From Wife to Widow: Reactions to a Husband's Death

Cape Cod Times

 Feature article published May 2, 2003, in the Cape Cod Times. Reprinted September, 2017, with new epilogue in PrimeTime magazine, a publication of the Cape Cod Times.

Widely reported in the media is the statistic that half of all marriages end in divorce. For the 50% of couples whose marriages do not end in divorce, it is most likely to end with the death of one spouse before the other.

This obvious and logical fact is much ignored. Although it shouldn't have been a complete surprise when my husband died on Christmas Eve, 2002, it was and I was totally unprepared for the reality of the experience.

Trauma – an experience that produces psychological injury or pain. How little that does to describe the avalanche one death can produce. It is a blue blur. I am hoarse. I cannot bear making another person cry when I call on the phone.

I have a small, old brass plaque that may have come from a horse's stall that says, "quick transition." No matter how lingering the illness, the moment between a spouse's life and death makes for a quick transition. The survivor is plunged instantly into another world whose depth is unknown and many of whose precipices remain unseen. With the exhalation of his final breath, I have gone from wife to widow. I   am cut loose from my mooring. I have made a quick transition into limbo. Like learning to walk again after a limb is cut off, can I learn to live again after a life is cut off?

Numbers and dates have become very important. A way of trying to gain control of an uncontrollable situation? Surgery on November 26, surgery on December 11, 17 days in the hospital, six transfusions, 11 days in rehab, death four weeks to the day after surgery, 150 people at the wake, standing room only at the funeral, an incredibly long procession -- how many cars? I need to know. A house full of people, 15 Grahams, more than 100 cards, five months since his hospitalization, four months since his death, five months of living without him for the first time in 39 years. I hate how time has so quickly pushed him out of the present and into history. Seven hours after his death it became yesterday that he died; seven days later it became last month and even last year.

I need to make this real. I cannot understand this yet. I held his unconscious hand for two days. I came back and held his dead hand. I know I should understand and know this has happened but I still don't. The shock and numbness which have protected me and made it possible for me to handle a vast number of details and arrangements have also kept me from the grief and sorrow that lie in wait. I have cried and mourned more for friends who have died. I seem to not be able to let myself go. My body is filled with tears unshed. I feel the waters rising but the dam has not yet broken.

I think there are two kinds of tears. There are intellectual tears -- The thinking widow's tears – brought on by an idea, a thought, a memory, something that triggers them. Then there are the emotional tears that swell up by themselves from deep places. These are the harder tears. These are the tears I wake up with, vulnerable, before the protective veneer settles around me again.

I need a whistling tea kettle. My concentration is gone. I roam the house, stopping to do something and wandering off again, the task half-completed, a Saltine half-eaten sits on my desk. I hang up the phone and don't remember who I was talking to.

I have been thinking I needed to make an appointment to talk to the doctor to understand what happened. Then I came across notes I scribbled while talking to him (the doctor near tears) Christmas Eve morning: might not make it through this admission, respiratory rate, chemistries abnormal, liver totally decompensating, holding fluid, ammonia high, body unstable, multiple systems failing, doing so poorly. No ventilator. Won't regain consciousness, critical, might go in the next day or two, heart, lung, liver. I am amazed that I was so totally able to suppress the details of our talk.

I need people around. A lover of solitude, I crave companionship. I cannot initiate plans, but accept most invitations. I can go to restaurants, movies, walks. I cannot accept invitations to people's homes. I think it's because the former things I sometimes did without him, but not the latter.

I cannot bear to throw anything out. It feels too disloyal. I can't change the phone message, I hated taking down the Christmas tree because he never saw it, couldn't open Christmas presents for two weeks, can't touch clothes. I gave away his car to friends who started as friends of his. It felt like the right thing to do, but I was overwhelmed when I came home and saw the gaping hole, as wide as the gaping hole in my life, left in the driveway by its absence.

I need to tell, endlessly, the stories of Ray, his illness, funeral, anything. We already have plans to memorialize him through a book for family and friends called Ray Stories. We are planning a photo show as well. It's important not to forget or let others forget.

In the video, "Strong at the broken places," someone says, "you're not the person you were and don't know the person you're going to be." Everything feels so different, I am a different woman, a different parent. My relationship with my children feels different. I have been catapulted to the pinnacle of parenthood, a lonely outpost. They are solicitous. They worry about me. I worry about them.

For all that the reason we were gathered was so sad, the day of the funeral was also a day of incredible warmth. I felt totally bathed in love. One person said they could see that I was being held aloft by many, many fingertips; another said they saw me held up by angels' wings. I felt exactly that way. There were remarkable moments of timing, "coincidence," connection, beautiful experiences.

I have entered the gates of a community whose members are all around, but I never truly saw them until I joined them, an Involuntary club membership. Talking to widowed friends is the best. They understand. They don't feel uncomfortable. They don't speak in platitudes. The cemetery representative tells me "he is in a far better place." Does that mean the cemetery instead of my house? Probably not. I will join a grief group. Might this experience teach me to be a better therapist? I think so.

There are landmines everywhere – the supermarket where I no longer buy the things that only Ray enjoyed. How do you shop for one? First I shopped for two, then three, then four, then three, then two, now one. What will my refrigerator hold? Will it be a memorial to mustard, a shrine to hot sauce? What kind of single entity will I become? Will I cook, what will I cook, will my table ever be ringed with smiling friends again?

This is a time of firsts. We quickly dispatched the first Christmas Eve, the first Christmas Day, the first New Year's Eve, the first New Year's Day. Then came the first time checking the "single" box on a form and the first dream in which he was dead.

In class, our group therapy teacher kept asking us, "where do you feel it in your body?" I feel it always in my neck and shoulders, sometimes having to stand in a hot shower just for relief. I feel it in my brow, which has developed a deep crevice I can feel with my fingertips. I feel it in my teeth, which ache. I feel it in the loneliness of being dreadfully ill with flu a week after he died. I feel it in my cold feet in bed that have no warmth to seek.

The cat is stressed. Minnie is losing clumps of hair and having digestive problems. She climbs onto my chest when I sit at the computer or on the couch. She cannot get close enough to me.

I know this experience is a process and that I will change day by day in ways I don't even know of now. I don't know what I will think of the world or my place in it. I hope I will regain my footing.

Epilogue

September, 2017

Fourteen years ago, when I wrote From Wife to Widow a few weeks after my husband’s unexpected death, I didn’t know if I could, or would, succeed in making a new life for myself. I didn’t know what I would do with my grief. Hold onto it? Nurture it? Deny it? Or do what I think I have done – let it take its course and become part of the story, not the whole script.

During these years I have started new traditions, made new friends, written two plays, earned certificates, traveled again to London, met new challenges, and passed the last age my husband reached.

I think about the things he’s missed – special gatherings, family and friends’ events, world situations – and I’ve missed hearing what he might have thought and said about them. I miss him always on my birthday, a day I knew each year that we would celebrate together.   Now, I plan my own celebration, and invite whomever I think might wish to join me. I am pleased when old friends remember him or describe him in glowing terms. I regret that new friends never knew him.

We never produced the planned book of Ray stories. He was a great raconteur; without the teller, the tales fall flat. We did put on several shows of his photographs, and his work was the foundation of Family Perspectives, a show of Graham art.

I have widowed friends who have persevered through online dating experiences, kissing many frogs before finding their princes. Although I would not say no to being in a new and loving relationship, it hasn’t happened, and I have chosen not to go down that internet road.

Old habits sometimes resurface unexpectedly. Making out a birthday card recently I almost wrote, as I had so often in the past, “love, Ray and Joan.”

I used to go to the cemetery pretty often, but not so much anymore. That’s not where he is. He lives always in my heart and in my memories.