The Bad Girl Widow

In one of my very first blog entries I wrote: “Oh crap, widowhood is going to be fattening!” And I was right. At the doctor’s office today he pronounced me six pounds tubbier than I was six months ago at my last visit. He didn’t, of course, use the word ‘tubby’---he’s a nice guy---but my weight gain prompted a long “bad girl” discussion that ended with me having to sign a pledge to add 30 minutes of exercise to my day, journal my food intake and e-mail him an accountability report once a month. Tools for losing weight. Whoop de doo!

The report thing was my own fault. He wanted me to come back to the office in three months for a follow up but I pulled the Old People Card and said I wouldn’t do that in the winter months for anything less than a heart attack. “Spring will have to do,” I said, thinking I had out-smarted a guy who soaking wet couldn’t weigh more than a bale of hay. I didn’t count on him standing his ground and pulling the accountability pledge out of his bag of tricks to use on stubborn patients who won’t do follow up appointments if it’s snowing. He even had his nurse register me for an interactive website where I can view my medical test results, send Mr. Doctor my monthly reports, and ask his nurse questions like, “If I just broke my big toe will I need a cast?” When I send in my first tubby report I’m going to sign it, “from fatty, fatty two by four.” Damn it, it’s going to be a long winter without my comfort foods to keep me warm!

During the “bad girl” discussion I confessed that I’m an emotional eater and the doctor asked, “Is there something special going on in your life that is causing you stress?” If looks could kill, he’d be dead. I had a hard time not calling him an idiot for not remembering that---DUH!---my husband died nine months ago! But deep down inside I wondered if 10 years from now I won’t still be using the same excuse if I don’t get my bad girl eating binges under control. So I put my strong widow lady face in place and as sweet as marshmallows in cocoa I explained what I’ve been doing since Don died.

Near the end of the visit the doctor left the room to get me a flu shot injection and he came back with a nurse in tow I hadn’t seen since before Don passed away. She’d just heard the news and was upset that she didn’t know before. He was her favorite patient, she said and “I just loved Don to death.” Oh okay. It’s a common expression and at first it went right over my head but when it hit me I had to concentrate on stopping the full blown pucker up and cry that was forming in my head. Meanwhile, the nurse realized what she said about loving Don to death and like a slow motion video you could see a pucker up and cry washing over her face. The next thing you know we were both crying and Mr. Skinny Ass Doctor was standing in between us with one arm awkwardly around each of us. And for this surreal hug fest I wondered how much extra Medicare would get billed.

On the way home I had the Prime Country station playing on the radio and Dan Seals was singing One Friend:

Sometimes the world was on our side;
Sometimes it wasn't fair.
Sometimes it gave a helping hand;
Sometimes we didn't care.

'Cause when we were together,
It made the dream come true.
If I had only one friend left,
I'd want it to be you.
Someone who understands me,
And knows me inside out….

Well, isn’t that just like a country singer, I thought, playing my emotions like a violin and making me wish I could write like that. Then I pulled over to the side of the road and cried the color right out of my irises. Don was that one friend in my life who knew me inside out and now his spirit is off doing what ever spirits do in the Great Unknown and I’m stuck writing fatty two by four letters in my head. I’d call him an ass-breath for dying and leaving me alone but I’m trying to quit swearing. And Dan Seals? Well let’s just say I’m still mad at him for making me late for dinner. ©

Changing Seasons on Widowhood Lane

Fall, with all its beauty, has never been one of my favor seasons. Growing up, fall came with an endless supply of leaves that had to be raked each day when I got home from school and when that job was done for the season then we had a dozen old fashioned wooden framed storm windows to wash and exchange for the screens hanging on the house. Those thankless chores didn’t exit from my life until I was almost old enough for Medicare. In fact, raking leaves and dealing with storm windows in the fall expanded to include several more houses as Don’s and my aging parents needed help in the fall. Heck, with his soft spot for old widows Don even got us involved with helping several elderly neighbors with their leaves which I didn’t like doing at the time. Spending so many daylight hours of October raking, burning or hauling leaves wore me right out. In life, everything comes full circle. Now I’m that elderly woman on the block and I’m grateful for the “Don” who lives next door who snow blows my sidewalk. He’s exhibit B in the changing seasons of my life.

The Canadian geese have been flying overhead this week. Bright colors are in the landscape and the days are getting shorter. The cooler temperatures of fall are here and even though I don’t have much to do to get ready for winter, the changing season is making me anxious and sad and missing Don all the more. Maybe it’s remembering autumns past---the work we did getting all his equipment ready for the winter snow removal season. Or maybe it’s the symbolism of leaving summer behind that makes it seem like Don is slipping farther away with each new sign from Mother Nature that life goes on, things change. For every thing there is a season...and Don’s season is truly gone.

And with fall comes the beginning of the holiday season---the first Halloween, the first Thanksgiving, the first Christmas and the first New Years in forty-two years that I’ll be all alone in the world. It’s a huge Waterloo that we widows have to fight our way through and we equate it with being at the wrong end of Napoleon’s bloody cannon. Cripe! Get out the violins. Grab the hankies. I’m getting overly dramatic again. Woe is me. A pity party is about to start. Broken hearts, lonely nights, and lost loves…yadda, yadda, yadda. I’d write myself a country western song if I had any musical talent. But since I don’t I’ll try my hand at writing a sappy poem instead, try summing up in 50 words or less what it's taken me three paragraphs to say up above:

The rustling leaves of seasons past

Seems to say he won’t be near

For the coming holidays so blue.

He’s riding the winds of yesterday

Caught on the breath of Lady Fall

As she makes hearts as bleak as the

Landscape she hands over to Snow.

So now you have my poem and weekly report penned here on Widowhood Lane where I’m left searching for rhymes. (Hey, anything that takes my mind off from chocolate brownies is a good thing.) And I won’t be able to stop looking until I admit out loud that it was all a waste of time; i.e. it takes more than a lonely old heart to make one into a poet. And deep down, I know it. ©

Widowhood, Shakespeare and Homing Pigeons

Today I googled the term “the winter of our lives” thinking I might like to write a blog entry with that line as my jumping off point. But Google turned up 111,000 links to that phrase and I’m not sure the world needs another one. One of those links was to a paraphrased version of William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 97 on Wikipedia:

                   “My separation from you has seemed like winter, since you give

                   pleasure to the year. Winter has seemed to be everywhere, even

                   though in reality our separation occurred during summer and fall,

                   when the earth produces plant life like a widow giving birth after

                   the death of her husband. Yet I saw these fruits of nature as hopeless

                   orphans, since it could not be summer unless you were here; since

                   you were away, even the birds did not sing, or rather sang so

                   plaintively that they made the very leaves look pale, thinking of winter.”

After reading that, I googled away another fifteen minutes before landing on a blog entry titled Widowhood Explained. I was excited. At last someone can explain what I’ve been going through since Don passed away in January. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be a blog about racing pigeons. Widowhood racing, I learned, is a race just for the male birds---the cocks as they are properly called in the world of birding. The people who race these birds seem to spend a lot of time talking about whether or not cocks are better racers if they’ve been allowed to rear a brood or two before setting off on an odyssey to find their way back home from hundreds of miles away. And one bird trainer recommends introducing males to the hens for a two hour conjugal visit the day before a race. Candlelight and wine? I don’t think he furnished them but afterward he does gives the cocks a warm baths to help the birds relax and stay calm while being trucked to the race’s starting point.

As I thought about pigeon racing it stuck me that widows going through the grieving process have things in common with the pigeons in a widowhood race. Both homing pigeons and we widows are sent off on a task not of our own choosing. Some of us hurry through the process as if the devil himself is chasing us and some of us don’t want to leave the starting gate. Some of us get lost along the way, a few get injured. And have you ever known a group of widows who didn’t eventually get around to discussing whether or not the older widows who’ve had time to raise families with their spouses have it easier or harder than the young widows who just barely got started living with their mates?

There are other similarities as well. We are encouraged to take care of our health during our grieving period. Widowhood racing pigeons are pampered with special grains, vitamins and electrolytes. We can find mentors and widow clubs all over the country, same with people who are new to racing pigeons. But there is one thing that homing pigeons have that we widows don’t and that’s a numbered band that can help them get back to their lofts if they get lost. When we widows get lost in our travels through the grieving process wouldn’t it be nice if some kind stranger could look at a band on our body and gently help us find our way through this winter of our lives? ©

 

Sonnet 97 by William Shakespeare

How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December's bareness every where!
And yet this time removed was summer's time,
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,
Like widow'd wombs after their lords' decease:
Yet this abundant issue seem'd to me
But hope of orphans and unfather'd fruit;
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And, thou away, the very birds are mute;
Or, if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near.