As Mary and I write this blog for our friends who are newly widowed, the memories rush over us once again. Not raw and shocking as they once were, but vivid nevertheless. And loneliness as a reality is one of the first to be felt and one of the most lasting. Perhaps so few people write about loneliness because the misery is just more than language can capture. I think loneliness comes as a surprise because most of us spent hours, days, sometimes even weeks from time to time on our own and got along just fine when the other person was working, traveling, who knows what. Maybe we even welcomed those quiet times to watch our own TV, to eat the peanut butter out of the jar, to drink from the milk bottle, to stay up until two with a great book,  to go out of the room without someone asking, Where are you off to? 

So the surprise for the newly widowed is that silence is so heavy and so deafening? Especially when you come home from a trip or a great day or even a bad day, and there is no one to say, "How'd it go?"

What can we say?

Grief has no compass, but surprise seems to be what most of us experience first. It seems like stage one. The world as we knew  it changed.  The things we used to do now seem old. The people who cared for us seem not to know how grief holds us hostage. Death aged us. Having a vibrant partner kept us young, even when they were terminally ill. Just caring for them made us feel important, so important that we thought we could rescue them.  Now we are aimless. We kept our commitments to work and family, but we discovered loneliness. We seemed like drifters, not caring, just doing.  I am not sure what I will tell Barbara.

 I think I might tell my dear friend what we mentioned in our book FRESH WIDOWS:

     Give yourself an A+ if you can forgive jerks. stay solvent, and figure out what's next.

I wonder what a man, a recent widower, might mention to a fresh widow.

Is surprise the first stage of grief?

Okay, Mary, this is my last post tonight, but sometimes when I get thinking about something I can't turn my mind off. What prompted all this reflection is your friend who so recently lost her husband after a couple of days in the hospital for a routine procedure, which should have meant that life would return to normal. (how sweet "normal" must sound to her now), and they would soon be talking about the surprise and inconvenience of it all. What can we say to her? I wish you would write something about Surprise being the first stage of grief. Do you think there is anything in Fresh Widows that be of comfort?

Sudden death

Mary, I can't get it off my mind how different the experience of loss is for those who get whacked by the surprise of sudden death of a spouse and those who get to say good-bye. My thoughts go back to what I wrote in our book about Joan Didion whose husband died right before her eyes while she was making dinner. Another story I recall is a neighbor whose husband had a heart attack while they were making the bed together. She thought he was joking. How does anyone survive that shock?

I remember when I was in my bereavement group. The people––men as well as women––fell into three different groups: those who had someone wiped out in a moment, those who had a tolerable time to say good-bye (like me)  and, finally, those who kept care of a spouse for years and years, and while they grieved as much as anyone, nevertheless, had reached a point of relief that had been a long time coming. Not surprising, we were often almost talking past each other, the experiences were so different. 

Preparation for widowhood?

Well, Mary, you say that no one is prepared to be a widow, but just think of all the life changing events for which there is no preparation. Almost all of them. I lived for nearly six decades without knowing anyone really close who died. In that I was unusual, perhaps even fortunate. I also think of you nursing your husband for over three years while he slowly left life as you two knew it together because of his

Alzheimer's. And yet, even you were not prepared for the finality. No one can be. I thought I was prepared in the sense that in my situation there was no hope in those final weeks in the hospice, but the difference between the body that breathes and the one who does not is beyond description. I feel so sorry for your friend whose husband went into the hospital  for "a routine procedure" and two days later was gone. 

You wonder what prepares you for life as a widow. Our mothers rarely mentioned a topic everyone avoided. Death happened in movies, on TV, or to someone else in the news.  It never seemed real to me until Bob died. As a dear friend said to me who lost her husband last week, I never thought it would happen to me. I never thought I would be a widow. I didn’t know what to say to her. We are all on unfamiliar territory.  Her grief is raw like ours was six years ago.  Each day is too long. The silence is deafening. Neighbors and friends try to comfort her but it doesn’t help. She misses what you mentioned in FRESH WIDOWS…the ordinary touching that I miss so much, the kind that happens in the kitchen when your husband needs you to move away from the sink so he can get in and fill the water glasses for dinner—just that little nudge on the hip that moves you over, that utter familiarity.