A Changed Life

Aging.  Knowing that it's happening to all of us is not very consoling.  I see the effects of the years of living on myself, especially when someone takes a picture of me.  I definitely don't like it and I wonder how I arrived at middle age so quickly.

 

I know that sounds so cliché but it's true.  I see those grey hairs working their way out of my scalp and for now those bad boys get dyed.  I also see lines starting to form on my face in places where I don't want them but I don't hate them so much that I would get botox injections or go under the knife.  Too scary.

 

As my mother says, "Every year is just a little more maintenance, and then a little more and then suddenly it takes you an hour to do what it used to take you ten minutes to do."  Okay Mom.  I am working to accept it for I know it's inevitable. 

 

That said, I do try to take care of myself and work hard to stay in shape and minimize the effects of the sun and other bad health decisions on my body; particularly my skin.  My personal theory about getting older is that it's all about your physical and mental energy: walking with a purpose, thinking good thoughts and approaching each day with a certain amount of zest!

 

I'm thinking of this subject today because a friend emailed me a recent interview NPR did with British author Penelope Lively (love her last name!) about her new book, Dancing Fish and Ammonites, a book that 81-year-old Lively says is about her "view from old age," a place I don't think about much because it once seemed to be a place so far, far away.

British author Penelope Lively

In particular in the interview, Lively talks about how it felt like to adjust to the unfortunate death of her husband, Jack, at 69-years old from cancer and her keen observations on how women and men adapt differently to going on with life after the death of a spouse.

Lively also notes that she is part of a new demographic in the Western world: for the first time, there's a large segment of the population over 80 and she notes that the effects of the additional time and attention it takes to care for such a large population of older people on the rest of society are yet to be seen.

Here, for all to read, and also listen to if you wish, is the link to Lively's NPR interview and pages from her insightful book:

http://www.npr.org/2014/03/17/290855933/author-penelope-lively-shares-the-view-from-old-age

A Friend's Good Bye Letter

Last week a childhood friend of my father's died.  They had known each other since they were in grade school and met each other while playing on the black top when they were about seven or eight years old.  They both went on to attend the same high school, playing basketball, and later both went into the insurance business working for different companies.

 

 

Over the years, they stayed in touch with each other as best they could.  They both worked very hard while trying to raise large Irish Catholic families.  My father and mother had six children and my Dad's friend and his wife had eight children.  Our families didn't really mix, not because we didn't want to, but more because the ages of the children were different we didn't live close to their neighborhood and there basically was just too much stuff going on to try and coordinate anything.

 

When you have known someone for as long as my Dad and his friend knew each other it is hard to let go.  My Dad knew that his friend was not well but didn't know how sick he was until he received the news of his friend's death.  One way to keep the person connected to you is write a letter to the person now deceased.  I don't think this is morbid.  In fact, I think it's very healthy.

 

The person who died is someone who had an important place in your life.  The person is physically gone but the friendship is still there.  Sharing memories -- whether it's through writing a letter or talking to others about this person -- is a healthy way to process your feelings of grief and to establish  to yourself that the friendship or perhaps love in other cases, is still there and will always be.

 

 

Now my Dad is writing a letter to his friend's widow and their adult children about his special friendship with this man and it is bringing back a lot of great memories for him which he hopes will also be a comfort in the days and years ahead as they and my Dad work through their loss.

 

Don't ever unestimate the importance of a note written from the heart.  After my husband died, I received cards from people who worked with my husband or were friends with him and some wrote notes to me about how they knew him and their experiences with him.  I saved those cards because those notes were like little pieces of a puzzle that was my husband.  Sometimes the stories caught me by surprise and other times I only knew the story from my husband's point of view and the handwritten note reveal a different side of him to me.

Let me be honest, sometimes the stories weren't always the best but either way, the notes were part of dealing honestly and openly with our feelings of grief and trying to find comfort in reaching out and sharing.
 

Widowed Fathers Reaching Out

I know a few widowed mothers and have great respect for how they handle the role of single parent.

I don't know any widowed fathers so I have always been curious about how they juggle the demands of raising children and handling their work careers. 

 

I imagine that a family member helps them; maybe a mother, a sister or even a brother.  Or maybe the fathers had already hired someone to help them when their wives sadly became too ill or were weakened by treatments.

 

But after reading the insightful New York Times story below, I found that widowed fathers and widowed mothers essentially struggle and try to deal with the same issues: school, bed time, personal responsibilities and housekeeping.

 

 

At the end of the day, it is not possible for one person to physically and mentally juggle it all.  It takes a lot of support to parent your children and take care of your broken heart all at the same time.  And it's okay to admit that.

 

You are not SuperParent.  You need help.

 

Asking for help doesn't mean you are weak.

 

Asking for help is a sign of good mental health.  It means you recognize that your efforts are not changing your situation the way you thought it would and something different needs to be tried.

 

Asking for help is a sign of strength.

 

It doesn't feel that way when it is happening but it's true.

 

I am always in need of help.  Many times I would call my grief counselor and my voice would be shaking and my hands would be shaking and I would try my best to keep it together but it wasn't happening.  Sometimes I couldn't even put together a simple declarative sentence.  All my words would come out in a jumble.

 

It's hard to put yourself out there when you are most vulnerable and in need of kindness and support.  And as a single parent, you feel you have to be strong for your children and show them the way to go.  I'm always asking other parents what's going on with their children and then telling them something that is going on with my child to see if a particular thing is common to them. 

 

"Well how did you get them to eat that?"

 

"What time does your child go to bed?"

 

"Have they asked about blankety-blank yet?"

 

Please read this great New York Times story below focusing on widowed fathers and the wonderful way these guys handled their unexpected situations:

A Lifeline for Widowed Fathers

By JANE E. BRODY

April 22, 2013/The New York Times

Three springs ago, Joe Ciriano was living in a fog. He had just lost his wife of 21 years to breast cancer. He was now the sole parent of a son and three daughters, one with Down syndrome. The children, ages 6 through 19, all had different needs and levels of understanding.

Mr. Ciriano, 51, an accounts manager in Burlington, N.C., was riddled with doubts about his ability to carry on as a single parent and was struggling to keep his head above water. While deeply mourning his wife, he was unsure of how good a parent he could be.

“What is normal?” he wondered. What should he say to the kids about their mother? How should he treat them? Could he handle his family and do his job?

With no one to share day-to-day family responsibilities and decisions, and to help fill both his and his children’s emotional and physical needs, life felt “overwhelming,” Mr. Ciriano said in an interview.

Then something wonderful happened. He and Karl Owen, a 49-year-old software engineer from Chapel Hill whose wife had died, of lung cancer, three weeks after Mr. Ciriano’s, were asked to form a support group for fathers widowed by cancer who had children at home.

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dr. Donald Lee Rosenstein, a psychiatrist, and Justin Michael Yopp, a psychologist, weren’t sure how openly these men would talk about their feelings and struggles. But the researchers saw a pressing need to help them and their children through this trying life experience.

Too often, they’d found, widowed fathers contend with social and emotional isolation — a profound aloneness — and suffer in silence.

“I’m not a support-group kind of guy who wants to talk about touchy-feely kinds of things,” Mr. Ciriano said. But finding himself “lost at sea,” he was willing to give it a try.

The result has exceeded all expectations. The eight widowed fathers who formed the core group, led by a professional facilitator, quickly learned that their feelings, doubts and concerns were shared by all and offered one another insights and suggestions on how to cope.

“All the men were exhausted and suffering a crisis in confidence, fearful of screwing things up,” Dr. Rosenstein said. “They faced countless daily issues — school problems, struggles with discipline, bed times, expectations and a tendency to let things slide a little, which really doesn’t work well for kids.”

Mr. Owen said in an interview: “A lot of things that seemed abnormal in our lives were common to the other guys in the group. Someone would bring up a situation, and the rest of us would nod, ‘Yeah, me too.’ These issues were very difficult to discuss with friends who hadn’t been through a similar experience,” said the father of two children, who were 9 and 12 when their mother died.

 

“We were all in a place in our lives we hadn’t prepared for,” he said, “and collectively we could share experiences and help each other navigate.”

Participants in the group developed a remarkable bond, a level of friendship and sharing that is rare among men, who even now are expected to be strong and resilient, and many of whom still avoid talking about deep feelings and doubts.

Three years later, four of the men continue to meet monthly and have benefited so much from the experience that they are reaching out to help other fathers newly widowed by cancer.

Meanwhile, Dr. Rosenstein and Dr. Yopp, who said they could find no similar support groups for widowed fathers, are trying to get others started at cancer centers around the country. They would like to conduct a formal study to determine “what is most helpful and what isn’t to these men,” Dr. Yopp said in an interview.

Ideally, he said, every major cancer center would have a support group for widowed fathers, whose experiences and needs are different from those of widowed women and older men. (More information about how the group works can be found at singlefathersduetocancer.org.)

Cancer is responsible for more widowed fathers than any other cause of death, Dr. Rosenstein and Dr. Yopp noted in an article in the journal Psycho-Oncology. An estimated 100,000 children are living with widowed fathers in the United States, and the trauma of losing a mother at a young age can seriously disrupt a family’s structure and the children’s development, sometimes with lifelong consequences, they wrote.

“There is a pressing need to understand the experiences of these widowed fathers and to develop supportive interventions for them and their children,” they said.

I can attest to the value of such support. I was 16 and my brother was 12 when our mother died of cancer in 1958, leaving my father emotionally, physically and financially drained by her yearlong illness.

To stay afloat, he worked two jobs and had little time to enforce routines and discipline at home. I soon departed for college, and my brother was left to cope on his own with the devastating loss of our mother at so vulnerable an age.

“Men traditionally do not play the role of the more nurturing parent; therefore, as widowed parents, fathers may be less likely to employ child-centric or nurturing parenting styles and more likely to feel unprepared than widowed mothers,” Dr. Yopp and Dr. Rosenstein wrote.

They said various studies had found a clear “link between the mental health of the surviving parent and the adjustment of the parentally bereaved child.”

A major issue for widowed fathers, Dr. Rosenstein said, is providing parental consistency with love and understanding. Good parenting requires structure, clear expectations, well-defined limits and reasonable consequences.

“What I’ve seen happen a lot is the former family order melts away and no new order is put in place,” the psychiatrist said. “This can be tough for kids, who feel cared for when there are limits and consistent discipline.”

The trauma of a young mother’s protracted death from cancer can be exacerbated by the patient’s understandable wish to live as long as possible for her family, Dr. Rosenstein added. These women often choose aggressive therapy until the bitter end, missing the comforts of hospice care and the opportunity to express their love, wisdom and wishes for the family.

In an online survey conducted by the two researchers, nearly half of 144 widowed fathers said their wives had had no chance to say goodbye to their children.

Widows Fighting For Their Homes

Protect Your Property

 

Every woman needs to read this New York Times story (see link below).

 

Whether you are 18 or 81-years-old, single, married or widowed, every woman needs to know the financial facts about owning her own home.  Don't think that someone is going to go out of their way to explain it to you.  Find out about home ownership for yourself in order to protect yourself and the biggest investment of your life -- your home.

 

When my husband died, both of our names were on the mortgage.  I was lucky but I could easily have been one of these women in the New York Times story.  My husband had been ill and in and out of hospitals for about two and a half years before he died.  I remember a particularly poignant memory when my husband ended up in the emergency room and the doctors thought he was going to die that day.  One of the doctors asked me in a tone I will never forget if I had power of attorney.  I didn't.  I had never thought about it.

 

Really.

But I quickly got a lawyer to give it to me.

 

It was from that day forward that I saw I needed to be proactive about our property and finances.  I was working full-time and made sure from that time forward that I could pay the mortgage.  I felt very alone in that time and particularly vulnerable because I felt the financial weight as well as the responsibility for my husband and young son.

I knew I could pay the mortgage but that also was a lot of stress to handle.  Sadly, I know a few women who had to sell their houses after their husbands' deaths and it is not a pretty process.

 

It's already hard enough when you have to deal with the emotional minefield of grieving but to then find yourself in the throes of fighting to keep a roof over your head is just incomprehensible.  I remember the surreal and out-of-body feeling of planning my husband's funeral, trying to take care of our child and having no enthusiasm or energy to do any of it.  I can't imagine to then be expected to put all that turmoil aside and then focus on proving that the house I have been living in is legally mine.

 

I'm not sure why two people would buy a house and list only one person's name on the morgage but apparently this happens all the time and now we are finding out that the so-called gap in paperwork is creating a crisis for widowed women who are in their fifties and older.

 

If you have a mortgage, please make sure you are listed on it with your husband or partner.  Unfortunately, mortgage companies take a "business is business" attitude and don't let feelings of compassion or sympathy enter into their decisions about home foreclosures.

 

Here is the compelling New York Times story:

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/business/widows-pushed-into-foreclosure-by-mortgage-fine-print.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20121202&_r=0

Wedding Rings

The summer months bring many celebrations, mostly weddings and graduations, and this summer I have been to both.

Each is  a joyous event where the participants are beginning new futures either as man and wife or hopefully as a careerperson.  But today, weddings are on my mind.  Specifically, the rings and vows you exchange when you get married.

Nothing so publicly represents your marriage to others as wearing a wedding ring.  Whether it's a diamond or a simple gold band, a ring on your left hand symbolizes the emotional commitment you made to another person.  You are telling everyone that your heart and your life belong to someone else.

So what happens to your wedding rings when your spouse/partner dies?  Should you continue to wear your wedding rings?  Or do you take them off?

This is a HUGE issue for widows and widowers.  Technically, you aren't married anymore when your spouse dies but of course you still feel married.   I know lots of widows who continue to wear their wedding rings and would never think of taking them off.  And that's okay.  It's a personal decision and you have to listen to your heart and do what you think is best for you.

In my case, I wore my wedding rings for about two years after my husband's death.  I didn't plan it that way.  It just evolved.  The first year was a year of survival so I really didn't think about my rings.  During the second year, I started playing around with taking my rings off but for some reason it didn't feel right.  

One day, I remember looking down at my hand and staring at those rings and thinking, "I'm not married anymore.  My husband is no longer living.  I don't have a husband."  I slid took them off my finger because I knew it was time to say good-bye to that part of my life.  My finger looked so bare and vulnerable.    As I put them away in a special box, I thought back to our beautiful winter wedding and smiled.

I didn't discuss any of this with my son.  With all that was going on in his life at the time, I honestly never thought he would notice my hands and whether I was wearing rings or not.  But I was wrong.  One day I was turning a light on and he looked at my hand.  "Mom, where are your rings?" he asked me.  There was a slight note of worry in his voice and I think at first he thought that I might have lost them.

"I took them off," I said quietly.  "Daddy's been dead for two years.  I'm not married anymore and it doesn't feel right to be wearing my wedding rings when I don't have a husband."

"But I want you to put them back on," he said. 

"Why?," I said.  "I don't get it.  Why do you care if I have my wedding rings on or not?"

He hesitated.  "Because I think they protect you," he said.  "Please put them back on."

I hugged him and then explained to him that it was going to be okay and that this was the right thing to do.  He kept looking at me like I was making a big mistake but I said he had to trust me.  It was hard at first but now things are turning out to be okay and I've never regretted taking my rings off.

But that's my decision.  It doesn't mean it's the one for you.  You need to do what is comfortable for you.

If you're not ready to take your wedding rings off, then you could move your rings to your right hand, you could wear your rings on a chain around your neck or you could have the rings made into other pieces of jewelry for yourself or your children. 

Or you could just keep wearing your wedding rings for as long as you wish.

There is no right or wrong answer to this question.

Just as everyone finds their own way to mourn the loss of their loved one, so it is also true for wearing your wedding rings.

Meryl Streep

When Hollywood hands out its little gold statuettes tomorrow night, we'll find out how The Academy voted on the nomination of Meryl Streep and her empathetic performance in the role of Margaret Thatcher as a politician and a wife.  The story is primarily about a British woman attaining so much power in the 1980's that she became Britian's first woman prime minister.

But the movie is also a love story and a reminder that no matter how high the government position you are elected to, no matter how much money you make, no matter how much privilege surrounds you, human beings are all the same when it comes to losing a loved one.  The same pain, confusion, and shock from a loss hits a Prime Minister as hard as it hits a painter.  Grief is a great equalizer.

Even Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister of England and subject of the Oscar-nominated film, "The Iron Lady," searches for meaning in the midst of her grief.

Surprisingly, "The Iron Lady," shows us an elderly Margaret Thatcher preparing to eat breakfast with her husband, Denis.  She is talking to him about the usual things husbands and wives talk about in the morning.  The camera shows Margaret Thatcher talking about the price of milk as she starts to eat her soft boiled egg and then the camera shows Denis on the other side of the table folding his newspaper, conversing with his wife.  We think it's a routine scene about a husband and wife having breakfast but then Thatcher's assistant enters the kitchen and we see that Margaret Thatcher is sitting at the table alone and she has been talking out loud to herself.

There is a place set on the other side of the table where Denis would be sitting were he alive.  But for Margaret, Denis is still very much alive in her imagination and she "sees" him as she has every day of her married life.  That is when we bond with her as a human being, when the person of Margaret Thatcher is revealed. 

We feel the same jumble of emotions that anyone would feel were we in her position of adjusting to life without her loved one.  Her husband may be gone but she still talks to him because she feels his presence and it doesn't seem strange to her to talk to him even though he is no longer physically present.  Lots of people do this and it's perfectly normal.

"There should be no stigma...It's about life.  It's about the truth," Meryl Streep said in a television interview discussing the personal scenes where she depicts Thatcher as an 86-year-old widow.

Then there is that moment in the movie when Margaret is being urged by others to get rid of Denis' clothes and his other belongings.  We expect that Margaret Thatcher, who appears to be ice cold and steely strong in her public life, will also handle the death of her beloved husband in the same stoic manner.  But we would be so wrong.

Denis's clothes are hanging in the closet, his pillow is right next to hers and his golf clubs are leaning against the bedroom wall as though he just came through the door and placed them there.  As Margaret goes through Denis' things, she relives the memories of the highs and lows of their life together.

"The decision to let go of your husband's things after he's gone is a very hard thing," said Meryl Streep in an interview with the Daily Mail.  "These decisions you make in your personal life are as profound as any decision about the Falklands.  Everything counts.  In a big ambitious life, everything counts."

SWF Seeks Replacement Husband

I found this touching and beautifully written story, SWF Seeks Replacement Husband, on Hello Grief (http://www.hellogrief.org/), one of the many blogs I follow.  As you read it, you can feel the author gather her inner strength as she goes through the transition from widow to a single woman on the dating scene. 

By Hello Grief

 

“Online dating?” I said, trying to keep the sound of horror out of my voice. “Seems impersonal.”

“It’s kind of fun,” my colleague was saying. “You write a profile and post a picture and guys email you if they are interested.”

“Wow” I managed, trying not to sound shocked that my demure colleague engaged in such activities.

“Sounds easy enough… Has anyone emailed you?” I queried.

“I was emailing this one guy and then we went on a date,” she said. “But I haven’t heard from him since.” She was trying to sound light hearted, but I could hear her disappointment.

“That must be a problem…” I trailed off.

“You should try it,” she cheered. “You’ll have a million guys writing you.”

After months of prowling the man-site anonymously, I resolved to write a profile about myself. Artistic? Creative? Smart? Insane? Everything I wrote sounded ridiculous. Tall, attractive (?), sexy (?), 9/11 widow, mother of two, hasn’t dated in eighteen years, seeks handsome rich prince who loves kids and is not afraid of a ghostly dead husband in the closet…

My choices of photos were limited due to the fact that I was the photographer in the family. There was the coy one, with my baby daughter and my grandmother, both of whom I would have to crop delicately out of the picture. And there was the demure photo, posing smartly for a corporate newsletter in a turtleneck.
But where were all my sexy shots? I sneaked glances at the other women’s profiles, to see what I was up against. Even the 50-year old women looked sexier than I could ever imagine being. I settled on the coy-girl-next-door-with-cropped-out-baby-and-grandma-shot.

I posted my profile and photo to the website and then waited for some kind of response. Almost immediately, I got a few “winks,” one from an elderly looking gentleman claiming to be 44; one from a man showing his nude torso wearing his firemen’s boots and suspenders, and one from an orange-tanned jock with no neck.

Deciding to take matters into my own hands, I browsed the site as though I were in a giant man superstore: Nice eyes, but too pudgy; funny profile, but too short; great in every way but a smoker; tall and handsome, but doesn’t want kids; wonderfully intellectual, but weird bulbous nose; sincere, but can’t spell.

My eyes were beginning to glaze over when one man caught my eye. Widowed architect, loves to garden, lives in Manhattan… I spent two weeks working up the nerve to write him an email. What to say? Hello fellow widow person. Isn’t this a strange club to belong to? I am absolutely terrified of dating, and still love my dead husband, but would you consider going out with me?

Finally, I wrote him: Hi! (Trying to sound upbeat). Loved your profile (Flattering the ego). I like to garden too (Showing common interests). I look forward to hearing from you (positive, yet non-committal). Regards, Abby.


I waited for a response. And waited. And waited. I am still waiting. It was humiliating. I retreated from the man-site to lick my wounds. My worst fears of being “un-datable” were being realized. Now I was the one who was too tall, too widowed, too many kids, too unsexy, too something.

I had to admit that I was lonely for companionship, plus my kids begged me regularly to have a “new” daddy. I think though, that my biggest motivator towards rushing fate was my determination not to waste a moment of my life. If Arron’s death had taught me anything it was that there wasn’t time to sit around waiting for life to happen to me. I resolved to push fate along by making the effort to get myself out into the world by whatever means necessary, no matter how painful it might prove to be.

My palms were sweaty as I maneuvered the car into a space near the coffee shop where I was to meet my … dare I say it … date. I sat and breathed for a few minutes staring at my hands on the wheel, trying not to panic. Oh God! The wedding ring! I had forgotten to remove it. What to do? Stuff it in my purse? My bra? I stared down at my hands admiring the chunky gold band on my left ring finger. It seemed to cling adoringly to my hand. I slid it up my finger and the shiny white skin that was revealed seemed to cower like a snail without its shell. I hesitated. I pulled the ring all the way off and held it in my hand. I had forgotten how heavy it was. I slipped it onto my right hand ring finger, struggling to push it over my knuckle. I held my hands out to survey the effect of this transition. Both hands felt strange and backwards, like they weren’t my hands at all. They seemed sad and alone — the hands of a single woman.

I wiped a tear from my eye. “I’m sorry Fab.” I had betrayed my husband Arron’s (Fabbo to me) love with my bold, impulsive move. I had done it unceremoniously, sitting in a car. No music, no pomp, no kisses, no smiles. Just a cold, grey New Jersey December sky to accompany my small ceremony. I recalled another in-car ring ceremony.

Arron’s wedding ring had been his father’s pinky ring, which though beautiful with his father’s initials embossed into its pink gold, had proved to be problematic as a wedding ring over the years, given that he wore the ring on his left pinky finger.  I had always wanted him to have a regular ring finger wedding ring, but had deferred to his wishes when we were married, knowing the sentimentality he held for his father’s ring since his father’s death when Arron was 17.

Arron and I had sat in this same car on a warm and sunny Saturday with the kids strapped into their car seats in the back. We had waited while Arron dashed out to the jewelers and came back clutching a small blue velvet box. He opened it and held the bright, shiny ring, which we had chosen together up in the sunlight, ready to slip it onto his hand. “Shouldn’t there be a little ceremony, or something?” I had said.

“OK. Here.” He handed me the ring. It was a lovely gold band, strong and simple.

I slid it slowly onto his ring finger, smiling at him and then kissing him gently when it was in place. He held up his hand and we were both pleased with the effect. I loved Arron’s hands – strong, creative, sensitive, loving. The ring was beautiful and I felt proud being bound to him by it.

That simple little ceremony felt like an instant renewal of our love, something secret between just the two of us. I still have his father’s pinky ring, which I will someday give to our son. Arron died wearing his new wedding band.

Now, staring at my own hands, grey in the dim light of the mid-winter morning, I mourned him once more. “It’s just coffee,” I told myself.  I hoped that my first-ever blind date would not notice the glaring whiteness of my loss, wouldn’t see my hand shake as I held my teacup. I hoped my voice wouldn’t crack when I answered the inevitable question,… ”So, how did he die?”

I touched my thumb to my ring once again for reassurance as I opened the coffee shop door.

Special thanks to Abigail Carter, author of “The Alchemy of Loss: A Young Widow’s Transformation” for sharing this piece with Hello Grief.