Wandering Widows

A thousand voices mingle together and become one huge hum of unrecognizable chatter making a harmonious, monotonous, tune that gets stuck in your head. It is worse than any solitary confinement on earth but then something happens that changes it all. In the midst of the crowed there is one voice that is different from all the rest and it shouts out, “Hey, hey, yeah you. I’m over here. What took you so long” and then your whole world changes. Being a widow sucks. There is no other way to describe it. The thing is, I liked my husband. We were friends. Even after the early year passion had faded, we still really liked and respected each other. We had gotten busy and bogged down with life events as most married couples do, but promised that as soon as the kids had grown and gone we would work our way back to us. That never happened. Joe came home with a headache one day and a week later he was gone. It was like one of those new white boards that they have in classrooms now. We had it full of notes, plans, directions and someone, in this case God, whipped it clean. So here I stand with this big empty white blank space that was, is my life. What do I do? And people look at you funny when you are a widow. They just don’t get it and they really don’t get it if you are under the age of 70. Your life is a train wreck that they cannot seem to turn away from. They are horrified for you, happy that it is not them, say all the wrong things, or say nothing at all. There are even some who walk to the other side of the street and break their neck trying to avoid you, and yet can’t help but sneak a peek at your distress. Then there are those who say, “You are young and you will find someone else.” What the Heck? Why would I care to do that? There is no replacing what has been lost and to say that demeans everything I had with Joe. There are always people, especially the older generation, who do not feel that you are grieving appropriately and wait patiently for you to “hit the wall.” What the Heck? Do they want me to be miserable? The deal is, there is no right or wrong way to grieve. It simply sucks and that is all there is to it. No, I do not want to get in the floor and boo hoo with a bunch of other widows. That is all right for some, but poor pitiful me is not the place I want to be; not that I haven’t gone there, it is just not the place I want to get trapped. And if I decide to occasionally visit that place, I do not want company. My grief is my own and quite frankly the only thing I have left of him that is exclusive. Even that pisses some people off. The one thing about becoming a widow that is the most prominent and noticeable difference in me personally, I just do not care what anyone thinks about what I do or do not do. This is my life, what’s left of it, and conforming is not in the plan. So, back to the introductory paragraph. I met Wendy Bryant Cook not by chance at all. She was one of Joe’s last and greatest gifts to me. She joined facebook February 21, 2015. We discovered that Joe had a mass in his brain February 21, 2015. He passed away February 28 of the same year. Wendy had known Joe through a business association and had liked him for his humble demeanor, honesty, and the respect he showed her, not a surprise at all. She reached out to me an expressed her condolences through facebook messenger by announcing that she too was a widow two years my senior. I responded as all good southern women do and had no intention of ever contacting her again. I didn’t know her, didn’t care, and didn’t need help from anyone. Fast forward four months. I crashed, big time. I heard voices, saw spots, questioned if Joe had every really existed; here comes that wall everyone has been waiting for me to crash into and really fast. For whatever reason, the only name that came in my mind was Wendy’s. I reached out and what she said pretty much pulled me back from the edge of despair. “You are not going crazy…!” Pretty simple. Anyone could have said it, but the fact is not just anyone had experienced what I was experiencing. She had, as was traveling the same highway to hell I had just turned onto. We have a lot in common, both in our 40’s, both widows, both of us have our names carved on a piece of stone in cemeteries just waiting for our entrance, and somehow we have both decided that we have a lot of living to do before our arrival at our predetermined final destination. Why not travel together?