YWBB

Reading posts at the YWBB


I still read the widow board sometimes. Thankfully the time I spend there is less and less. I just don’t have the time really and frankly, when I do read it either depresses or infuriates me.

Two things of late that I have noticed there are eating at me for some reason. The first is the tendency of older board members to condone mean-spirited behavior from some of the members while scolding new members for objecting when they are the victims of this behavior. The prevailing attitude of the powers that are at the YWBB has always been that grief is the great “get out of jail free-card” and that a widowed person in particular can say or do just about any awful thing they want because it is part of the “grief work” and “leaning into the pain” as opposed, I guess, to dealing with reality and behaving like a normal person in spite of the fact that life has dealt you some painfully bad cards. In my opinion, based on what I have read, people who let themselves be driven by their grief are the people who never seem to regain a solid footing in the world.

There is one person in particular who uses the board’s private message system to send what amounts to hate mail to other, usually newer, members of the board. It is Internet bullying of the adult variety and it is tolerated and even condoned at the YWBB. Rob got a message from this person that implied hateful things about him and his late wife. He posted it along with his feelings that the PM’s (private messages) should not be a forum for expressing disapproval or offering advice to people who were nothing more than strangers to you. He was soundly chastised by the older members who felt that PM’s should also stay private even if the message was a harassing one. It is this kind of thing that allows abusers to get away with victimizing people, but many at the YWBB are so blind to anyone’s needs but their own – they can’t see that. This person is harassing another woman right now who is bravely taking it public and is, naturally, being made the villain for doing so. Isn’t that always the case? Victims being re-victimized when they speak out? I feel badly for her, but not badly enough to register to defend her. I am not interested in being that kind of good samaritan anymore. It does sadden me a little to see people I know and like supporting the harasser though. I don’t think she deserves it. Sometimes I get the feeling that the harasser may not even be who she claims to be and that much of what she writes is creative rather than factual.

The second thing that bothers me is an anonymous poster who claims to be recently remarried and her new husband, a widower, has cheated on her already. I don’t know why this bothers me so much. Perhaps because there were many marriages in and around the time Rob and I married and I knew some of the people’s stories and it saddens me to think that any of these couples could be experiencing such trouble already. Partly too because I wonder if anyone wonders if that is me posting. Rob wondered that too when he pointed the post out to me. It doesn’t matter what anyone at the YWBB thinks. But for a handful, they are strangers. It is just a sad post though Rob doesn’t have the same impression. He thinks there is something fishy about it. I guess it doesn’t matter and it is another sign that I need to curtail even the little bit of surfing I do there. If I am not posting, which I can’t as I am not registered, there is no reason to read.

Adults Behaving Badly – on the Internet


In the Edmonton Journal Friday there was an article about government agencies, political groups and corporations that have been tampering with information they find objectionable on the Wikipedia site. Apparently Wikipedia has a program created by Virgil Griffiths, an Alabama-born Cal Tech grad student, that allows the site to track those who come there to add or edit the various articles there. Among the addresses associated with tampering with/deleting information Wikipedia discovered isp’s belonging to the CIA, the National Democratic Party, the Church of Scientology, a voting machine supplier named Diebold and the Vatican. Persons using these particular addresses were deleting or changing information that might be seen as unfavorable to their organization, or in the case of the CIA, simply vandalizing entries. I would like to say I am shocked to hear that the Democratic congressional Campaign Committee had added information to the entry on Rush Limbaugh calling him an “idiot”, a “racist” and a “bigot” or that the reference to his listeners as being “legally retarded” was a mistake, but I’m not. Anonymity brings out unacceptable and even herd mentality in the most mature adults when it comes to message boards or any public internet space where people are allowed, encouraged even, to voice their opinions and views. I was recently reading an article on MSNBC about immigration and clicked on the chat option to see what other readers were thinking about what they had read and was again not particularly surprised to learn that most of them were thinking that a previous poster in the conversation was a complete moron or worse.

 

Back in the day when I was watching soap operas I would frequent the ABC boards in hopes of picking up spoilers on different story-lines or characters but instead often ran across vehement and vicious arguments between regular posters over some of the most banal topics which is quite a feat when the topic to begin with is a soap opera. Name calling and character assassination was the norm and the idea of a civilized debate or even agreeing to disagree was considered foreign if not completely absurd. It’s interesting to me how easily we can dehumanize the being on the other side of the broadband and convince ourselves that they are not entitled to the same type of polite deference that would apply in a room full of people having the exact same conversation. Though I know that there are people whom face to face interaction is no deterrent, and who would think nothing of arguing and belittling those who disagreed with them or questioned their behavior, most people are not of that nature and yet are just as easily sucked in to the most appalling confrontations once they are seated at a keyboard. I guess it is no different than email which, if I am to believe the authors of the new book on email etiquette, is also a means of behaving like high schoolers in a clique war.

 

It shouldn’t surprise anyone. The internet has made it possible for vast numbers of diverse populations to gather and share information, form relationships and bridge the geographical obstacles that keep us from being the one rather gigantic community that we make up as members of the human race. The tipping point for a manageable community is about 150 people. Past that loyalty limits are exceeded and tension and strife set in. Many internet communities, certainly Wikipedia, exceed that by many times. Perhaps it is truly our nature to be aggressive and adversarial like animals who mark and guard their territories. Or maybe, we are just egocentric beings who only interact peaceably in the face of external pressures that society creates for us and the internet is still the cyber equivalent of the wilds, the last untamed frontier. Ultimately it really doesn’t matter why, but it is certainly disheartening and not in the least surprising which might be the most depressing thing of all.

It’s Not “Getting Over”. It’s Surviving.


 

I guess I could try to be remorseful about feelings that are inadvertently hurt when I base my advice or responses to queries on my own experiences rather than adhering to the accepted standards of the majority. Which rules by the way. Most emphatically. But, everything I know about widowhood, surviving in general really, I learned from my family. The standard response to death (or lesser tragedy or even just upheaval) was that life goes on, and no one can live your life for you. If you have issues, deal with them. If you need help, ask. Whining is okay but be prepared for solutions to be offered when you do, and be equally be prepared to be told to knock it off if you are “all whine and no work”.  Grief is never over, but living isn’t over either until you’re dead yourself. 

 

In the beginning, people play the event, or events, over and over. As if in doing so they can change the outcome. Then comes the unrelenting pain and despair that just guts you. That doesn’t last though. Eventually, what trips us all up is living again. And that is where people get stuck. How do I do such and such now that XYorZ has happened? The answer is, of course, differently. From many of us this answer is compounded with….alone. It’s easy from there to allow yourself to slip from grief to self-pity and finally into learned helplessness, but it is not inevitable.

 

From day one of Will’s illness, I was a problem solver because I had to be. Did I whine. Yep, a lot. Was I a drama queen? Sure, often. Were people patient with me? Most assuredly they were. When it was clear that was what I needed, they were there to listen, and when it was just as clear I was past my “born on date” for a particular issue, I was told that too and in no uncertain terms. And was I appreciative. No. But, it usually brought me back to my senses, and I found a solution to whatever was plaguing me, or I learned to wait it out. Make a plan and work towards it. Can anyone do that? Most people can. Most people do. At a certain point past whatever their tragedy might be, and it’s not as long as some people think, most people begin to move forward. They have a goal. They make a plan. They put it into action, and they work at it and tinker with it until they reach that goal or discover they need a different one. 

 

And I wasn’t always like this. For example, during the days when Will and I were struggling to have a baby, I found it easier to ask “why me?” and spin all manner of drama queen scenarios out of my frustration. I taxed people’s patience. Will’s especially. And I wish now that I had been mature enough, and secure enough in myself, to have approached things differently. I eventually pulled things together, worked a plan and we had Katy. But even as we went through that last IVF attempt, I had already mapped out a fall back plan. I was learning. Moving forward.

 

It’s not a magical day, the day you take those first steps. It’s just a day like the ones that led up to it, and the ones that follow. For me, the day I began my forward momentum in earnest after Will died, was the day before the first anniversary of his death. I sat in my kitchen and had a talk with him. It was time to move forward. I knew that and in a way he confirmed it for me. The heart rendering grief served no healthy purpose and even though it would have been easier to let it continue, it was time to stop. 

 

The people I admire most worked early on to integrate their grief into their lives in a positive, future oriented way. They taught me all I know. They showed me when and how to use my life as an example. How empathy and compassion are healing for the giver and the receiver, and when the best thing you can do for someone is to tell them, it’s time to pick up the pieces and begin the process of putting life back together. 

 

A friend is in the process of deciding to separate from her husband. It’s painful to me because I know how hard she has worked on her relationship and how much she wants to still be able to save it, and how badly she is hurting. I hope she can turn things around. At one point a few months back, when things were very rocky, she joked that it was a good things she had gotten a life insurance policy on her husband and that perhaps when she returned from vacation she would find he’d been in a car accident and killed. Problem solved. Of course she didn’t mean that. Didn’t mean it anymore than my mother did when she used to wish that my dad’s drinking would just kill him, so she wouldn’t have to put up with it anymore. Having lost my husband, statements like these, even when they aren’t meant, bother me a lot. I can’t imagine wishing that kind of pain on myself as a solution to a problem. Widowed people are often driven to distraction by the marital complaints, griping of any kind really, of their family, friends, coworkers and total strangers overheard at the grocery. It bothered me a lot too in the beginning too, but now I just marvel at their naivete. These people are lucky to be able to “whine”. Lucky to be so innocent. Lucky to have not been so sorely tested. Now I am bothered much more by those who have been where I have been and still can waste time on the most trivial of things. Life is too short to choose to chase your tail on a regular basis. I can listen to someone talk about their spouse, their sadness , their attempts to redefine their lives forever, but I can’t listen to these same people on subjects that aren’t that big of a deal because they are fixable.  Ot understand how everything in life is suddenly the direct result of being widowed. Most problems that arise have solutions if you take the time to sit and figure them out.

 

I guess it all boils down the that “eye of the beholder” thing I have written about in other entries. What I see as surviving, someone else sees as “getting over”. What I consider a mole hill is the Andes to someone else. Still, in my opinion, it’s better to push through and take what control you can, rather than let the events of your life sweep you along to places you might have a hard time getting back from.