young widowhood

Normal Life


Normal for Rob and I on a weekend morning is lounging about in our robes, eating a leisurely breakfast, checking out what is going on in the world via our computers and sharing what we find and think with each other. Is that everyone else’s normal too? Probably not. I have long suspected that what the world calls normal and the way people actually live are two separate things. The first is a fantasy perpetrated on us by the self-appointed arbiters of life, and the second is the way things really are and are supposed to be.

There is much talk among the widowed about returning to what they regard as normal life. I guess I was never much of an enthusiast for the idea because my normal before Will died was anything but that, especially when I looked at what most people consider to be a normal life. Even before Will was in the hospice, and the nursing home before that, normal was skewed by his yet unknown to us by name illness. I really have no basis for what is normal married life or normal family life. My own family and upbringing may have been typical for the neighborhood I grew up in, but an alcoholic father makes for a pretty unpredictable family life, and as I grew my younger brother’s drug addiction just made that life more turbulent. Is it normal to lie awake until your little sisters fall asleep so you can push the bedroom dresser in front of the door because your brother threatened to kill everyone as they slept? I am thinking not. Probably not anymore normal than spending Sunday mornings spoon feeding Cream of Wheat to your nearly vegetative husband in a nursing home while your two year old looks on.

What is normal? Is it one of those eye of the beholder things? Or does it really even exist at all? Is it perhaps one of those middle class ideals they sell you through TV shows and movies? I am not too concerned about whether or not my life is normal these days. It is what it is. And mostly what it happens to be is pretty darn good. But it was no accident or lucky break because I don’t really believe in those things anymore. Life changed because I did and continue to do so. I chose not to wait for the day I was happy again and went looking for it. 

Today while my handsome husband is at work, I will tackle the household chores and rearrange furniture, in a likely vain attempt to make sense of the blending of stuff, and then take my daughter to her first day of kindercamp. Normal enough? I think so.

Shelter Belts



Winters on the prairie  were brutal for the early pioneers. During snowstorms a person could get lost just walking from the house to the barn and back again. In order to protect themselves homesteaders would plant trees and shrubs of various types around the buildings and as they grew they would form natural wind breaks. These shelter belts are still very common in rural areas in the U.S. and Canada. Driving through North Dakota we saw quite a few of these belts surrounding homes and farm buildings. Some were so thick that you couldn’t even see the house and buildings there were protecting and others were obviously still in their inceptions or had been reduced by time and weather.

I got to thinking that these shelter belts are not really unlike what we do in our own lives to shield ourselves from hurts and disasters. Instead of trees though we use the people around us. Some of these people chance placed in our lives through the accident known as birth but many others are chosen. Through deliberate acquisition and lucky timing we place these people around ourselves in the hopes that when the brutal emotional times come we will be protected and supported.

But, when death claims one of the members of our shelter belt, we are less able to bear the brunt of the storm that follows. We are like the homesteaders of bygone times, stringing up rope from building to building and pulling ourselves through the emotional blizzards. A lost member of the belt cannot really be replaced. It takes time to patch the whole in our shelter system and even when we find someone new to stand in the place of the fallen, they will not be the same. Just like a newly planted tree takes time to grow and fill out, a new person in our circle will need time as well, but they will take on a different shape just as a new tree would.

Florists and Funerals


Did you know that in the Yellow Pages the listings for Funerals is right after the listings for Florists? I didn’t either until I was looking for a florist for the wedding and the pages stuck together and there I was looking at an ad for simple cremations. The joys of duality. And now my neck, which was already sore from another day of hauling totes to their new home in the basement, is throbbing and my head hurts.

It’s not that you don’t expect to be caught off guard but that the nature of being caught off guard is exactly that. You are caught and there isn’t much you can do but deal. I get tired of dealing though because it is not like these moments come up in ordinary time. I don’t think about Will when I am getting breakfast for Katy or eating toast or making the beds or any number of things I do throughout the day. They come at moments when you are happy and moving farther away from them. The memories. Sometimes I wonder if they are just trying to remind you of their existence in much the same way that toddlers insist that their parents stay within sight at all times.

Not everything brings them back and often they are not painful. When Rob was picking out his tux for the wedding he asked for my opinion on every item from the style to the cufflinks and I could recall Will simply selecting everything while I browsed through a giant book of invitation selections. It was just a recollection triggered by the circumstances. Carried no real emotional weight though. Even today’s Yellow Page moment wasn’t fraught with heavy thoughts. It was more of an…aw shit, again? Because I want my moments now as moments now. Not connected to the past. And that is not possible. We are a sum of our moments

There is a song in Act II of the Sondheim musical Into the Woods where the Baker’s Wife is thinking about her “moment in the woods” and she sings,

Ah, if life were only moments

Even now and then a bad one

But if life were only moments

Then you’d never know you had one

And I guess that is it. Life is a continuum  of memories. The good, the bad and the merely annoying me when I would rather not be.