-
Promises
Below is a post that was written by my partner, Chris. It took me two months of persistent lobbying to get him to write again after his original blog post. He’s worried he doesn’t have anything to add to the conversation about widowhood, that it’s not his place to talk about the things that he hasn’t lived. But he loves me, and loving a widow is….complicated. Here’s just a bit of that story, written only because I put him under (some) duress. “You know my only rule, right?” It was a question that made me feel a little bit uncomfortable, I guess in part because I had no idea what…
-
He Makes the Coffee
When Chris first came to stay with us, he was shocked to learn that I drank instant coffee. He didn’t understand how I could drink something so terrible when I really enjoyed food and cooking. “It’s just so much easier,” I explained. Of course, it was more complicated than that. I started drinking instant coffee when Shawn died. I did it for a lot of reasons, but I told myself that I made this decision because it didn’t make any sense to make a full pot of coffee when I was the only one drinking it. I’d gotten used to crappy coffee as a teacher (teacher’s lounge coffee is universally…
-
Fierce Loyalty
When my mom died, my dad couldn’t face cleaning out her closet. I was just 19, and so it didn’t fully make sense to me why the closet had more meaning than any other space. I volunteered to do it, and along with my sister Lindsay and our childhood friend Marcie, I went through my mother’s clothes. It was a quiet process, which is my lasting memory. Marcie took things out of the closet and my sister and I sorted through them. My sister, always meticulous, folded the clothes that we were going to keep. I don’t remember much else. I do remember that Lindsay and I talked very little…
-
Two Widows at the Orthodontist
Austin is a pretty chill kid, unfazed by a lot of the mini-dramas of childhood. He doesn’t get anxious about schoolwork or whether he’ll get picked to play first base, and he never seems to worry much about the things that sometimes bother other kids. Thank goodness, because as long as Covid lasts, he has to go into the orthodontist’s office without me. He does it with little fanfare, and I sit outside the office on the sidewalk each time. Last week, he had an appointment to get braces on his top teeth, which apparently takes forever. I was working on my phone, answering emails from students and trying to…
-
Silence
“I’m sorry I never said anything when your husband died. I didn’t know what to say.“ I have lost count of the number of times that someone said this to me – sometimes it was a fellow teacher at school or sometimes it was a neighbor or another acquaintance. When I hear those words, I always say something back like, “you’re saying something now, and I appreciate that,” which is true. It’s the worst kind of silence if those in your world don’t acknowledge the loss of your partner. That’s crushing. But the thing is, this isn’t the only kind of silence that a widow faces – it’s merely the…
-
I’m Not a “Bike Widow”
Chris is an avid cyclist, and the other day he was texting with a friend who rides bikes with him. They were trying to plan a long ride at some point, and Chris told his friend that he needed to check with me first, since an entire Saturday morning was a long time to be away from me and the kids. In jest, his friend texted back, “better that she find out now that she’s going to be a bike widow every weekend!” In response, Chris texted, “since she’s an actual widow, I try not to joke about that sort of stuff.” His friend was hugely apologetic. He didn’t mean…
There’s No Handbook for How to Do This
