Widowhood

I recently welcomed a friend into the club of women you don’t want to join – widows. She is the second friend of mine who has followed me into the parallel universe of having lost a spouse to death.  One moment you are living your life, and the next you are frozen.  Life keeps going around you, but you are stuck – like a rock in the center of a stream while everyone else keeps moving around you.  There is an odd moment when you look around you – maybe in the grocery store – when you look at everyone else and wonder how they keep going when the world has stopped. It is a strange place to be, time has ceased to mean anything and you are gripped in a paralyzing numbness unable to comprehend things going on around you.

Our society doesn’t handle death well.  In other cultures, death is more visible, it is an inevitable part of life.  Widowed women or men dress in particular clothing, can be seen wailing in public and it is accepted. But in our society, we hardly see it.  We don’t see the impact on families, and especially when it happens to someone young, we seem completely ill prepared to deal with it.  When I was first widowed, one of the most striking things to me was how reluctant I became to tell anyone.  It was almost as though in my mind there was a stigma attached with saying ‘I am widowed’.  Women at the park with their kids would easily mention they were divorced.  There was no surprise. However, if I mentioned I was widowed, shocked silence would be followed by awkward apologies.  We simply don’t know what to do around the death of someone’s spouse when they die young.  I suspect it is different among older women since it is so much more common. I generally avoided ever mentioning it.  I think most people around me to this day believe I am divorced with an absentee ex-husband who doesn’t visit the kids because I don’t know how to say I am widowed.  Four years later and I still don’t know how to say those words easily.

Though I avoided telling those around me, it didn’t mean I didn’t feel a lot of irrational anger towards those who were still happily living their lives.  I remember the one morning I was driving behind someone who lives in my neighborhood with a license plate that reads glfwdw (golf widow).  I had seen that license plate many times before, but after Gene died that license plate made me irrationally and overwhelmingly angry.  She was still married.  Her husband simply played golf on the weekend.  How dare she refer to herself as a widow?  At the end of the day, she still slept wrapped in someone’s arms.  Absolutely irrational.  I sat out one day at a birthday party for a friend’s child where the women were talking about their marital problems.  One was describing how irritating she found it when her husband unexpectedly came home during the day for lunch as it was so disruptive to her schedule.  The other woman agreed and said it was so disruptive when her husband worked from home.  And I had to choke down the urge to tell them to stop whining and start appreciating each day they had with their loved one. 

Though I struggled with fitting myself into the world around me, I still I found myself not wanting to be defined by my widowhood.  It was almost as if I believed by mentioning my status, I had a giant letter W on my forehead.  It became as big a part of my identity as being a mom or being a college professor.  And perhaps that as much as anything kept me from admitting my situation in social settings.  I got creative in how I described my late husband – would refer to him as my children’s dad (as if we had never been married).  I even once or twice called my late husband my ‘ex-husband’ even though that denied who he was to me and denied myself the status of having been in a committed, caring, loving marriage.  Why is it so hard to say my ‘late husband’?  I give many personal examples in class, and this becomes the trickiest situation for describing my marital status.  I have really shied away from students knowing my life story even as I use personal examples in class.  I cannot tell you why I find that to be the case – why would I feel there is a bigger stigma attached to being widowed than to being divorced?  Do other widows feel that way?