dating a widower

Dear Prudence


Emily Yoffe writes an advice column over at  Slate called Dear Prudence. Rob reads it with fair regularity and occasionally shares the dilemmas she is called upon to “solve” with me. I haven’t been much for advice columns since the long ago days of reading Ann Landers in my hometown paper. I guess I have come to a point where I don’t believe that rigid etiquette will save the world as much as people simply learning to mind their own business at least twice as often as they mind someone else’s and remembering to listen more than they comment, which is an odd sentiment coming from me – a blogger with an attitude and an opinion.

Yoffe’s advice is usually well-grounded in sense and not too heavily coated with some of the rigid Miss Manners’ stuff, but a recent reply to a fellow non-plussed by a female acquaintance of his wife raised my hackles enough to inspire me to email her.

The gentleman reported that a friend of his wife’s had sent her a series of text messages to let her know about the funeral she was planning for her husband. The funeral was set for a week later and the gentleman and his wife were a bit disconcerted to discover that the husband in question was technically dead yet. He’d been ill for a long time and was in a coma, not expected to live much longer. The man wanted to know if the widow-to-be was wrong to jump the planning gun by informing others in advance of the death.

Yoffe’s reply was by the book. Yes, the not quite widow was wrong. Her husband might not die on schedule after all. But she went all stand-up comic in her approach,

Not even Sarah Palin has had the audacity to imagine the advent of scheduling people’s funerals before they actually die in order to get the old and sick to move along.

And added,

It is rather chilling that the wife is texting everyone with the news. (Did she write, “Hubby OOH; funeral Sat”?) I suppose you can be grateful that as a further convenience, she’s not sending around advance information about her wedding gift registry in case she finds a candidate for remarriage.

Following up with this condescending comment,

…refrain from pointing out to the widow-to-be that her behavior is appalling. She’ll be an actual widow soon enough, so all of you should just act as if her grief has gotten the best of her.

It’s hard to say at what point I was most offended but by the end, I knew I had to write her. And this is what I said,

Dear Ms. Yoffe,

I read your Sept. 3 Dear Prudence reply to the gentlemen who was appalled by a friend’s setting up funeral details for her dying husband in advance. As someone who did this herself, I was offended by the fact that you not only didn’t stop to consider that their might have been (probably were) details about the situation that the letter writer wasn’t privy to, but that you felt it necessary to take a swipe at the widow to be by making a cutesy crack about wedding gift registries.

I realize that your advice column is more about clever entertainment than actual advice, but I wonder that someone who is married to a widower herself wouldn’t stop and consider the impact of her words on people who’ve been in the situation that poor widow in waiting found herself.

I won’t bore you with the details of my late husband’s death. If I am to believe you, I apparently missed the meeting on exactly what a good future widow is supposed to be doing in those last hours when there is nothing left to do. The handbook hospice gave me didn’t cover funeral planning or how to project a Jackie Kennedy aura. I will say that on a more personal level I was more offended by your implying that grief is the ultimate pass card and that the ignorant gentlemen should simply join you up on your moral high horse for a more sympathetic view of a situation neither of you know anything about.

Even though that widow will never know you used her to sharpen your wit on for the entertainment – though not the edification of others – you still owe her an apology.

Not surprisingly I got a reply in which she defended her advice on the grounds of anecdotes of situations where people outlived their expected date of expiration, resulting in messed up funeral plans. Not surprisingly, however, she didn’t address the remarriage crack.

“She’s an idiot,” I told Rob after relaying her reply.

“Really?” he said. “After giving her the thumbs up as someone who understood after that piece she wrote about her husband’s late wife?”

And therein lies the problem. The dying thing is complex. There are so many sides to death, and as many people to take them, that sometimes a person is faced with themselves across the debate table with their own conflicting view points hurtling back at them  – because perspective does matter. I am widowed. I am remarried. I am remarried to a widower.  And there are times when none of these experiences line up neatly or at all.

I understand her advice in its context. Everyone wants to believe that reports of death are greatly exaggerated, that doctors are wrong more than they are right, and that terminally patients routinely defy odds. It makes us feel better.  Safer. Death is scary after all despite it being the one thing that we all will do someday.

I still think her wisecracks were cold and calculated for their effect. She is a writer and I can do that too.  They were definitely at the expense of that poor widow who hopefully has no idea what judgmental friends she has. The truth is more people spend a loved one’s last days and hours engaged in similar activities than not, but we keep it to ourselves to avoid this type of censure instead of sharing our turmoil and anguish in the hopes of lessening the burden through distribution. I know. But I’ll let it go now because it is kinder to leave people to their delusions about death and what really goes on until they have to live it themselves.

Things in the Night Pt. 2


…that pat your leg or sit in the backseat just the the right of your peripheral vision or that say,

“Hi, Ann.”

There are a lot of ways to meet your husband’s first wife but her disembodied greetings on the edge of sleep is probably not the preferred way.

On the drive home from the city, Rob admitted that what had woke him was the presence sitting on the end of the bed touching his legs. This has happened before. It’s usually associated with an anniversary for him.

“Even now, I can feel someone in the backseat,” he said. “I can almost see a dark figure just on the edge of my vision.”

“What do you think it’s about? Your birthday?”

But it could have been Edee. She’d been up all night the previous night with Pandora in her arms as the little cat alternated between struggle and a death like limpness.

I didn’t tell Rob until the next morning that as I was falling asleep Saturday night, I saw Shelley in the background of my waiting dreams. It’s not as odd as it sounds. Rob had a dream once where Will had given him a hug. And I have a half remembered dream of speaking with Shelley but I don’t recall what was said.

When I told Rob what had happened his reply was,

“So, you’ve been identified by name now.”

I was quite startled when it happened, but I’m not frightened. I am not at all sure what it means. I am sure that if I were to hear a recording of Shelley’s voice, it would be the same as the voice that greeted me. I’d like to think that she approved of my handling of the cat situation and Edee. I was quite worried I’d overstepped and been too motherly. It’s hard not to mother. I am a mother. It’s not something I can switch off. After Dee was born I found that my approach to children – of all ages – in general was more maternal. It made me a better teacher and was a liability all rolled up in a neat package.

The house has been quiet since early Sunday morning. Pandora recovered though it was a very close call. I spent Monday afternoon on my own for the first time since June and all was well. I am taking that as a good sign.

Things in The Night Pt. 1


I know it’s Tuesday and from a fresh news perspective Dee’s first day of school yesterday, the “growing” push for Texan succession and the latest Glenn Beck YouTube parody – except it’s really him and not terribly funny – will all pass the smell test and what I want to talk about won’t. And I’m sure at least half of you are tired of the blending and the widowy, but things come up. They run around the rooms in my mind before burrowing in and blossoming with the rapidity of qwack grass after a soaking rain.

Saturday was the hamlet wide garage sale and hockey swap meet. There is nothing like a dozen or so neighbors displaying their junk and the lure of hockey equipment to bring out the crowds from The Fort. Rob and I, being us, worked until after 10 on Friday night setting up. Other people toss their unwanted onto tables and are done. We treat it like it’s a real business or something. Consequently, other people get more sleep than we do.

By the time we’d cleaned up and were in bed it was after midnight and the plan was to be up by eight to finish the remaining pricing.  At 4:30 I woke. My right leg was stretched across Rob’s side of the bed and the toes were dangling off which is something that can only happen if Rob is not there.

The dimmest bit of light was straining to lift the blinds and I headed downstairs in search of my husband (and to use the toilet because I am old).  At this time of day the sky is bruised by the indirect light of a sun still too far east to do more than send word of its impending arrival. Such a difference from just a few weeks ago when the sun never seemed to set at all.

I found Rob wrapped in our old comforter on the couch.  He was grumpy from lack of sleep and the fact that the sadist train engineer had just crawled past the hamlet with the whistle at full throttle.

“I’d just managed to fall asleep too,” he said.

He’d been up since two. For reasons he didn’t explain until much later, he was up and couldn’t fall back to sleep. He hadn’t wanted to wake me tossing and turning, so he’d gone downstairs, fiddled about on the ‘Net until his eyes burned and tried to catch a few winks on the sofa.

I got him to come back to bed. He was so exhausted by this point that he fell asleep quickly, but I was awake. I got up at 5:30 and was out in the garage by 6:45 and that is mostly where I remained until 3P.M.

But I did come in a bit before 8 to wake Rob who thought perhaps I had a birthday present  for him despite the fact that he’d issued a no present edict earlier in the week. The next day he would say,

“It was probably one of the worst birthdays ever.”

So much for birthdays not being a big deal.

We’d planned dinner in the city with the older girls for seven that evening. It should go without saying that neither of us was energetic enough to really be looking forward to the 45 minute drive – each way – but the sitter had been booked. Last minute sitter cancellations can lead to difficulty finding willing sitters, so we headed into the city.

Let me digress a minute. Earlier in the week, Rob noted that I had been commenting a bit more on widow blogs. He wondered if I was okay. I was heavy into the memory mode with purging old things for the garage sale. On the surface I felt fine but after a bit of reflection, I realized I was a bit blue about Rob’s birthday. Not that it was his and not mine. I actually love planning parties for other people more than I like celebrating my own birthday. It came down to the fact that we were having two celebrations to accommodate the children. We took Dee out for dinner on Friday night and had cake upon returning home. Saturday was with the older girls because their adult schedules sometimes make it too difficult for them to always be traipsing out to the country.

The thing was that Rob has three daughters, but I have one. As much as I love Edee and Mick, they are not my daughters. I am not their mother. My birthday doesn’t mean anything at all to them. Which is not to imply that I think it should or that they are not wonderful or that we have a contentious relationship. But where Dee becomes more Rob’s child than Will’s, they remain Rob’s daughters.

It’s not something I expected to bother me. I knew perfectly well that, with their being adults, we would not have the relationship that Rob and Dee have formed and will continue to form. And I get it. I really do. One of the reasons I have shied away from searching for my birth parents – my birth mother in particular – was that I didn’t want to feel bound to love her like I love my mom or to have expectations of any deep connection.

And though we get along quite well and the girls are genuine and warm, I know they struggle with just who I am in their lives.

The word “step-mother” is not used. I am introduced as “Ann” or sometimes “This is Ann, Dad’s wife.”

And to clarify further, no one uses the “step” prefix in our family aloud really. Dee doesn’t even know what a step-dad or step-sister is.

I am ever conscious of my actions and words. I don’t want to push or encroach or presume or give the impression. I walked into this with more knowledge than Rob, who at one point declared himself willing to be Dee’s father figure but that he could never be her father father.

We stopped by Edee’s to pick her up. She’d been home with her cat, one of Bouncy’s brood if you recall, who was at death’s door from a blood parasite she’d picked up. And I mean the literal door. Pandora was at a point where she was using her reserves to try and crawl away from wherever Edee put her – looking no doubt for a place to die. Even I know enough about animals to know that.

Dinner was back and forth between pleasant conversation and tearful worry. There was hugging and reassurance and I never know when I am doing too much or not enough.

We’d told the sitter we’d be home between 10 and 10:30 and it was 11 because after dinner at Edee’s poor Pandora was no better. We finally left after assuring Edee that whatever she decided to do concerning Pandora’s care  we would support. The naturopath vet had prescribed an antibiotic with herbal back up and instructions to bring the cat in on Monday if she was no better but still alive or a trip to the emergency vet clinic, an expensive affair that makes a jaunt to the human ER in the states look affordable by comparison.

Rob called me from the car after dropping off the sitter to let me know that Edee had texted him and needed him to go along to the ER with her and Pandora. He didn’t get home until about 2:30 where he found me still awake.

Why? The ghosts are back … but then he already knew that.