dating a widower

The New Normal


Family arrangements in the US have become more...

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There is no new normal because, honestly, the whole idea of normal is highly subjective even under the best of circumstances which makes our former normal a matter of opinion really. Just as an example, for my four year old daughter old normal was a terminally ill father whose unresponsive shell she visited weekly at first in a nursing home, then in a hospice and finally in a cemetery where she would hug the grave marker good-bye before leaving. Now her normal is Daddy Will and Daddy Rob and two big sisters, one of whom she has yet to meet. This is normal to her. Even when she compares herself to her peers at the preschool she attends (and she does), she doesn’t see herself as different. Her friends have fathers and she does too. Her friends have older siblings and she does too. Her friends have DVD players in their cars, and now thanks to Daddy Rob, so does she. Four year old’s have their priorities straight and are shockingly practical.

 

Society fights a losing battle to norm itself, set standards and define optimal situations. While they seem to work for the majority of people, it doesn’t seem to be how the majority of people actually live. As another example, about a month ago a state trooper came into the high school where I teach to deliver a presentation to the students on the dangers of meeting people on the Internet. I sat as far back in the auditorium as I could, and I listened to the kids around me as they dismissed most of what the officer had to say as largely misinformed scare tactics, and although I don’t personally discount the possibility of predators on the net, I had to agree with the students. There are predators everywhere in real and virtual life. It is wise to know what signs to look for and to be careful when getting to know someone, but normal for most of the teens and young adults I know is meeting people via the Internet. Friends that you have never seen or talked to is no more unusual to them than the old concept of pen pals. Cyber introductions are similar to “friend of a friend” connections. I met Rob on a message board. In fifty-five days we are going to be married. In times gone by men and women met and got to know their potential mates via correspondence with their first face to face meetings often being their weddings. And that was normal. Twenty-five years ago my friends and I were meeting and dating young men we met at bars and frat parties. And that was normal, but I don’t remember any lectures on stranger danger from state troopers back then.

 

Normal is in the eye of the beholder. As my darling husband-to-be would say, “It is what it is,” which is a topic for another day.

The Void


Simulated gravitational lensing (black hole go...

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Lay down all thought

Surrender to the void

It is shining

It is shining

-John Lennon, lyrics to Tomorrow Never Knows off the Revolver album

 

 

 

Widowed people often ask about filling the void left by their deceased spouses, or rather they talk about how it can’t be filled. Surprisingly, I don’t disagree with them. Voids can’t be filled. How can you fill something that isn’t empty?

 

Voids are black holes of the soul. They devour. Nothing escapes their gravitational pull. Everything that was joyous and worth getting up in the morning for has been sucked into this pitch-colored vortex, never to be experienced again. They act almost like vacuum, clearing away the memories left behind by our spouses like cracker crumbs. Remnants of a life that hide like a set of misplaced car keys when you need them, but turn up when unexpectedly and rock us to our core.

 

Voids are necessary for the same reason that basements or backs of closets exist. They hold the things that our lives can’t rid themselves of, for a variety of reasons, but can’t use anymore either. Psychic storage units that you venture into at your own emotional risk. Why would you throw opportunities for love and happiness into that?

 

The life you find yourself living in the aftermath hangs on the edge of this blackened crater. It would be easy to fall in, let the dark claim you, but most of us don’t. True, we wander the rim for a time, but eventually we walk away in search of unscathed earth to resettle ourselves upon.

 

It’s not about “filling” anything or in the case of “the void” paving over it. It is about relocation, finding new space or in some cases making new space. Some people don’t have the capacity. They surrender to the grief. Or worse, they seek replacements and dump new love on top of old pain. It always comes back to this however, acknowledging the former life and honoring the love that once was while moving forward and being open to the possibilities that life does present even to those who aren’t paying attention.

 

 

 

 

High End Pens


Parker Duofold pens from a 1920s magazine adve...

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“None of us can have as many virtues as the fountain-pen, or half its cussedness; but we can try” – Mark Twain

 

There was a small article on fountain pens on page 194 of the September 2006 issue of Oprah Magazine. I saved it because it reminded me of my late husband. Will loved pens. In general he hated shopping unless it was for a new pen or Pittsburgh Steelers paraphernalia. He would tease me about my Target addiction and only reluctantly would he actually accompany me, but he rarely left there without a new pen.

 

He didn’t write much in his line of work. Mainly he took orders and filled out inventory files, but he insisted on having a good pen with which to do these things. Before his illness took its vicious hold of him, he had printer perfect block letter penmanship, and his cursive was small and impossibly neat. He would leave yellow post-it notes for me on the kitchen table with short utilitarian messages and “I Love You’s” whenever he left the house and knew I would get home before he could get back.

 

But he did write once upon a time. There are three or four pieces of lined notebook paper with poems he wrote when he was just starting college that I have saved. They reflect a rough time in his life. A good friend of his had just committed suicide and the younger brother of one of his close friends had killed himself around the same time as well. The poems are dark and painful. He shared them with me one day not long after we were married. He had been to his mom’s to clean out his old room and discovered them in an notebook. He had wanted to throw them away. He didn’t think they were very good, and they reminded him of the day when he had almost committed suicide himself. I convinced him to save them. I am not yet sure if I am glad I did. I don’t know much about that time of his life beyond what he told me. But right now I am not able to throw away anything I come across that he wrote.

 

I even saved a letter that former girlfriend wrote him a few months before we were married. She was a foreign exchange student he met in high school and their correspondence spanned about 7 or eight years. He stopped writing to her after we became a couple. Not because I asked him to but because he considered her a chapter in his life that was closed. She wrote a few more times before she reappeared about two months before our wedding expecting him to be free to pick up their on/off more romantic on his side than hers relationship. I think something about seeing she and I together made him finally realize that he had been used. I don’t know what she thought. The letter represents another time in his life I don’t know much about either. I realize now that there were a lot of things about him I didn’t know.

 

Periodically Will would initiate a shopping trip strictly for the purpose of acquiring new pens. He would normally purchase several at a time because as a route salesman he knew that they would eventually be left at a stop, lost in the seat of the truck, or drop from his pocket as he loaded and unloaded his cube van. I still have his favorite one. It’s maroon and black and though it doesn’t work very well anymore, I can’t throw it away. Like the poems and that stupid letter from the spoiled little Dutch girl.

 

Our daughter seems to have inherited his love of writing utensils though she loves mechanical pencils just as much as she loves pens. Will didn’t like pencils at all. He even balanced his checkbook in ink. We are forever collecting pencils and pens now. Her favorites tend to be girly with sparkles and feathers. It never ceases to amaze me how much she is like him when she never really knew the man that I fell in love with. He was long gone by the time she was born. She only ever knew her father as a sick man. Confused. Frail. And then wheelchair and bed-bound. Finally unable to talk, see, feed himself. “Daddy never talks to me,” she would say when I asked her if she would like to visit him in the nursing home where he spent over a year of the last fifteen months of his life.

 

The pen I saved is one she uses sometimes though often she will decline to use it because “that’s Daddy’s.” It’s funny the little things that pull up memories you forgot you even remembered. Articles in Oprah, god would he have laughed about that, and fountain pens.