Widowhood Evaluation Time

Recently I was reading a blog of a woman whose husband died within a few months of mine. I don’t read her much anymore because her plight usually brings me down and that’s sad because we go way back to when we both blogged at a stroke support site. Back in those days our caregiver stories tracked almost the same in terms of the heavy load each we carried and length of time we carried it. Now, she says she misses her husband more, not less than in the beginning of her widowhood journey. She says that everything reminds her of her husband and that makes her feel even lonelier. She’s stuck in grief, she says, and is wondering if she needs counseling.

A person commenting on the post said she is a widow in her seventh year out and she feels the same way, she still cries every day and she’s lost friends because she can’t move on. I have to wonder, though, if after so many years can you still call it grief? Perhaps a different label at that stage of the game would define the problem better and if it were me, I'd start with a lot of blood work to make sure a seven year-long depression doesn't stem from a chemical imbalance. These two widows’ stories make me wish there was a magic pill we could take to make everything okay again. Some would call that an anti-depressant and that may be a necessary tool for some but, in my opinion, after a while most widows need to pull that Band-Aid off and let the healing process happen on its own. Pills and alcohol just postpones the emotions one needs to move through to reach acceptance. At least that’s my layman’s theory.

One thing my friend wrote about I can truly relate to. She said she went from being a caregiver without a moment during the days to waste to being a widow who drifts from day to day wasting a lot of time. It’s a restless feeling to have so much time on your hands and it’s a feeling that still plagues me more often than I’d like. Guilt comes with the idleness. I have chosen to fill much of that time with whatever activities catches my eye in the senior community. Not that my way of coping is any better than anyone else's but we all have needs and I need to talk with someone other than the dog from time to time. Even if it’s mostly the 'shallow acquaintance' talk I find in my travels, there are times when the banner goes to a deeper level and the mystery of when and where that can happen is all I need to keep me going. Sure, I still miss my husband and think of him often. Sure, there are things every single day that remind me of him. But those memory triggers, now, are strangely comforting. They remind me that I was once loved deeply and I was important to the happiness of another person. Not everyone near the end of their life can say that. One thing we can all say, though, and say with conviction is the past is past and we can’t bring it back.

Just suppose we could bring the past back. Would any of us do it if we truly could? If we knew in doing so we couldn’t change a thing that happened back then? Not the outcome. Not the words we said or didn’t say. Not the painful parts as time marched us to the same ending as before. I wouldn’t. I would not want to see my husband go through his stroke again just so I wouldn’t feel lonely or restless now. Nope, once was enough. As I move forward in widowhood I am able to filter out the bad or painful memories of my husband’s and my struggles in his post-stroke world and, for me, that’s a miracle brought to us through gratitude and grace. I may stumble and fall in my pursuit to put meaning back in my life again, but without that goal would any of us get back up again? Some widows apparently can’t. So I raise my glass to toast all of us widow ladies who keep on moving forward! I see you everywhere---on the internet and in my activities here on the home front. We are women and we are strong which reminds me of a conversation I had with my audiologist last week.

She wanted to know if I was dating yet. I laughed and said, “No, way!” Then I got serious and told her that I would never put myself in a position where I might have to be a caregiver again, that I loved Don and didn’t mind doing it for him because we had a long history together of supporting each other through difficult times. I also told her that in my circle of friends from the senior hall there is a running joke that guys in our age bracket are only looking for cooks, house keepers and/or nursemaids. It was her turn to laugh. Then she said if your mom died her father would find another woman right away, that he was so helpless he can’t do anything for himself. Her mother, she said, was tired from doing it all for so many years and the audiologist predicts her mom would be like me and never get remarried. We chatted on for fifteen minutes covering topics like raising boys in her generation versus mine. Just think, that concept of marrying for a cook, house keeper or nursemaid will die out---and good riddance---with the 30-something generation. Young guys, today, can do it all and in my book that’s a good by-product of the Feminism Movement of my generation. Yup, my conversation with the audiologist was one of those light banner things that turned deep and philosophical and I left the place feeling good inside. ©