Debbie Weiss's Blog - Posts Tagged "widow"
Creating A New Life After Loss
In April 2013, when George, my high school sweetheart and partner of 32 years died of cancer, I had to either reinvent myself or else reconcile myself to leading a very lonely life. As a couple, we’d led isolated lives; without him I could go days without talking to another person. When he died, I was fifty and for the first time ever, I was alone.
George was a software developer, an engineer’s engineer who was happiest at his computer. I was an introvert and a bookworm, a former lawyer who’d retired at forty to escape the stress. George was my life…until I lost him. After that, it would be over a year before I could focus enough to get through an entire book.
He’d been in denial about his illness, somehow thinking he was going to recover even as his body wasted away. I needed to know I still existed after a year of being his caregiver, watching him disintegrate, feeling deep in my bones that I was failing him. I couldn't fix his illness, nor jolt him into reality, or even get him to agree to palliative care.
A full night’s sleep had become a memory. Through grief therapy, I discovered that I had post-traumatic stress disorder.
Over the next few years, I got better, in dribs and drabs, but the loneliness enveloped me. For 32 years, George and I had eaten dinner together almost every night, then curled up in bed to wake up beside each other each morning. I still wonder, where does all that love go? Is it transmuted into protective energy or is it just gone?
Turning to Writing After Loss
Soon after my loss, I found a writing class offered through an adult education center. Some of my classmates invited me to join their weekly writing group where I found friendship and encouragement. For two days a week, I had people to be with and writing to critique. Other days of the week, I had a purpose, writing new pieces to share.
I still remember going to Friday morning writing group for the first time, sitting in a little, rose-patterned armchair at my new friend Dana’s house, sipping mint tea, being surrounded by the other writers, her little dog sniffing at our feet. I felt like I had come home.
But I also remember allowing double the time it took to drive there because I was so worried my widow brain couldn’t follow directions, despite the two maps app on my phone. I have anxiety, probably because my mom died when I was ten so I learned young that those we love can vanish at any time. It got worse after losing George, who’d always reassured me that everything would be okay.
Once I started writing, I discovered a lot I wanted to say about widowhood and being single in general. Like why our society treats grief as an embarrassment to be worked through as quickly as possible.
Or why being a single, middle-aged woman seems to have such a lower currency than being coupled. Or how it feels to start thinking as an “I” after spending most of my life as half a “we,” as in “we like our Steak Dianne medium rare.”
But I’d never considered whether I even liked Steak Dianne in the first place.
Starting to Date at Age 50
Fourteen months after my loss, I decided to start dating, which was a shock since I hadn’t dated since 1980 when I was a high school junior. Once I went online, I found a entire new wealth of writing topics.
I wrote my book, Available As Is: A Midlife Widow’s Search for Love, published this past September, to offer hope that reinvention and having a good life is possible after a devastating loss. Even for the terminally cautious. But I joke that I wrote the book to warn other midlife women about the exceedingly poor quality of so many of single, middle-aged men out there.
I remember being a widow of eighteen months, sitting in a chic cafe Oakland cafe having breakfast with the wealthy but dyspeptic artist I was dating when he started ranting about how I’d failed to pay for our meal or appreciate him enough in general, his voice rising shrilly in indignation. When I asked him, not for the first time, to air his complaints privately, he whined, “My shrink doesn’t want me to feel resentful.” A few days later I started my blog; that line was so terrible it needed to be shared.
Writing through Loss
In different publications, I've written about caregiver guilt, living alone for the first time at age fifty, surviving the holidays as a widow, exploring sexuality as a widow, escaping an emotionally abusive relationship, and dating a polyamorous tantra instructor (it was not a success). I've heard that sharing our foibles with others helps to cleanse our shame over them, and it has helped me.
Before being widowed, I was pretty “judgy.” I couldn't understand how someone could be with an unkind partner, or cheat in a relationship, or otherwise tolerate being demeaned. Now, I understood the depths to which we can fall so as not to be alone. But sharing our stories can help us to feel less alienated after a loss.
So many of us are mourning something these days, be it a person, a way of life, or even the state of the world. I wish we treated grief as a permanent part of our mental state instead of a glitch to be worked through as quickly as possible.
I did find my second love online (although I’d like to say we met cute at a writing retreat), and we’ve been together over four years. In 2021, I finally moved from the home of 27 years I’d lived in with George to a new house by the water, one of my longterm dreams. The publication of my book fulfilled another one.
But my best advice is to start pursuing your dreams now, without needing a catastrophic event to show you how finite this life can be.
George was a software developer, an engineer’s engineer who was happiest at his computer. I was an introvert and a bookworm, a former lawyer who’d retired at forty to escape the stress. George was my life…until I lost him. After that, it would be over a year before I could focus enough to get through an entire book.
He’d been in denial about his illness, somehow thinking he was going to recover even as his body wasted away. I needed to know I still existed after a year of being his caregiver, watching him disintegrate, feeling deep in my bones that I was failing him. I couldn't fix his illness, nor jolt him into reality, or even get him to agree to palliative care.
A full night’s sleep had become a memory. Through grief therapy, I discovered that I had post-traumatic stress disorder.
Over the next few years, I got better, in dribs and drabs, but the loneliness enveloped me. For 32 years, George and I had eaten dinner together almost every night, then curled up in bed to wake up beside each other each morning. I still wonder, where does all that love go? Is it transmuted into protective energy or is it just gone?
Turning to Writing After Loss
Soon after my loss, I found a writing class offered through an adult education center. Some of my classmates invited me to join their weekly writing group where I found friendship and encouragement. For two days a week, I had people to be with and writing to critique. Other days of the week, I had a purpose, writing new pieces to share.
I still remember going to Friday morning writing group for the first time, sitting in a little, rose-patterned armchair at my new friend Dana’s house, sipping mint tea, being surrounded by the other writers, her little dog sniffing at our feet. I felt like I had come home.
But I also remember allowing double the time it took to drive there because I was so worried my widow brain couldn’t follow directions, despite the two maps app on my phone. I have anxiety, probably because my mom died when I was ten so I learned young that those we love can vanish at any time. It got worse after losing George, who’d always reassured me that everything would be okay.
Once I started writing, I discovered a lot I wanted to say about widowhood and being single in general. Like why our society treats grief as an embarrassment to be worked through as quickly as possible.
Or why being a single, middle-aged woman seems to have such a lower currency than being coupled. Or how it feels to start thinking as an “I” after spending most of my life as half a “we,” as in “we like our Steak Dianne medium rare.”
But I’d never considered whether I even liked Steak Dianne in the first place.
Starting to Date at Age 50
Fourteen months after my loss, I decided to start dating, which was a shock since I hadn’t dated since 1980 when I was a high school junior. Once I went online, I found a entire new wealth of writing topics.
I wrote my book, Available As Is: A Midlife Widow’s Search for Love, published this past September, to offer hope that reinvention and having a good life is possible after a devastating loss. Even for the terminally cautious. But I joke that I wrote the book to warn other midlife women about the exceedingly poor quality of so many of single, middle-aged men out there.
I remember being a widow of eighteen months, sitting in a chic cafe Oakland cafe having breakfast with the wealthy but dyspeptic artist I was dating when he started ranting about how I’d failed to pay for our meal or appreciate him enough in general, his voice rising shrilly in indignation. When I asked him, not for the first time, to air his complaints privately, he whined, “My shrink doesn’t want me to feel resentful.” A few days later I started my blog; that line was so terrible it needed to be shared.
Writing through Loss
In different publications, I've written about caregiver guilt, living alone for the first time at age fifty, surviving the holidays as a widow, exploring sexuality as a widow, escaping an emotionally abusive relationship, and dating a polyamorous tantra instructor (it was not a success). I've heard that sharing our foibles with others helps to cleanse our shame over them, and it has helped me.
Before being widowed, I was pretty “judgy.” I couldn't understand how someone could be with an unkind partner, or cheat in a relationship, or otherwise tolerate being demeaned. Now, I understood the depths to which we can fall so as not to be alone. But sharing our stories can help us to feel less alienated after a loss.
So many of us are mourning something these days, be it a person, a way of life, or even the state of the world. I wish we treated grief as a permanent part of our mental state instead of a glitch to be worked through as quickly as possible.
I did find my second love online (although I’d like to say we met cute at a writing retreat), and we’ve been together over four years. In 2021, I finally moved from the home of 27 years I’d lived in with George to a new house by the water, one of my longterm dreams. The publication of my book fulfilled another one.
But my best advice is to start pursuing your dreams now, without needing a catastrophic event to show you how finite this life can be.
