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Gray Matter
Widows: Strong at the ‘Broken Places’
Please, remove the American widow from the Endangered Species list.
Yet, even as we make this correction, let’s acknowledge how these women-of-merit suffer. To begin, they absolutely hate coming home to an empty house, and then lying down in a bed grown cold.
Further, they struggle, they weep, and some fall low. However they get up again! They live to survive and, over time, most become renewed.
I write this as a rehabilitated widower, someone who has confronted that imponderable: “Why do widows fare so much better—far better—than widowers?”
My answer: because women-without-men represent an effective alliance, a coalition that gets a hard job done. Consider, there are an estimated 10 million widows in the United States, and all speak the same language. Label it: “Widowspeak.”
The conglomerate of those who are fluent in “widowspeak” is linked via electronic mail, by telephone and, importantly, through melancholy histories shared at support group meetings, book clubs, and even in the aisles of supermarkets.
An unwritten code demands each survivor: “Reach out for support!” Never, ever attempt to go it alone. Group strength is the core of this challenge.
Now, as I scribble on, messages from recovering widows guide my hand. These poignant communiqués represent the sisterhood at work, one widow teaching another to live one hour at a time, then one day at a time.
"It’s crucial to know you’re not alone,” author Philomene Gates writes in “Suddenly Alone” (Harper & Row; 1990). “Thousands of women before you have plunged into that seemingly bottomless pit of grief and despair; and have climbed out again, often to more fulfilling lives than they ever imagined possible.”
As a rehabilitated widower, happily remarried today, I nonetheless remember how I recoiled as one more well-intentioned soul offered me a platitude. “Life is for the living,” was my least favorite. What heartless, inane palaver, I thought!
Many years later I comprehend the wisdom behind the cliché. Oftentimes, I have counseled: “To all who struggle with loss, there is one, over-arching mandate: be patient with your healing; remain hopeful; be steadfast. Learn to seize, and relish, the good moments.
“Understand that life holds inexorably to a pace its own,” I insist: “None of us must ever slip into the role of non-participant, withdrawing into an isolation of our choosing.”
The late Helen Hayes, called the First Lady of Theater, was a widow at the end of her life. “When it comes to feeling lonely,” she wrote, “we all have two things in common: we don’t know how to talk about it, and we usually are a little bit ashamed.”
I hold to a slightly different opinion. Women DO know how to acknowledge vulnerability and sorrow. Jackson Rainier, a grief counselor in North Carolina, recognizes “Women have a much broader affective vocabulary…they have more words to describe their experience” as widows.
Men, on the other hand, resist putting feelings into words. A friend once told me, “God invented bartenders, so men would have someone to talk to.” Rainer adds, “Many men, particularly those of an older generation, are used to confiding, exclusively, in a spouse…(and) after losing an only confidante they are at a loss about how to manage the most difficult transition they’re likely to face.”
When women alone dialogue in widowspeak they remind one another of these truths: first, the only way to avoid hurt is never to have loved. Next, the finest tribute you can offer that partner-now-absent is through the meaningful life you lead from here on. In fact, you only bring honor to his memory as you pick up, and move ahead.
In a poem titled “Turn Again to Life,” Mary Lee Hall teaches, “If I should die and leave you here awhile/Be not like others, soon undone, who keep/Long vigil by the silent dust and weep. /For my sake turn again to life and smile.”
Sisters and brothers, this is sound counsel, delivered in poetic widowspeak.
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Outrageous Associations
