Not Yet

Sue,

          I started to think again about our first phase of widowhood. I guess the first few months after our husbands died we were "giving" as we met once a week and started writing about our feelings and uncertainties. Like Barbara we needed to be connected outside our family and friends. You and I were strangers. While you helped me adjust to living with a missing partner, maybe the stranger in Barbara's life is helping her accept her new life.  Maybe the will to help keeps us all from depression.  

        Depression keeps victims hostage, but not us. One of the big steps in widowhood is moving, connecting and  eating out alone. Barbara hasn't taken that last step, yet. She has started to accept being the extra person as couples invite her out to dinner.  It is an awkward situation but she has accepted the challenge. She might enjoy more eating alone, feeling close to Katherine Hepburn, like you mentioned in FRESH WIDOWS.

        For now she seems most enthusiastic about trading in her car, the car with the spotless trunk. I will have to ask her, Why?

           

Purpose Through Giving

Dear Mary,

When I read your post two things ran through my mind:  Barbara has found purpose through giving and  a life with purpose is one of life's values. It gives you reason to get up in the morning, and it affirms a sense of self at a time when that sense of self has been so shattered. I think feeling whole, even if lonely, is so much better than that awful experience of "going to pieces." 

You say you could only cope in those first months, but think again. When we met only days/weeks after our husbands left us, we were giving to one another right from the first moment. We were giving in understanding and companionship just as surely as we were taking from one another. To be sure, this took a different form than Barbara's...who is somehow "on call" to strangers.

But it bears out what you wrote in Fresh Widows: "Mother said, "Never talk to strangers." I loved Mom, but she was wrong on this....I think I'll tell my children, "Let a stranger in your (life) and your misery will disappear."

Sue,

   I saw Barbara on Sunday. We walked and talked about being widows. After only a few months as a widow she seems to have moved past the state of surprise or shock. During the last month she was able to join her children at a meeting with the CEO of the hospital that poorly managed her husband's care. Even though they did not come forth with all the information Barbara needed, it did relieve some of the anger. Her children will continue to pursue the missing information (Why did the doctor disappear? Why is he not at the meeting?). But Barbara seems relieved that justice will be served.

     The big surprise for me yesterday was that Barbara's time was limited. I thought she would need lots of time. While we were walking around the town she received a call from a husband seeking help. Barbara replied, I will be there by 3. Little did I know, but Barbara is part of a social ministry. Through her Lutheran Church she is part of a network that has served strangers with kindness, coffee, and good humor.  Yesterday, she left early to spend time with a diabetic woman who had recently become an amputee. Her husband had kept watch, and now needed a break. 

        Giving, Barbara told me, is what has helped her most during the last two months since John died. Giving to strangers.

        All I can remember the first few months after Bob died was coping, not giving. Barbara deserves an A+. Before she left, she showed me the trunk of the beautiful car her husband bought two years ago. The trunk was empty. Tomorrow I am trading it in for a new car.  All  I could say was A+.

Loneliness Again

I wrote my last post on Loneliness taking my cue from Mary's thoughts about what to say to Barbara who is now widowed maybe only two or three months, and I remember what I wrote in Fresh Widows.

"After six months the shock is gone, the fear has lessened, the sorrow has changed, but the loneliness is worse. This means way more than just wishing for your husband to be there so you could tell him something he would love to hear. It means the sound of silence, as Simon and Garfunkel sang: Hello darkness my old friend; I've come to talk to you again."

I know widows who plan to be with someone every single day in order to break up the long silence, but loneliness always catches you somehow. 

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.