This is to introduce excerpts from a piece I am creating called "Widow in Datingland" which I plan to edit and publish. It is a bit rough, and is in a type of blog format. Would love your comments/input. I hope it makes you, if a widow, feel more normal and accepted, and you, if not a widow, feel more understanding of what it is like for widows and appreciative of any relationship you have. It's kinda scary to put it out there.
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The single widow wakes up from a numbness, and recalls the impossible shock of first being a widow, and looks at the path from there to now.
What have I been looking for? I have been looking for love in every flavor of the universe: Searching for John Orange, Friendship Peach Cream, Affirmation of My Existence Apple, A Place to Put My Misery Maple, A Place to Find a Hand to Hold Double Fudge Nut Brownie, Horny Nuts and Cream, Union with my Husband in the Spiritual Spheres Rainbow Sherbert, Blessings on my Life Marble with Raspberries, Sit in the Sadness Strawberry, Understand Me When I Cannot Pineapple Ices, Dispel My Shock Mango Vanilla, Feed Me with Anything Fill Me French Apricot, Help Me Not Be Alone Hot Fudge over Vanilla. And I did eat, I did. I sat at my wood veneer oblong table and ate snacks, I ate pathos. I ate my feelings (this is for another time, this is for never).
I sit in the kitchen with the gray square tiles, and white wooden cabinets, looking out the window towards McDonald, where I can see the bridge with the blue lights at night, the Vincent Saint Thomas, removing food from the off white refridgerator with the broken handle. I see a bee buzzing at the window to my left, and piles of papers, some papers leaning onto a basket made of whicker in the shape of a duck which has a nail file, a calligraphy pen, and a teal beaded Indian necklace in it.
I was like a bird who had flown for all its life with a flock in patterns together, soaring at night, waking and preening and grooming and readying for the day together, our patterns determined, every day. And then my flock disappeared and I was the only one left. Nothing touched me anymore, not a wing, no more huddling in the cold. And I saw other flocks flying but was not part of them.
I was not part of anyone or any bond. And many widows and I feel this. This shock of: Who do I have in this world? And occasionally, between sitting at my table eating Understand Me When I Cannot Pineapple Ices someone would invite me to join their flock for an evening. There were other birds, and it was good to be in their company. And I would never hear from them again – which told me: You are not in our flock. You are a guest. And occasionally some birds would sing to me over the phone and listen to me while I was trying to pretend my wings were not craving preening, and I would not tell them I was eating Feed Me with Anything Fill Me French Apricot, and that my nest was getting very, very messy, that I didn’t have the energy to clean it out.
So this is who I was in various stages of evolution as I sought out dating. All need. I needed friendship but not once a year or twice a week, I needed to be held for a very long time, to have a bird on either side of me and to feel their feathers until, until I could get out of the shock and feel warm ever again. During this time I went to birdie dance class, and sometimes another bird would touch my hand, or one plump and beautiful bird held me, on the floor, and I would cry and cry and cry. Or a male bird at the dance would look at me lovingly, and hug me and I would cry.
I would cry that I am shocked and happy and surprised that someone would want to touch me. I had become less a bird and more a cry.
I could not believe that I had no real birdie friends besides my flock. There were visitors eventually and guests, and a neighbor bringing by worms the day after John’s death, and people surrounding me around the time of the funeral, but I couldn’t believe that I was so friendless so that people would not want to visit or invite me out or call, or call my daughter and invite her. It was hard to, from this place, call others. I was self-conscious that my cry would be heard while I carefully tried to sound normal, that I would not be a happy, cheerful birdie like other birdies want to be around, and that I might be flawed and ashamed to show this weak, un-happy self to other birds I admired, even several who called, and who I didn’t call back. I’d learned from my daddy bird who’d been a rabbi bird, and my mommy wife of a rabbi bird – that you smile when you go out, you don’t show let alone feel sadness, sadness was un-kosher, unattractive. (Anger was OK but only at home).
I did have some people who flew by to visit and invite me out periodically. It’s just if I needed, like a drug, 100 million ice cream cones, they were like an occasional grapefruit ice or rainbow sherbet cone flying by in an occasional drop.
Sometimes someone would ask me about my husband and I went to this place in my heart which had shelves labeled:1) to be pitied me, 2) almost feeling sadness and the loss but not wanting to share this- so personal and so awkward, with a strain of shock.
Then when these shelves had been set up, I would go back to them when people asked about my husband, or when a form was asked for with his name, or I told a friend at the end of a party that I usually called John to check in when I would be home, and just forgot that he wasn’t there to call.
It was like I’d created this space for people where I had to feel but couldn’t feel in front of them and there was a strain, and the place became familiar and it’s still with me, I go to it when my husband is mentioned, and it’s strange, a grimace in time, almost like different parts of my brain competing with each other, like the Los Angeles writers strike before it had been resolved. And I’m afraid that for 22 months I’ve been trying to make up for this shock, by trying ways people did not have to see me grimace or in pain or not doing my paperwork, by being with people were grimacing themselves and just could be sad or angry – the Internet, grief sites. The only thing was that my feathers still needed preening and my beak still needed to preen, and my little birdie feet still needed foot massage, so this was largely unfulfilling while good for a little section of the shelf of my heart.
It is interesting that I am using the analogy of feathers, while trying so hard to describe to you what aloneness tastes like, what being alone on this little planet earth in the middle of billions of universes feels like. Because John, God bless him, I believe was sending me feathers. One day I took a walk and I saw a feather floating in the air above me and I reached up my arm and it dropped into my hand. Then another day I was at Walmart and a feather floated right above me, again I reached for it, right in my hand. I’d never caught a feather before in my life.
After I walked from Walmart to my car in the cement parking structure on the stair I was about to step on, a white feather. At a meeting for a job that was stressful, I looked outside the window, and a feather was floating by in the air.
I do remember that when we were engaged I’d written John a poem about feathers, describing each of the qualities I loved in him as feathers.
Over 15 years of marriage I discovered we were not perfect together. Oh, we were not. He flew away many times when I needed some squawking time, and I was not great at
nest-cleaning, and there were flaws. Yet still, still, we rested in each others feathers at night, made decisions for our flights, made every plan with each other in mind. I feel that because we were not perfectly in love, perfectly doing the marriage dance, I don’t deserve to be grieving! This sounds sick. Like an extreme case of obsessive compulsive disorder – my relationship must have been perfect for me to grieve.
I keep wanting it to be dance class today but it is tomorrow. Dancing has been a way to release and feel some of these feelings and get t o u c h . Do you KNOW how precious touch is? My neighbor Esta lost her daughter who is about my age two weeks ago. Esta told me yesterday, standing there in her yard behind the chain link fence, looking like the caricature cartoon of the woman who has one nerve left, that she phoned a friend whose son had just died. All Esta wanted to do was go hold her, but she didn’t know her that well. Esta knows what is needed at such a shock. She knows it in her moans and groans and bones. And, coincidently, Esta takes in birds of all kinds, has maybe a hundred at her house.
Many tears shed, many ice cream cones later, I really do want to be close to other birdies, but I found that meeting with widow friends was pretty darn satisfying. I’d met them on a grief board and we ate at a trattoria in Marina Del Rey last week. It was a few hundred yards from the beach and surrounded by shops and Sunday busy-ness. We laughed and laughed, over pastas with Italian sounding names and chicken with overfried but comforting potatoes and vegetables cut in a fancy way and sauteed, at our rectangular table, finding that humor in the tragedy, all beautiful birds, gorgeous, pink cheeked, with their kids in tow. Like the African American slaves through times of slavery, rape, and torture, like the Jews through pogroms and pillages, we joked. One of the widows, Elizabeth, when the handsome waiter was about to take our photo and we were posing, said to us: Say Widow (instead of Say cheese). It was that type of laughter.
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Here’s a little sample from my culture’s humor, a little intermission:
Gottlieb called his Rabbi and said, "Rabbi, I know tonight is Kol Nidre*, but tonight the Yankees start the playoffs. Rabbi, I'm a life-long Yankee fan.
I've GOT to watch the Yankee game on TV."
The Rabbi responds, "Gottlieb, that's what VCR's are for."
Gottlieb is surprised. "You mean I can tape Kol Nidre?"
* Kol Nidre is an important service for reckoning and asking forgiveness of sins that is part of the important High Holiday Yom Kippur. Don’t read this, I’m hiding it in here: for two years I’m afraid I’ve been taping Kol Nidre and watching the Yankee game.
And I think I’ve cried out many tears and no longer miss my husband John in the way that the very fabric of our existence is torn, and it is always obvious that he is missing. And I think, I’ll tell you the secret – that he is with me.
That he is with me! I think that when I pray deeply he is with me. Because we went to the – ugh – hate to remember this mortuary (must come from the word morbid), the place we looked in a maroon carpeted room at coffins and picked out a lovely shiny beautiful reddish, mahogany was it? - coffin from this – room of coffins, my couple friends and sister and I. Then, after paying top dollar by the way, but at a discount cause someone knew someone, per my Jewish tradition, we were shown to a side room where his body was on a metal table. I wrapped his body in soft light yellow chenille that my then 11 year old daughter had picked out, and then in this white Chinese silk that my friends, who loved him too, picked out. And I anointed him with rose water. And we were futzing with his long body on this table that was shorter than him, and he almost fell off, well close. And I was talking to him as I was trying to wrap him, lovingly, joking with him. My friends Tim and Jackie were standing to the side, but Tim helped me when John’s body was rocking off of the front of the table. Anyway, I left the room and felt this feeling, this stimulation in my heart, like a little motor humming in there. Where did this come from? I wasn’t feeling particularly spiritual to be having some feeling there. So I went back into the little room where John was as if wondering if it came from him.
And that was when, standing by his wrapped body, I felt him tell me something. He was showing me as if pointing to over my head to turn to God, that this was the path he was on now, and I could commune with him there.*
(*I’ve read that loved ones give one parting sign, one reassurance from the vastness to loved ones)
And the irony is that two things really work well during grieving: prayer (when you’re not pissed as hell at God), and therapy. And I could have used more of both of these during these two years. [I don’t want to tell you that there is a little piece of therapy I’ve been waiting on, and that is to talk about the discomforts, to put it mildly, of the things that did not work well in my relationship with John. This is smelly as old salmon right now. * Since writing this I did bring this up in therapy and it was good]. At times I said a prayer for “the departed” and could feel him then, so I kept saying prayers for him and for all kinds of other departed aunts, uncles, grandparents to get this scent from the garden, it was like my hit of heroine.
John was tall and mustached, and a little bit humped over from having had Hodgkins Disease and treatment before we met – I never talked to him about it. It’s really hard to imagine him in Heaven, and having wings – sorry John. (I think he’d laugh at this). It is hard to think of him as non-physical, with those smiling eyes, and those impish puns. It is very hard.
“When the soul attaineth the Presence of God, it will assume the form that best befitteth its immmortalty and is worthy of its celestial habitation.” - from writings of the Baha’i Faith. And these are from those writings too:
“Sorrow not if, in these days and on this earthly plane, things contrary to your wishes have been ordained and manifested by God, for days of blissful joy, of heavenly delight, are assuredly in store for you. World, holy and spiritually glorious, will be unveiled to your eyes. You are destined by Him, in this world and hereafter, to partake of their benefits, to share in their joys, and to obtain a portion of their sustaining grace. To each and every one of them you will no doubt attain.” I feel a little left out.
He’s “moved one.” (I meant to say moved on, but moved one fits too, he is in a world of more oneness). But somehow, I feel him with me now as I’m writing, smiling and kissing me in Spirit. I feel he is with me and on my team, cheering for us, cheering. He wanted, wants the writer’s strike within me to be over, too, I imagine. I feel he is with me in that place above my head, some spiritual place where I am with him too, perhaps, out of time, not in this dimension, but here, nonetheless. I am willing to have a non-physical birdie be in my life. A blessed birdie. Feeding me spiritual worms. Surrounding me with loving presence. And this has been there all along. And I am filled (though not with ice-cream) after all. I feel you, your grin, your happiness.
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The single, mom, self, and widow digs deeper into what she has been looking for through the Internet. What she has been disappointed in not finding.
I have been looking for love, looking for him, or a substitute for him. I have been looking for him but couldn’t find him. I have tried everywhere – in every Internet message, looking for that banana cream ice-cream of his humor, and his heart, that flavor, that natural flavor that was stashed in the fridge and we could have any time. I have been looking for someone, anyone to see me, to know me, to be natural with me, to care, to help, to be all he was.
My small right hand is on the mouse. The mouse has a royal blue light shining through silver hourglass shape. I have a purple amethyst ring on my right hand that I bought as a present from John after he died. I am typing at this computer beige-grey keyboard which is arranged at a diagonal to the right. There is a black notebook, and open book, a calligraphy pen to my left, and a blue notebook for plans for Carmel’s schooling. I am wearing the plaid shirt with red and orange yellow, and spring green and teal aquamarine blues, the turquoise flowered shirt under it, and the navy floral corduroy pants that I fell asleep in, so tired after writing last night. Now I am filling in what I feel I left out yesterday when I wrote.
I have been looking for myself. I have been looking for how I recover and survive and patch up the boat and continue. I have been looking out but not in. Except when I take time to check in, to put my hand on my chest and feel what I am feeling, sigh, relief, I am here. And I feel that everything around me is caving in onto me. And I need every bit of spiritual help to handle all of life’s responsibilities and trust in myself. Trust. I inhale deeply. I am not used to having so much on me and I am always in fear of falling off the mountain – I’m too close to an edge I am unfamiliar with. I fear exploding into little bits – exploding would be a thousand papers I hadn’t finished paying and stamping and writing, my house insurance or taxes, library fines shooting up in the air, credit bureau scores bursting, my health dribbling out in lava, my child bursting into a bad crowd in a scene from West Side Story, the kitchen scatterred with broken dishes and piles in the sink, sprays of drinks all over the walls, my sanity, my very sanity exploding into a million little ions, into space, with no one home to run the show. It doesn’t sound so bad, though.
I have caved under the pressures, the overwhelment. I have caved by ignoring the quakes I keep feeling over the months, more and more pressingly, of papers to be attended to.
I wrote this to widows on a grief board a week ago:
I am 21 months out. If I were to be a new widow again I would consider that it was going to be at least a 2 year stretch of grieving during which I might as well do some ongoing good things for myself like
1) buy teas and healthy foods and avoid overeating, lose weight gradually if one needed to, in two years that could be a significant weight loss
2) journal about the funeral with a trusted soul - unlock the feelings from that shocking time (in a grief class we wrote about the days right before during and after our spouses’ deaths. That really released lots of feelings).
3) write down the areas in which I want to improve and begin weekly doing actions to support my growth. I see this as a very receptive period for seeing oneself.
4) hire someone to set up a filing system if I didn't have one, and pay someone or get someone to assist me with paperwork
5) arrange a work schedule whereby I could supplement and not dip into life insurance or other saved money
6) Keep all phone numbers in my planner, including a section for other widows I've met and may want to stay in contact with
7) arrange a monthly social get together for new widow friends
8) go to a counselor, preferably one knowledgeable about grief and trust her with some of the sorting process re: regrets, guilt and such
9) not re-cycle guilts ad infinitum because it doesn't seem to lead anywhere, and later down the line the things don't seem to matter so much, unless you really plan to make some changes based on your discoveries (as noted in #3)
10) not volunteer to help others in anything extensive for a while (year or two) unless they are family or close like family
11) ask people to call me for a brief call or prayer on say Mondays, or Tuesdays, or once a month, for example, the first Monday of the month, so there'd be calls every day of the month, because reaching out can be hard when grieving. And I'd call some of my favorite people, and ones who had called me. (I didn’t always return calls because I felt I was in an unappealing frame of mind at times).
12) I might hire someone to answer some of my phone calls and pay them (maybe a teenager) so the calls would be returned with some message of appreciation that would let person know I care even though I may not be up to returning phone calls.
13) I'd keep all my mail in one place, and maybe all the junk looking stuff that I didn't throw away in one basket and all TO DO looking mail in another.
14) I'd hire/ask someone to handle some of the difficult business transactions I was not up to do - I might even hire a secretary to handle my mail, maybe a teenager who is responsible or someone older
I would do many things I did do like go into nature to grieve, go to grief support group and grief class, let tears be keys for "getting out of the prison" of grief.(prison analogy given by grief class teacher).
15) I'd be on Internet grief groups about 75% less, and arrange in person support/social getting together about 75% more.
16) I'd get more massages.
After writing this I realized I can still do the things on this list I have not done yet now, and am doing some of them already. Now off to doing things for my daughter’s schooling. I hope that people who are divorced, and others might benefit from what I wrote, not just widows, because death just makes you see things from a different perspective, one with less filters, and one where you value your time left here on earth to spend on whatever you choose. I told my daughter yesterday that it’s as if we are all handed a deck of cards with lots of high cards, royalty, and low cards and everything in between. (Sometimes those aces can be low and used for a high too). And we get to choose which cards to keep and which to discard. I guess in a sense we can look at dating as a deck of cards to, and we get to decide which pair we want to put down…
Some widows, I was surprised and disappointed, wrote back that this list was overwhelming. Grieving, the grief counselor had told us, takes lots of energy. Even though I have totally spaced out my life and all the papers in it, I totally love and accept myself. I do! Even though I’ve put my life on hold for almost two years, I totally accept and love you, Claudia, yes I do. Even though it’s taken much more time than I thought it would and I’ve spent way more money that I might have, I totally accept and love you. Even though your house and life are in a messy disordered phase I totally love and support you. I’m on your side. I’m on the side of my life. And as my posting name says, I am alive again after the dreadful cancer days, even through this mess, I see a way through.
I feel a gumption to continue to survive. I sense talent in me to express through writing and giving classes. I yearn for God still and for my life, and for my daughter’s company and to keep doing right by her. I yearn for solace and kindness, and truly, the kind things I have said to myself over these years have led to a sweet relationship with myself. I found myself saying the other morning, “Good morning, babe,” to myself. I can accept myself with all this baggage and cave-in, with all the ignoring the practical world. Well, that’s a lot. I close my eyes to take this in.
This is a hard one to take in. I sit for a minute, my plaid shit clashing with my turquoise floral shirt. My striped turquoise yellow black and white socks clashing with my floral navy corduroy pants.
I accept you because you must have been suffering to not be able to do more. And it has been a rough road. Daughter had depressions, school didn’t work out for her…
Applying for high schools at the same time as working with school district to find a school and home schooling. Quote about wounds. For some time the resistance to taking on husband’s responsibilities too, not sure how many pounds of responsibility weight I could lift.
Gradually am lifting more.
It is very sad to do it alone. I am sad to be missing half of my team, a very important half. I am sorry if I wasted resources while being human and enduring this shock after the shock of cancer. I totally love and accept you even though you threw away two years of money and time . No I don’t I feel bad. If I could have done better I would have. I so longed to not keep working in social work and finish my books and I think I’ve continued on that line.
I notice a journal entry from the beginning:
What can I do on this earth, without you, honey. Where is the one who calls me honey. Who am I with no one calling me honey. Can I live and make my way in a world where I am not honey to any. Dad left. John left. Is it time for me to grab the masculine by the feet and make it mine. Grab the gentleness. Grab the consistency he went to work with daily. Grab the responsibility he paid the bills with. Grab his soul and snuggle it invisibly. Grab my new opportunities that I couldn’t have had if he still worked in Orange County, and was sick.
I keep trying to write about how I didn’t want to think of death. I sometimes carried the book Facing the Final Mystery, but rarely opened it. But, but, life would have been simpler somehow, from this perspective, not fighting it so much. We could have had more freedom in the burial details. I COULD HAVE, OR COULD I HAVE KNOWN, THAT MOST OF THE SAME THINGS I NEEDED IN THE SHOCK OF HIS INITIAL DIAGNOSIS, I WOULD NEED AFTER HIS DEATH:
A CANOPY OF SUPPORT, THE COURGE TO REACH OUT AND CALL PEOPLE, LETTING GO OF EXPECTATIONS THAT THEY KNOW WHAT I NEEDED, TO BE HUGGED, TO GO TO SOMEONE’S TABLE FOR DINNER OR LUNCH, and TO HAVE WAYS TO KEEP TRACK OF MY KEYS AND PAPERS AND PHONE NUMBERS, EASILY, BECAUSE THEY ALL FLOATED AWAY IN THE CEREAL OF THIS WINDY BLOWY, SOGGY, EVER CHANGING TERRAIN, EVEN SPARKLY, EVEN LOVING, AT MOMENTS.
How can I say anything else. It’s all here. I sit with him flowing through me, permeating my atmosphere, knowing I need to make life more me, less him, feeling and remembering him less, it seems, when on vacation, having new adventures in carving into life. I know he would want me to be happy, successful, delighted. And I will be.
I don’t want to say more now, just that I am open to embracing myself for this human journey over the last almost two years, for whatever the shock and thawing entailed, for whatever the post traumatic stress was of all those wavy lines on the machine of our four and a half year of keeping you alive, and now I go on from here, from this moment.
Tomorrow I have someone in, another step in organizing these wicker picnic and regular tree basket, and these probably only 21 boxes, the closet in my room to be an office, my papers. Where to start? I can do the papers with a friend, I mean pay out the bills. I want a space for books. A space for projects that is easy to see. A place for monetary matters that is clearly marked. A place for files that make them usable, and easy to access. A space for clothes where I can see and get to them. A big dumpster to throw away at least 15 boxes of stuff I haven’t missed. Shelves for my art projects, with supplies easy to access.
I love how you order me (I say to myself). You do? I do. I haven’t gone under. I am still kicking those legs, doing that breast stroke, looking for water lilies but hiring an organizer. I love that you haven’t let me down, that you have tenacity to live through the cancer the grieving and the after the most intense grieving. You are a star. You have my award, my certificate: You are my hero. You have survived. You have handled a teenager and an open adoption when it got messy, and have gotten dtr to an audition and are working on getting others. You have taken her to art classes and listened to her as undjudmentally as possible. You have bought some beautiful turquoise/teal clothes to make me wear what I love. You are truing, bring in building materials here and there to build what needs building, to hear what needs hearing, to write what needs writing, to hope upon hope your experience will help others. And you have been generous in giving of your honesty.
You are a brilliant star, shining honesty and realness for others to see. Within you is wanting to shine, shining and helpfulness, service, affirmation, devotion, completion of projects. You my darling can do it! You Can, my love. We can.
This is who I am God. I have done what I can. And I need help for doing the rest.
I trust, that though my husband did not “come back” through all my efforts (that’s supposed to be a joke), that the love I received when I did reach out, and I did, sustained me and was part of this mosaic that I trust has gradually been filling in this life that is more honest, more vulnerable, more giving, more understanding of myself and of others. I look forward to what this ongoing mosaic will look like.
copyright Claudia Gold=Fanning, 2008
Note: As you see, some of this writing, which is the most recent, did not end up being about dating... After writing these two pieces I stopped craving men and stopped seeing each one who appeared - plumber or whoever, as a possible replacement. That just disappeared, but...it re-appeared recently. I received an
e-mail from a contact about a camp for kids who have had a loss, and the writer sounded so nice that in reply to his asking me to write him any questions, I wanted to write: Are you single? Maybe I need to journal more...
