The Church on Widow Lane

I’ve wondered at times if widowhood is easier for women who are regular churchgoers. After all, they have their church families---communities of people who supposedly care about the sick, elderly and lonely people in their congregations. But when ever I start thinking along those lines I remember a widow writing in her blog about her minister who, just days after her husband’s funeral, wanted to bring a committee over to her house to clear it out of every thing that her husband owned. The minister told her she couldn’t “get over her loss” until she did. She was so distraught over the thought of a half dozen people coming to her house to pick it over that she was thinking of changing churches if he didn’t stop badgering her. Call me cynical but my first thought was that the committee sounded like a wake of vultures picking over a dead carcass. Wow, I need a new flying rod. Look at this beauty!

I’ve never been a churchgoer unless you count the Sunday school classes my brother and I attended for a few years until we decided that exploring the near-by Indian mound was a better way to spend our Sunday mornings. My folks were not churchgoers either but they thought their kids should learn the basics and it didn’t matter to them which of the four churches within walking distance that my brother and I attended. Throw in a few summertime Bible School day camps and some religions-of-the-world type classes in college and you have the sum total of my religious upbringing. I keep waiting for a lightening bolt to strike me, to deliver a message from beyond that I’m missing something important by not going to church. So far it hasn’t come.

Friends of ours---a couple---got struck by that lightening bolt and they joined a mega-church then they totally immersed themselves in the culture of the church. Classes, committees, Christian tattoos on their bodies, daily devotions on their Facebook page and prayer cards at their place of business. To this day, they positively glow whenever they talk about their transformation. I was happy for them. They obviously needed something in their lives to anchor them but I must admit it was weird seeing this couple---one of whom had a potty mouth before finding religion---try to fine my husband fifty cents for saying the word “shit” after his stroke. Cripe, he only had a 25 word vocabulary at the time and they were trying to talk scripture with him. What did they think he was going to say? Hallelujah, amen and here’s a twenty for the collection plate? One time a faith healer was due to speak at their church and they wanted me to bring Don out to the event to have his paralysis prayed away. “Worth a try,” they said. Ya, sure, I thought but didn’t say, if I believed that I’d be down at the bank arranging for a loan to buy some ocean front property in North Dakota.

Shortly after Don passed away I was alone with him in his intensive care room when the Chaplin showed up. She asked if she could do anything to help Don “find his way home” and I said, “No, we’re not religious.” Then she asked if I minded if she said a prayer for his soul “before she walked me out to my car.” Queue the stage hands, it’s time to close the final curtain and turn another newly minted widow out of the room. I guess someone has to do it, why not a hospital Chaplin? I let her say her prayer and then I kissed Don and whispered the words that are etched in our grave marker: “Happy trails to you until we meet again.” That made the Chaplin positively beam and say something about that being a prayer in my own way. She might as well have said, “No heathens in this room! The widow believes in an after-life.” She was too young to have ever heard Roy Rogers and Dale Evans sing those words at the end of their radio and TV shows in the ‘40s and ‘50s. But she was on the right track. I do believe our souls have always been and will always be connected in the Great Beyond.

When you google the phrase ‘finding religion late in life’ it comes up with 42,500,000 hits. It’s clear I’m not the only one who wonders if that lightening bolt is going to strike. At the very first website I clicked on was the following quote by New York Times op-ed columnist, Charles Bows:

“While science, logic and reason are on the side of the nonreligious, the cold, hard facts are just so cold and hard. Yes, the evidence for evolution is irrefutable. Yes, there is a plethora of Biblical contradictions. Yes, there is mounting evidence from neuroscientists that suggests that God may be a product of the mind. Yes, yes, yes. But when is the choir going to sing? And when is the picnic? And is my child going to get a part in the holiday play?”

Bingo. Haven’t I known all along that the appeal of church is the sense of community, of family and the traditions they provide? As appealing as that is in my widowhood, to join one of the churches in the area I would have to give up my world view of religion and spirituality and the idea that there are many paths to God. Not going to happen, boys and girls! So I’ll go on being a church of one on Widow Lane. ©

The Proposals

I don't plan to live in the past now that my husband is gone, but I do want to preserve and share some of my best memories from time to time on this blog. For me, it helps to write. It keeps me focused on the important parts of our shared history---and the important parts are NOT the last few days of his death or my pain of having to move on by myself. Don's gone and I can't change that but I can try to live the life he'd want me live while not forgetting our past. So with that in mind, here's a few memories that I treasure......

The Proposals

The first time---or maybe it was the second time---that Don asked me to marry him we were on a playground riding pink elephants mounted on giant springs and not doing a very good job of it since they were designed for children and we were in our late twenties at the time. It was four o’clock in the morning. The moon was full making the trees surrounding the park look like an enchanted forest. But there might have been a little alcohol involved earlier in the evening so it could have been just our imaginations working overtime. It’s enough to say it was a memorable setting to get a marriage proposal.

The last time Don asked me to marry him was in the year after his stroke. We were living in an accessible apartment while I was getting his house ready to sell and I was also in the process of getting an auction organized at a large pole barn that he had rented for years. My house was sitting empty, waiting its turn on the sales block. I’d been fretting about the high cost of my health insurance and we were having major cash flow problems. Don’s language disorders---aphasia and apraxia---at that point in time had his speech limited to a few nouns that often took as long as four hours for him to get out. But he was determined and would keep trying over and over again until others around him understood what he wanted to say. By the time he finally got the word “marry” out, the conversation about the insurance had vanished from my mind, but not his.

“You’re merry?" I asked and with all the stuff going on during that time frame I was stunned that he could feel that way. "You’re happy?” It was a question that, of course, upset him because I misunderstood what he'd worked so hard to get out.

Besides the fact that it took me a while to recognize that single word proposal as a proposal, another thing that was different from the time he proposed while we rode pink elephants in the park was his reasons for asking. This last time, Don was asking because getting married would get me covered by his health insurance and pension plan. I don’t know why he proposed that first time, but my answer was: “Why we hardly know each other!” We’d only been dating a matter of months---and not exclusively at that---and I thought anyone with a lick of sense wouldn’t ask that soon. Strike one against Don.

In the decades in between his first and last proposals when ever people pressed for a reason why we didn’t get married, Don often repeated that line---“Why we hardly know each other!” It was a standing joke and only the two of us knew its true origin. But there was a deeper meaning as well. Over the years Don and I flirted with the idea that reincarnation of souls is real and we figured we had been soul mates since time began. It just took me a while to recognize that when we first met. And that brings us to the true meaning of the words that will be carved on our tombstone… "Happy trails to you, until we meet again." Our time together here was just a drop of water in the flowing river of life and we’ll have until the end of time for our souls to keep on finding each other. ©

Edit to add: I added a link to an article that was published as part of Valentine's Day contest a few years back. The contest was to write about how you met your spouse. Look for that tab/link at the top that will take you to the article.

Sweet, Little Old Widow Lady

On the agenda for today was ordering the stone for my husband’s grave. Or I should say our grave stone since eventually both our cremated remains will reside in the same place. That was a surreal experience, walking into the monument company and seeing all those beautiful tombstones in their display room. For several years my husband had wanted to order a stone and I’d been the one dragging my feet. There’s something special he wanted to make sure got etched in marble for all of eternity but I was a little creeped out by the idea of seeing my own name on a grave. But “Some day” finally got here, and the job couldn’t be put off any longer. What my husband wanted and will get is a line from a Roy Rogers and Dale Evans song: “Happy trails to you --- until we meet again.” Yup, he was a bit sentimental about some things.

After the salesman wrote that line down and assured me there would be no problem using the copyrighted lyrics, he asked for my husband’s birth and death dates. I told him. Then he says, “And what dates should be use for you?”

From out of no where I snapped back: “If we knew that, I don’t think I’d be sitting here talking to you.”

People in the ‘death and dying’ business are so serious and somber and ever so worried about offending someone whose emotions are close to the surface. The look on his face was priceless until he noticed that I was smiling and then he cracked one, too.

“Let me rephrase that,” he said, “when were you born?”

Talk about being serious, somber and afraid of offending a client, the woman at the funeral home had put the wrong picture on the remembrance card and when I pointed that out she looked so stricken that I glanced down at her feet, half expecting to see pee running down her leg and filling up her shoe. I don’t remember ever having that kind of power over another person and it was fascinating. I suppose it had something to do with me raising my voice just a tiny tad when I told her that she, herself, had confirmed that I had e-mailed two photos---one for the obituary and one for the card. Fortunately, in time of the service, she came through with a corrected version of the card and as a reward I didn’t even yell at her when the video they taped of the service crashed half way through. After all, I had to start somewhere practicing to be a sweet, little old widow lady. ©