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?

Grief

It is funny the path that grief takes in an individual.  Though there are similar effects in others, our path is unique.  I was thinking about it this morning as I weighed myself and realized that 3 ½ years later, I now had gained back all of the weight I lost after my husband died (over 20 pounds).  That was one of my major physical manifestations of grief.  Looking back now, at the time I thought I was losing weight because I was too miserable to eat, too uninterested in things that would cause pleasure (like food).  But I think that was only part of the story.  The real story behind it seems more similar to what I hear about anorexia.  I was watching that scale every morning - deriving satisfaction in seeing the pounds come off because they represented control.  In a world where things had so severely slipped out of my control, I could watch the pounds come off and know that I was making that happen. 

Soon after my husband died, I started having trouble sleeping.  Initially that difficulty developed as paranoia.  I would hear things in the house, people outside.  I would sleep with the phone under my pillow convinced someone was now going to try to break in.  As the early period of grief subsided, I stopped being paranoid about security (I now occasionally will wake in the morning to find I left the front door unlocked all night).  But those first couple of months, I was scared.  And that fear took the form of fear of a break in.  It was somehow easier to direct the fear towards an unknown stranger than experience what I was really afraid of – that I couldn’t manage alone.  I wasn’t sure I could handle the finances or manage two small children with their demands and a full time career.  I had no idea how I was going to balance it all on my own.  So, instead of expressing fear of failure, I became paralyzed at night with fear that someone was breaking into the house.

Later in my grief process I developed another sleep problem, insomnia.  It appeared for me probably three to four months after he was gone – at a point when I felt I was finally getting on my feet and getting some control back over my life.  So, it was odd to me I began waking up every night at 4 in the morning, unable to go back to sleep.  Eventually I gave into the insomnia, would just get up, work for an hour, and then either go back to bed or if that was unsuccessful, I would go sleep on the sofa. 

I went back to work two weeks after my husband died.  Ostensibly it was because my job only gave us two weeks bereavement leave (however, I had been told I could get a doctor’s note and use sick leave if needed) but the reality for me was that I needed to go back to work.  It provided me with an escape from being bereaved.  I could step into my classroom and be the performer I am when lecturing and stop being the widow.  Grief had no place in that space.  I cannot imagine my lectures were any good that term (though I got fantastic evaluations out of sympathy) but it provided an escape for me. 

Though lecturing was easy following his death, other parts of work left me almost paralyzed.  I couldn’t grade papers.  And while commuting at times I was overcome by a wave of panic that didn’t seem to be based on any thought.  It was one of the strangest aspects of the process for me – the physical manifestations of stress were often independent of thought.  I did discover the wonders of a drug called Ativan – an anti-anxiety drug.  One pill and that ball of panic and fear would dissolve and I could grade!  You might assume by that statement that I used it frequently, but I didn’t.  My doctor initially gave me a bottle of 20 pills. I gave several away to a friend dying of pancreatic cancer, and 5 or so remain in my cabinet (expired I am sure).  I hoarded those pills.  Just having them in my cupboard helped me cope with life.  It wasn’t necessary to take them, just knowing I could meant I could sit down and grade my papers and drive to work. 

It has been 3 ½ years since he has been gone.  And my grief process isn’t over.  It has changed, but learning to move on to a new life is a long term process.  For me now, the steps are about distancing myself from my previous life.  Moving forward means letting go of what I had.  While during that first year, I did remember the bad with the good, I was still looking to replace what I had with something similar.  I dated men who were like him.  Now, more often than not, I remember the problems in my previous marriage not the good things.  It is sad to me that I end up focusing on what was wrong other than what was right.  I envy others who can look back and only see the good part.  But perhaps the exchange there is while I was in my marriage I was very happy – I can ignore the bad in the present, but see it strongly in the past.

My process has been very different from others I have seen around me.  I went to a grief group for a couple of years and watched others expressions of grief.  Even after the first couple of months, I was working on moving forward and rebuilding my life.  Others I saw spent far more time missing what they had.  Some of them seemed stuck in their grief.  But most of them only ever reported the happy parts of their lives with their spouse - the ways in which that person was wonderful.  I miss that.  I wish I could in some ways filter out the parts of my marriage that were difficult.  I think it might make life easier for my kids.

Grief is individual.  There is no one road to travel down.  I am a different person than I was before I lost him.  I am proud of surviving.  I am managing.  And that puts a smile on my face most days.