Widows and widowers seem to be chic these days. Jude Law is a widower with two young daughters in The Holiday. Jim Belushi is a widowed dad as well in the new Underdog film. Jennifer Garner is not-quite-widowed in Catch and Release though anyone who has lost a fiance could tell you it is really the same thing but for the formalities. The movie Premonition is about a widow. In The Prestige, one of the main characters is widowed early on and the other is widowed about half way though. Someone on the widow’s board wondered idly today why all children’s movies, though I would say movies in general, have widows in them. Widows probably do not make up even half of the characters in films these days but when James Bond is a widower, it gets you wondering.

And it isn’t just now or even just movies. When I was a kid most of the television shows I watched seemed to have widowed parents.  There was My Three Sons with Fred MacMurray. He played a widowed father with three boys and ended up marrying a widow with a small daughter at one point. The interesting thing about that is that I can remember the show actually dealing with issues that I have come to know intimately as a widow myself. The Courtship of Eddie’s Father was about widower and the very young son who was trying to fix him up. Of course there was the Brady Bunch. Two widowed people and kids blending into a new family. The show only dealt with the kids deceased parents in the first episode if I remember correctly and they were blithely forgotten thereafter. I have a friend even who was surprised to learn that Mr and Mrs Brady were widowed. She had always thought they were divorced. Mrs. Partridge was a widow. The mom on Petticoat Junction was widowed.  Jed Clampett was a widower. (Dang am I dating myself!) Oh, and don’t forget Ben Cartwright. Poor guy was widowed three times. 

I Love Lucy had two widows, Lucy and her friend Vivian. Even The Doris Day Show was about a widow with children, but only for the first three seasons. The fourth season found her inexplicably single and childless. If only real life was as simple as a rewrite.

The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew had widowed fathers. Florida Evans lost James on Good Times. Willis and Arnold were the sons of a widow adopted by a widower after they were orphaned. 

Even when I was “grown-up” I couldn’t seem to escape fictional widows. Dr, Westphal on St. Elsewhere was a widower with two children, one of them autistic. Cher played a widow. Twice. In The Witches of Eastwicke and again in Moonstruck, which is ironically one of my favorite movies ever. If it weren’t for the fact that characters on soap operas never stay dead (a neat trick most widows would wish their spouses could learn) I could recount a dozen more. Oh, but I forgot Jenny on All My Children. She stayed dead. but she might be about the only one.

I am not sure I appreciate this new awareness even in retrospect. And is there anything to be learned from all these media models past? No. Except maybe this, that death is part of life and art, if you want to call it that, imitates it.