YWBB

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. 

A Widow’s New Address Book


There is a saying over at the YWBB that widowhood rewrites your address book. It’s based on the very real fact that many of the family and friends you thought you could count on to be there for you when tragedy strikes will not be.  Or at least they will not be there in the ways you want, expect or need, and very often these people who meant so much to you disappear from your life completely.  Sometimes this happens gradually, and other times it seems to transpire overnight, but they go and usually never come back.

Widows love to indulge in the outrage of this.  It’s wonderfully cathartic to spew venom at those people we loved and needed whom abandoned us in our most wretched hour.  What we don’t do, nor do we want to hear, is acknowledge that often we play a role in our own abandonment.  What’s that howling?  It’s the shrieking of outraged widowed people undoubtedly.  However, I just can’t buy into the idea that we are entirely innocent victims anymore, and the reason is that I know better.  The tendency to push people away by not asking for help, by not answering the phone or letters or email, by not returning calls, or by not accepting invitations, all in the name of grieving is a pretty strong one that is not helped by the idea that is propagated among the grieving that anything done in the name of mourning is okay.  While conversing anything someone else does while caught in the same grief or simply in the ripples of our grief is heinous.  I am being over-simplistic but, in hindsight, I realize now that being widowed was not a pass for me.  I still had a level of responsibility in my relationships, great and small, that my hurting state didn’t excuse.  And I know grieving has to be done.  It just wasn’t meant to be a part-time profession or even a hobby.  We are the masters of our lives, actions and reactions, and if we emerge from the black crepe days friendless – we should take a closer look at the fingers pointing back at us rather than exhausting too much energy calling attention to those at the end of the one finger pointing out.

This last Christmas Rob and I sent out one of those obnoxious holiday chain letters.  The “hey, this is my wonderful year and family” kind of missive that makes most people wish they’d been sent fruitcake instead.  I tried to be as low-key Sgt. Friday (“just the facts, ma’am”) as possible and then decided that I would send it to just about everyone in my address book, including those people I hadn’t heard from since before Will died – and even further back than that in a couple of instances.  Why?  Because some of the reason I had this address book chock full of phantom numbers, addresses and emails was due to my own lack of initiative.  I simply let some of these people slip away through lack of attention.  I didn’t call or write or email, so what did I think would happen?  Why did I expect them to carry the relationship?  One of the worst things I ever learned as a widow was that anything I had to do to survive was okay.  It was an effort to call or write for a lot of reasons, so I didn’t.

One friend called regularly in the early months of Will’s illness.  She really was in over her depth and I think a bit frightened because when a close friend’s husband is really dying, it brings too many scary thoughts about your own world and – what if – into play.  I have to admit it was hard to just talk about nothing in those days and anything that was immediate to Will and what the hell I was going to do now (aside from teaching) was immaterial to me.  She tried to carry on our phone conversations as though nothing had changed.  Eventually, I screened her calls and stopped returning them.  What I should have done was been honest and said, “I appreciate what you are trying to do but I need to talk about me and Will and our options because talking through them helps me think and focus.  I don’t need forever to do this, but I do need right now.  Can you just listen to me?”  I was afraid I would hurt her feelings, so I ducked her.  She got the hint and took to calling every couple of months and as time stretched it become every six months.  I resented the calls.  I felt they were burdens.  What was really going on was that I knew I was being rotten and resented her reminding me of it.

She was hardly the only one.  I pulled away from many people.  And then I wondered why no one helped.  Of course, the reality was that I needed far too much help and people were as frightened by this as I was.  I blamed them and I shouldn’t have.  My reality was that I was too far from my own family and stuck with in-laws whose family dynamics left them poor substitutes.  I could have remedied some of this had I taken control and focused my efforts out but being raised to care-take and be “the strong one” my instincts took over and I did much of everything myself.  I was fortunate that a few of my friends and family pushed and insisted on helping, but I could have done a better job.

This friend was one of the recipients of the Obnoxious Christmas Letter back in December.  I got an email from her today thanking me for the pictures of Katy, reminding me that she had tried to stay in touch and could we not let so much time go by again?  I wrote her back and agreed.

When we are in crisis we expect so much and never stop to think that the people we are expecting things from are being tested too and that often they will not be capable of meeting the demands.  We will encounter worthless souls who slink off or implode or explode all over us and then leave, but it’s our reaction only that we have control over.  Most people in our lives are good people who are just as lost as we are in a tragedy.  We should be more accepting. Our address books are ours to write and no one else’s.

Paying it Forward



My blogging friend, Marsha, wrote a wonder piece yesterday about the idea of “paying it forward”. She feels, as I do, that one of the things that should come out of life’s challenges and tragedies is a sense that a person should put what they’ve learned from their experiences to use in helping others who are going through similar situations. It is something I did as a teacher. My life, and the lives of my family, friend and acquaintances, were examples from which my students could learn. Part of life is searching for the meaning and higher truths – enlightening one’s self, but the other part is taking that light and sharing it with others. The others are mainly family and friends and those you are in closest connection to on a daily basis, but some of us, I feel, are called upon to reach farther afield. For a while, I felt that the widow board was where I was supposed to be. I took note of those widows farther out than myself who talked about being called upon to be “widow-mentors”. I don’t think I am mentor material, but I had things to share. I tried to go back to the board recently. But I don’t feel overly inspired to read posts or reach out there anymore. Part of it is a left over resentment at the way I was driven from there. but more has to do with the fact that I am more interested in promoting growth and forward momentum than the idea that grief is a “do whatever feels best” and can “take as long as it takes” attitude. I do not believe either and much of what I have read in recent studies on bereavement is contrary to what is promoted at the site. 

I turned to blogging for myself initially and then as a way to share with others who might be experiencing transitions and on journeys of self-discovery. And I still like the idea of using the blog, and myself in the process, as an example. But, I was a teacher for twenty years, and I miss the face to face interaction and being able to see and talk with people. Writing and reading is good but the human component is distanced. The parents group at Pilgrim’s Hospice has proved a tiny outlet, but the process is so scripted and the grief is a one-size fits all as though everything about loss is equal, and like so much of life – there is no such thing as equal. Losing a parent as a child is different from a teen/young adult and much different from the experience of an adult who has a family of their own. They are not comparable experiences. Losing a spouse to death is not the same as divorcing one or being divorced. Losing a sibling is not the same as losing a life partner. Losing a child is the most horrendous grief of all but the age of the child and the circumstances of the death are factors. We like to ignore the reality that apples and oranges really are different types of fruit because we are afraid of marginalizing and even more afraid that someone may not like us – but how helpful is that really? So, the parents group has widowed people predominantly, a couple of parents who have lost small children and someone who lost a parent. Rob and I are by far the most “experienced” grievers in the group in terms of time out from the loss. It’s a 12 steppy thing. Aren’t they all? And it works on the premise that there should be a group facilitator prompting with open-ended topics or questions and that emotions and experiences of everyone present are going to be very similar. Even among younger widowed people are emotional responses and experiences can be quite dissimilar so you can imagine what a group of mixed grievers is like in terms of having a discussion rather than just one person venting and the next person do the same. It’s like parallel lines. After the last meeting I sent a email to the director suggesting tactfully, as I am capable of that, that we might break into smaller groups at different points so we can share with those whose experiences are most like our own. It is difficult to really articulate your thoughts and feelings when you are weighing them constantly in an effort not to make anyone feel bad. For example, the person who lost their parent, both Rob and I have a shocking lack of empathy for her and Rob has even lost a parent himself. I think it stems from the fact that we accept that as we age, so do our parents and as a matter of course, they will age, get sick perhaps, and die. It is a loss. It will/does effect one and there is grief, but it is part of life. Losing one’s spouse at a young age – not so on the scale of what is expected. Same goes for the death of a child. I just can’t muster the empathy for this person or the situation and so I am trying to participate in the group knowing that I need to keep this to myself.  The director liked my idea and will put it to the group to decide tonight. At the hospice group, I feel more like I am “paying forward” though perhaps it is more “paying up” in the sense that someone helped me along at different points in my journey and now I am called upon to repay the debt via others.

In the spirit of helping then, I went to a planning session sponsored by the city last evening. There is a need for grief services in our little town and I thought I could at least input a bit, if not volunteer at some point. It turned out that the model for the group was predetermined and it was more of a finite workshop than an actual support group. The group of women who attended last evening were the same type of mixed fruit bowl you get at most grief groups that are sponsored by social service agencies. The need to separate people in a more constructive way is not universally acknowledged. I left the meeting when it became clear to me that they were not soliciting ideas as much as participants. I was even a bit insulted by the leader of the group who made the comment to me, and another widow of my vintage, that perhaps the reason we didn’t want to participate was that we were in denial and were stuffing or blocking our feelings. Today I can chuckle a bit about that. Me? Stuffing? She needs to read my blog. But the thing that irked me the most was the fact that she was yet another one of those time-line people (four years to all better now) who believe that if one works hard and grieves according to the rules as laid down, they will one day be ready to resume life and live again. Nonsense. Life does not stop and wait for us to by ready and interested. If you wait for perfect or nearly so to live, you won’t. Live. Life happens all the time and whether we feel like it or not, we are living. We can choose to not participate and let moments/opportunities go by – and many people do this for may different reasons – but I believe we can live and grieve and that this is normal and healthy. And, I have to confess that her snide aside about my being married already colored my opinion of her and her ideas a bit.

My dilemma then is how to go about giving back/paying forward. If we stay here in this area (a possibility now as Texas has become an “if”), there is the possibility of becoming a hospice volunteer at the Pilgrim house. and there is also the idea of writing articles and freelancing a bit in the area of grief. 

If you are still with me after all this rambling, perhaps you have ideas or suggestions. I rarely hear from any of you aside from Marsha and Sally and TGLB – and of course my darling Rob, and that’s okay, but I’d like to know what thoughts there might be out there.

Oh, and my 10,000 blog view is fast approaching. If you happen to be the one to log on here and notice that you have tipped the counter to that big ole number – let me know it was you. ‘K?