Moving Day

I received a couple of texts over the weekend from a friend who lives in another city about how he now lives in a new place.

 

I didn't know he had moved from his home of almost 20 years so I was surprised by his news but I also knew that there was more to the story than just a regular heave-ho move from one place to another.

 

 

My friend lost his wife to cancer a number of years ago and she was a wonderful and talented person, but she also was the kind of person who kept everything.  She was not a hoarder but instead was a person who wanted to keep things so that she could pass these things along to other people because she knew that they would be perfect for someone else.  She kept all these things until she saw the person she had in mind or until she eventually got around to sending the item to the person.

 

This is why I knew that when my friend said he had just moved to a new apartment that it must have meant that he had come face to face with the dreaded day he had tried to put off for so long:  what to do with her possessions.

 

There are times when we all need to try and work through stuff by ourselves and then after a while of giving it our best shot, there comes a time when we need to talk to friends about what is going on.

 

And when what is going on is bad, I think the best thing to do is shut up and listen to the person who is going through a painful time. And listen. And listen some more until the person says they can't talk anymore and they have to get off the phone.

 

Which is what I did.

 

And I was happy to listen to him talk about the all of the tons of stuff he found and what he did with it.  I would go into more detail but this part is not my story to tell.

 

My part of the story is about the idea that even though you may not be in a crisis mode, it is always nice to have someone to reach out to.

 

To connect with someone else on a human level.  To be able to say this is what is happening to me and it sucks, big time!

 

To feel that another human being understands you and gets what you are going through.

 

To know that you are not alone.

 

And you never are either, my friends!!! Ever!!!!!

 

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

It's Not What You Think

  

 

 

 

To show you how little I knew about loss, I thought that the first year after my husband's death was going to be the hardest time that I would ever have to experience.  My thinking was something along the lines of  "If I can get the first year under my belt, then each year after that will become easier to handle."  Right?

Guess what? Not. Always. True.

Grief is always full of surprises and just when you think you have it under control, you don't.

The first year was so raw with emotion for me and such a blur of just getting through the 365 days of it, that the whole idea of my husband's death, the finality of it, didn't really and truly sink in at all. I thought about it, cried about it, read about it and even went to a support group for it but it still was a concept that danced all over the place and didn't settle in.

But the second year was different.  For me, the second year was harder than the first because it painfully confirmed for me over and over again that he wasn't coming back.  Ever.  That this was it and it's not like he's gone on a very long trip.  And then the second year also forced me to stop playing all those mind games with myself and face up to my new life. 

But what happened to me may not happen to you.

I know it sounds like a cliche, but it's still so true: everyone has their own grief journey to travel and no two journeys are the same.  There is no right way or wrong way to grieve.  There is only your way.

I'm not making this up.  It's really true.  Your reactions and experience with grief may be very different from mine and it's totally okay and normal.  It's normal because our relationships are different, our experiences are different, our emotional DNA is different, our religious beliefs are different and our expectations from life and the person we lost are different.

Unfortunately, no one prepares us for those differences. We may watch someone we know experience grief and we think that person's experience will be ours too.  But that isn't always the case.  I lost a husband.  Someone else may have tragically experienced the death of a child or a wife or a friend or a parent.

As much as we may want one and search for one, life does not provide us with a guide book on how we should grieve.  We all process pain and loss differently. 

We grieve because we love.  It is because we love that we grieve.  We care and we emotionally connect to other people and when that person is taken away, it is a shock that can take a long time to process.  On the surface, you are handling things, you take care of daily responsibilities and you go through life automatically.

 

But underneath, you may be a mess.

By the third and fourth year of grief, you think it's going to be so much better and sometimes it is.  I have two friends, they live in completely different cities, they don't know each other, they are different ages and both have lost spouses.  The woman has children and grandchildren and lost her husband suddenly in a tragic car accident.  The man has no children and nursed his wife through a lengthy illness until she died.

 

Both have told me they are surprised by the fact that they continue to grieve during their fourth year of loss.  They are active, positive people trying to change and rebuild their lives because both of them socialize, take classes and work.  They meet a lot of people but nothing has ever clicked.

So they forge forward, as I and others do, together, trusting that time will heal us as we journey to renewal and new opportunities.

It's what we know and we keep doing it until it gets better.