remarriage of widowed people

In the Shadow of My SisterWife


The wives of polygamists refer to themselves as “sister-wives”. I think this is meant to impose a familial feel to circumstances that could easily dissolve into something competitive and downright ugly were it not for the veneer of a pseudo-relationship that the term implies. Despite my own negative views on the subject of plural marriage, I wonder if the term doesn’t more aptly describe my relationship with Shelley than any other.

Shelley was my husband Rob’s wife. She died of melanoma eight months after my first husband, Will, back in 2006. She would be 47 years old now had she lived. Just a few months older than Rob is, and he never let her forget it. Now he must contend with being older then I am by a couple of years, and I am not sure why I think this, but I’ll bet Shelley is enjoying that particular turn of the table. Read Full Article

Seven Months Ago


Rob and I were married seven months ago today. I find it interesting that we count the months. I was never much for month counting. Not when I was first married to Will or when I was pregnant with Katy (though the count is generally by weeks for that life event). I had to stop and count when people would enquire how old Katy was even. Consequently, I have never numbered my days as a widow. It was actually quite a relief to be beyond the first anniversary and able to just count in years. So, it’s interesting that I, Rob too, counts the months of our marriage. Perhaps it’s just that this time we are so fortunate to have seems too precious not to keep track of every minute of it. Maybe that is even part of what drives my blogging. I want this on the record, so to speak.

 

We are “celebrating” by taking our old sofa to the dump. Neither Rob nor I can bear to sit on it since the nephew and his lice lounged all over it. And, it isn’t coming with us to Texas anyway. Rob hasn’t been able to pawn it off on either of the older girls. So to the dump.

 

Then it’s on to the mall for walking shoes. I finally talked Rob into starting a walking program with me on the two nights of the week that the gym offers child-minding. In between we need to make yet another library run, returning dvd’s, cd’s and finished books. I love that we are establishing library time as a family with Katy. When I was little, I loved our trips to the library. I want Katy to see the library (and bookstores) as fun and wonderful places full of adventure and a place to exercise one’s imagination. After that it will likely be dark and time to come home.

 

It’s staying light longer now. It was after five before dusk hit in earnest yesterday, but it’s still a short day in terms of daylight and sunlight isn’t plentiful yet. I will so miss the long sun days. I loved being able to watch the sunset at 10:30 or 11PM. The day we were married my mother was amazed to see the sun only just setting when back in Iowa it would have been dark for hours already.

 

We are planning a sauna for later and perhaps a movie. A comedy. We tried comedy last night, the Aniston flick about the family who were the real Robinson’s from The Graduate. We kept our widowed character streak alive as the dad in the story was widowed in his mid-thirties.. Rob assures me that widowhood is not a theme in tonight’s pick.

 

But it’s a beautiful day. Not quite 2 C (mid-thirties for you American folk) and we are set to enjoy it as they are predicting our first brush with -30 C on Monday and Tuesday. It’s a good day to hang out and be a family and remember it’s our anniversary.

A Year Ago


We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its urgency, here and now without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.
– Franklin Planner quote that Rob sent to me a year ago today

A year ago today I was at home having called in to work sick because of a sinus infection. I was sitting at my computer, as I am now, surfing the widow board and occasionally checking email (because I was an email junkie then). I hadn’t heard from Rob yet that day, as I was becoming accustomed to, so I checking mail rather often. When his mail for the day finally arrived it was curiously titled “A Difficult Letter” and I became a bit worried. I had been a wreck the last week leading up to the anniversary of Will’s death and in retrospect I think it had a lot of do with the fact that I was spending too much time at the YWBB and the volatile atmosphere and, frankly, negative approach to grieving was feeding some of my apprehensions. Consequently I leaned rather heavily on our friendship and was keeping Rob up quite late at night with our online chats. I was afraid when I saw the title of the email that he was going to tell me that he needed a little space for his own grief and maybe we should not communicate as much anymore. But as I read the letter I began to see that not only were my fears unfounded but the message was heading in the opposite direction. Not that it didn’t take 5 or 6 paragraphs for him to get to the point. He is nothing if not round about at times. But, when he did get to his main point it was this – he wanted to see if there was something more to our relationship than just the friendship that we’d already established.

I was stunned. I just sat there for a bit and read the letter (the parts that get to the point) over and over. And then – I called my best friend Vicki.

“What should I do?”
“Answer the letter.”

Vicki had, almost from the beginning of the correspondence Rob and I established, thought there was more to it than friendship even though I protested that it was not so. She would just smile knowingly and nod and totally dismiss me. She knew better. So I wrote my reply.

Subject:
Thank You. I’m breathing – raggedly – but breathing
Date:
Wed, 24 Jan 2007 12:53:54 -0700
Ann,

Thank you. I don’t know if you can imagine how hard this is for me.
Maybe you can.

I’m still a little shaky, really, but now today I am smiling – all the
way from my heart; something that hasn’t happened in a while.

Thanks again.
Talk to you later.
Rob

—– Original Message —–
From: ann
To: rob
Sent: Wed, 24 Jan 2007 10:58:06 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Go ahead a breathe, okay

Rob,

Since you probably haven’t done a single productive
thing all day, I decided I should send you a short
note now even though I haven’t had a chance to really
think about your proposal in depth yet.

I like you too. And July is too far off, I agree.

Now, get some work done. We can talk later.

Ann (who is marveling at the long-winded way that
Virgos manage to arrive at their point)

And that was the day that changed my life – again. It’s funny but despite the fact that by this point I knew that Rob was everything I was looking for in man, I was looking for someone just like him and not at him at all.

From here we began to plan the spring break trip that we eventually become our sojourn to Devil’s Den in Arkansas which is where Rob proposed to me. We, of course, had already managed an face to face meeting in Idaho Falls which confirmed for us what we already knew – that we were meant to be together. And that’s an identity shaker. To realize that you are meant to be with someone who you wouldn’t have even met had your spouse not died. It takes faith in the universe to wrap your mind around that – not your heart though.

This probably seems an odd post coming just the day after two posts about my late husband. It’s not odd to me. It’s my life. The sad and the sweet. The past and the now – and the future. I have been loved and have loved in return. I am loved and return that love with all my heart and soul.