TheBanyanTree: Widow Hell

[Margaret R. Kramer]

I bought Joyce Carol Oates’ new book, A Widow’s Story, a month or so ago.
Her husband, coincidently named Raymond, died about a week before my husband
died.  They had been married 46 years.  He went into the hospital because of
pneumonia and died from a hospital infection.

My Ray’s death was similar, colitis morphing into infections and finally,
according to his death certificate, pneumonia, the old man’s friend, as his
doctor told me.

I read through a few sentences before putting it down.  I’m not sure if I’m
ready to go back to those early minutes, hours, and days of early widowhood.
I hate remembering myself that way, so sad, so uncomfortable, so clingy, so
GRIEF stricken.

But all widows go through that, I think, and from what little I read of
Oates’ book, she did, too.

But, see, she’s out of widow hell now, because she remarried in 2009.  From
my own experiences, having another relationship takes the sting out of
widowhood.  It’s like a security blanket warding off the empty eternally
lonely feelings at dinner time, and also just before you go to bed, and
suddenly you realize you have no one to say good night to.

A relationship or marriage after widowhood doesn’t erase that loving
husband’s lack of presence.  It just makes the bereavement easier to bear.

When I’ve lost a dog or a cat, I’ve always replaced it almost immediately.
Well, you can’t do that with a husband.  I haven’t seen a Humane Society for
people yet.  Oates was lucky, she found another professional person to
marry.

But for me, it’s more of a challenge.  As time goes on, I’m getting used to
living by myself.  And then I don’t even know if I want to get married again
or have a close relationship.  Joe and I are kind of close, but not super
close.  He’s OK for what we have, but for a live-in or marriage, no.

So I go on in widow hell wishing for the moon, but not sure if I want it.   

I’ve often thought of putting something together about Ray and I, our lives,
and his death, perhaps similar to Oates’ effort.  I’m glad that I’ve kept
journals and writings; otherwise it’s so easy to forget things.  I still
have hundreds of the emails Ray and I exchanged over the years.

Someday I’ll finally gather that stuff together and try to make sense out of
it.  

I admire Oates for writing about her husband’s death right away.  It’s such
a difficult time to think about, but writing can be therapeutic and help
widows reconcile themselves to the death.

My life of reconciliation goes on.  

Baseball season started this week, and I pulled Ray’s Twins hat out of the
closet and placed on the shelf above my desk.  He loved baseball.  I didn’t
realize how much until he had been living with me for a couple of years.

He always listened to the games on the radio while he was working out in the
garage.  Early on in our relationship, we went up north and the resort had
cable TV and he watched the games with so much joy, that I made sure we got
cable in our house so he could catch most of the Twins’ games from that
point on. 

There were many Saturday nights that we’d look at each other and say, “Let’s
go to the game.”  And off we went.  One time he got great tickets from work,
right down the first base line, and that sure was a lot of fun.

He wanted us to get married at a Twins game.  One year, the Twins had
couples get married before the game.  Ray tried hard to get his ex-wife to
sign a divorce decree so we could get married at the game, but she didn’t do
it, so that didn’t work out, but that’s OK.  We got married soon afterwards.

We did go to that game and it was fun to see about 60 couples use the Twins
game as an opportunity for a wedding.   

He would have loved the new outdoor stadium.

Ray wasn’t a baseball snob.  He didn’t bore everyone with baseball stats.
He just wanted to see a good game.

I listened on the radio as the Twins won their first game of the season this
afternoon.

I put together vegetable soup in the crock pot and bread ingredients in the
bread machine.  That’s my dinner.

I drove out to the Eagan gym to work out this morning, because my little gym
close to home is way too crowded on Sundays to be comfortable.  Eagan is
crowded, too, but it’s so large, it doesn’t seem like sardines slammed
together.

I took the flower van on my journeys today, the 1995 Caravan, still starting
and driving relatively well.  I stopped by the cemetery.  Most of the snow
is gone now and spring flowers are appearing on the graves.  As Easter
approaches, more families will go out and add pastel colors to their love
ones’ stones.

There’s a bunch of deer poop in Ray’s row.  He would like that, not because
of the poop, but because deer have been walking over him.

Then I stopped at Target to get milk and a sympathy card.  A coworker’s
mother passed away this past week after a long slow death.

The cycle of life and death continues.

Margaret R. Kramer
margaretkramer at comcast.net
www.linkedin.com/in/margaretkramer

It's spring fever.  That is what the name of it is.  And when you've got it,
you want - oh, you don't quite know what it is you do want, but it just
fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!       
-Mark Twain