact with the vicious woman so that she could heal than she was about me or Dee and how Will’s mother’s toxicity had already damaged us. His fat stupid trailer park cousin, who hadn’t ever once lifted a finger to help me suddenly thinking that I should let her babysit in the future and expressing her concern about my mental health. The indignant hospice nurses who seethed as they recounted to me how his mother and her friends sat around his bedside having a hen party while they saw to his needs. Not a one of them checking to see if he needed his lips moistened or holding his hand. Just watching television and chatting as though a coffee table sat between them and not a hospital bed with a dying 32 year old man on it.

I remember his friends. Useless as ever, showing up the night before he died, standing around his bed smelling like the sports bar they’d come from and dressed in black and gold. Not one of them had ever visited him in the nursing home. Not one had ever called him after his diagnosis. I can still hear the hurt in his voice when he would say, “I called so-and-so today but he never called back. Why doesn’t anyone ever call me or visit?”

And there where the people who wouldn’t come because “they wanted to remember him as he was”.  His aunt. His uncles. The guy he considered his best friend.

And of course, there are the friends who never showed up at all. Maybe I got a card from them after the fact or came home to a message on the answering machine that grated like fingernails on a chalkboard, explaining that they’d had a long day at work or child’s sporting event to attend or it was just too sad for them to contemplate and “I hope you can understand”.

Which I do, every other day but today.

Then there was the visitation, where his mother accepted money from his friends for expenses and pocketed it. Where she told them that he died because I wouldn’t let the doctors treat him and that I was dating already. She and her family and friends sat in the spot reserved for family while I stood at the door, endlessly shaking hands – being hugged by people I loathed – and wishing every single second that I hadn’t allowed myself to be talked into such a stupid waste of money I didn’t have.

Most of the year I am okay with the fact that his family, friends and the majority of our mutual friends had a party right after the visitation. One that I wasn’t supposed to know about because I wasn’t a good wife to Will and didn’t deserve sympathy or consideration in their opinion. I wasn’t invited. The party was to be his send off by those who truly loved him. All those people who turned their backs on him when he got sick and have never once asked about his daughter or checked up on her in any way. They put on a little show before the visitation ended. Dressed in Steelers football jersey’s. They sang and danced the “touch down” song, tears streaming. All choked up as though it hadn’t been nearly two years since most of them had laid eyes on Will and as if they wouldn’t slither into the night, never to be seen again. A lot of people thought it was touching but they were the kind of people who probably think releasing balloons or gathering to toss flower petals is meaningful too.

Most of the year, I let that go. But not today.

There are no candles to light or  polite status updates or memorial rituals for remembering that on the one day in my entire life … in his life … when we needed people to step up, almost no one did. And on this one day of the year, I remember vividly, and I don’t forgive you though he would have because he was a much better person than I am.

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Calling All Women Married to Widowers


Just-married

Just Married

Abel Keogh’s working on a follow-up to his Dating A Widower book and is looking for women who have actually married widowers and are willing to share their experiences. You can find out more information about the book and the criteria for the essays by following this link.

Rob follows Abel’s Wednesday Widower posts although mostly to read my comments and when he saw the call for submissions, he asked me if I planned to write an essay.

“I don’t think I have anything to add,” I said. “If I have anything to say about you and I, or how we ended up married or even how it went that first year, I should probably write my own book, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” he said. “Are you going to write that book – ever?”

Probably. But I am still working on the angle. Frankly, I think the whole “widowed find love again” thing is played to death despite the fact that when stories turn up in the media they elicit a great deal of cooing from the general public, which in my opinion treats the stories like freakish there but for the grace of God go I cautionary fairy tales.

I’ve been reading George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones and have been totally taken with his POV chapters. I wonder if I could write our story in a similar style? But, that would mean soliciting Edie, Mick and various other friends and relatives. Would I really want to hear their take on that first year? It’s better sometimes not to know what people were really thinking behind their party manners game faces. It’s an intriguing idea nevertheless. Or maybe it’s the dwarf.

At any rate, widowed stories are a dime a dozen and let’s face it, it’s only widowers who are “hot”. They are like unicorns below a certain age and capture the fancy and tug at heartstrings more than widows, who just another breed of single mom for the most part.*

I am still not convinced that Rob and I did anything particularly amazing despite feeling that we are amazing. My feelings are biased and they are the basis for a book anyone would read. I’ve read … tried to at any rate … other books by widowed. Mostly they focused on the first year and selling the idea that somehow grief is like learning to walk again on tree stumps. Something a person has to just learn to be okay with like any other permanent disability – only while being really brave and semi-cheerful so as not to frighten the non-grieving folk. I don’t think I could write a similar tale because being widowed is just a “shit happens” thing and moving on is what a rational person should want to do badly enough to actually choose to do it. Remarrying or not is another choice that is based partly on you, partly on luck and partly on someone else seeing things as you do.

But Rob says I am too practical a person to really see the wonder in it all, which might be true. I know I am too practical to view it as magic or destiny (outside the idea that we all have a destiny which needs are active participation to be realized here and there).

Anyway, if you are married to a widower and have words of wisdom or caution to share with other women considering or preparing to marry a widower, here’s your chance. Follow the link.

 

*No I haven’t forgotten that some widows are childless, but they seem to be an ever smaller sub-set of an already tiny percentage of the population and like single mom’s, they don’t inspire much enthusiasm in the general population. Everyone knows a single woman just like everyone knows a single mom. The whole extra x dooms us to known-ness and renders us uninteresting at best and stereotypical at worst.

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Dating While Widowed: Are Widows Different From Widowers Where New Love is Concerned?


Anders Zorn-The Widow

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An interesting search term turned up yesterday: how to get a widow to love you. It was interesting only because I have been asked before whether my advice for dating widowers would apply to widows as well.

My answer was “yes” and “no”, which I would guess is only mildly helpful unless one is really good at filling in the gaps between the lines.

Biggest difference between dating a widow versus a widower, off the top of my head, is that women tend to comb through the still smoldering ashes of any relationship once it is over – regardless of why it ended – and they will do this until the ashes cool, go stone cold and even begin to scatter to the wind as often as they feel the need to (or have an audience for it) until they “get over it”.  And by “get over it”, I mean put the experience into a context that they can live with to an extent that allows them to move on.  Men don’t seem to do that as much or as obsessively.

Pick a relationship board on the internet. Any one will do. Just glance over the posts on their feeds and note how endlessly the women recount every detail of the last relationship or marriage. They parse the same events over and over. Even their replies to each other’s questions and experiences will harken back to their own hurts, upsets and frustrations. It’s like watching someone get stuck on a level of Angry Birds. They bang their souls against rock, glass and ugly pigs without resolving anything, and yet, they will tell you that this type of regurgitation is just as productive for their “healing process” as a cat’s hacking up a furball aids their digestion. To women, resolution is policing their new relationships for the vividly recalled flaws of their last Prince Charming and flogging the new one with their insecurities and angst when he proves to have similar or even entirely different flaws of his own.

Actual resolution is acknowledging that, in the end, it really doesn’t matter how or why a relationship or marriage ended. It did. Move along.

Most people who move on in life with any degree of success do so because they accept that what happened can’t be changed by endlessly brooding or sorrow. They make their peace and then make for the next horizon. You can’t change the past by being sad or angry with it. You certainly can’t endlessly talk it into submission. It doesn’t matter if you were wronged or right. The past is.

Men are good at this acceptance thing, which is not to say that you won’t find men who brood or are endlessly bitter about past failures or lost love, but you find far fewer of them than you do of women. I have yet to meet a woman who can’t recall for you, in minute detail, how her first love evolved, blossomed and eventually went up in flames. Minute detail.

You read about first loves reuniting a lot these days thanks to Mark Zuckerberg, but I am willing to bet that the women will spin tales about how they never got over the guy and how their subsequent loves and even about marriages that never held a candle to the first love. Ask a man about his first failed romance. Go ahead. Ask. He might remember the sex, or the lack thereof, but he won’t be holding a lit flame. Nor will he necessarily be compelled to reignite it if he is okay with where he currently lives his life. Men ground themselves in now, which is why a woman’s obsession with past, or future, perplexes and/or irritates them. Most men went on to have love, children and good lives with nary a backward glance at that first love. Sure, they may be pleased to have a second shot later in life with a girl whom they can only recall as a girl, but if they’d never heard from her again – they’d have found someone else to be happy with. Because that’s men. Practical in a cold-blooded way that (most) women aren’t.

A widow in the aftermath is the same as a widower. Grief is grief, and some people are more resilient than others, but it takes center stage for a while. For men, however, a good marriage (or even just an okay one) is eventually acknowledged as such, and they begin to assess the reality of existence sans mate and decide that a) single is okay and can be lived with or b) “I would rather be with a woman again”.

For widows? First the death has to be sorted through and then the relationship itself and throw in kids (widows are far more skittish when kids are involved than men seem to be and, statistically, they have reason to be cautious since males are more likely to be abusers than females) and friends and in-laws, and also let’s never forget that women invariably have “tribes” with whom they consort and poll on every subject imaginable, and you are looking at a much longer “recovery” period.

Don’t forget as well that women are raised in relationship culture and lore that often is bullshit. They are schooled to believe at a young age that they must “find themselves” and “be independent”  even though it runs contrary to the overriding societal command that they must also find love. Love that is “true”, “soulmate-ish” and that “there can be only one”. Depending on a woman’s age and previous experiences when she is widowed, all that Oprah inspired nonsense can still be in play and not in a good way.

If widowers are still men first and foremost then the same is true of widows. They didn’t stop being women when they married nor when they were widowed. And women like tribes. They gain admittance into a new tribe with widowhood where they “learn” to be widows. Men largely escape the indoctrination because they don’t seek out groups and are, perhaps genetically, ill-disposed to self-help in any of its forms or genres. All this makes it harder for women to date, to let go of their labels, to not compare, etc.

The last is the worst thing about women and largely what makes many of  them lousy daters whether they are single, divorced or widowed. The comparing stirs up insecurities and compels them to rely on equally insecure friends to figure things out that they should be discussing with the men they are dating.

Bottom line? If you are dating a widow, she is a woman. Start there. Next, resist the urge to play white knight or to allow yourself to be drawn into the role of grief counselor. Insist on communication and that relationship issues should be brought up with you before she rants to her sister, friends or semi-anonymous friends on the Internet. Don’t let her play the widow card. Expect the same good behaviour from her you would have any other woman in a relationship. Being widowed doesn’t give her special dispensation. And if being a widow first is more important to her than building a new relationship with you – walk. Finally, expect to be loved for yourself and to be first in her life. If she did that for her late husband, she should do the same for you if she really loves you.

Dating is dating. It all comes down to two people willing to be real and lay their cards on the table in the present tense with an eye toward the future and it really is no more difficult than riding a bike.

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UPDATE: I forgot to add one thing. Don’t love her potential. Non-widowed have this fantasy idea of what it’s like to be widowed and what the marriages and/or relationship IQ’s of widowed folk are. Just because she was married, and according to her – happily, doesn’t mean that she can replicate that with you or even that she was in a happy successful marriage. The beauty about widowhood is that only one side of the story exists now. The other side is … well … on the other side. Play the ball where it lies. If she is flaky now, she probably was with him. If she was neglectful or selfish, a drama queen or princess, this is who she’s always been. Maybe the dead guy was okay with it, found it endearing and cute or maybe he stuck it out for the kids. She is and you are and that’s all you have to work with. Widows waiting for the right guy to thaw their hearts and souls (or widowers with hearts of gold waiting for the right woman to give them a reason to live again) are Hollywood creations.