Widowed: I Don’t Like My Life
I don’t like my life. It is flat. It is uninviting. It has lost its zip and its meaning. And I don’t want to lead it.
Not to worry, I am not suicidal. It’s not life that I am objecting to. It’s the future, my future, the one that befell me when my husband died a year and a half ago.
On paper, what I have here is a pretty good deal. Some bodily aches and failings have emerged lately. But I’ve got friends, neighbors, family, and a writing career that has persevered into my 80s. Also, a nice house with a patch of alstromerias that push out blossoms whether I bother to go outside to look at them or not.
And so, everything is in order in the architecture of my life. Except for that one thing: Jon isn’t here anymore. And his departure has taken the life out of my life.
Covid Isolation
This flatness confronted me anew this week when I returned home from eighteen days of covid isolation, which I spent in a quiet rented bungalow in a city not my own.
I had flown east weeks earlier, across two time zones, to the hospitable Midwestern town where my son Peter lives with his wife and their two small children. We had some nice days together, the grandchildren and I, swimming and romping at a woodsy resort on a lake up north.
Then, six days in, I felt the tell-tale symptoms: sore throat, headache, body aches, chills. A home test came up positive for covid, and it fell to Peter to find an urgent care center for me — fast.
Paxlovid Prescribed
Paxlovid was prescribed, and Peter, the windows of his car wide open, drove me the two hours from the resort up north to the Airbnb I had booked near Peter’s house back in town.
Finally, this past Monday, I was well enough to make the three-hour flight home. I put on the mask required by CDC guidelines and rolled my suitcases around two airports, no problem.
I was fine.
I was fine, that is, until I got home — to a house filled with Jon and Jon’s dear things: his shoes, his laptop, his dresser still filled with his socks and T-shirts, the miniature ceramic cat he kept on his dresser, and the dish where he dropped the coins he took from the pockets of his khakis at the end of the day.
A Pleasant Airbnb Stay, on My Own
In truth, the mandated covid isolation had not been all that bad. I wasn’t particularly sick. The rented house was sunny and pleasant and, empty as it was of any trace of Jon, it allowed me to look away from him for a time.
But now, back home in the presence of all this evidence of my missing husband, there was no averting my eyes from my dispiriting future.
I have written about this before. I can go for hours, days even, without feeling the heaviness of grief. On a hike at Chimney Rock with friends, the grief evaporates for hours. With a college roommate as a houseguest, I’m good for days. When daughter Christina shows up in town for a bachelorette party and works remotely from Jon’s office, I’m my old self again. When I drive across the Bay for lunch with my brother, it seems my life is rich and interesting after all.
In other words, I can be distracted from my grief. I can put it aside. Grief has been known to retreat for a time.
Widowed: I Don’t Like My Life
Hikes and lunch dates are helpful distractions. So were the cough suppressants and covid tests that preoccupied me while isolated in that Airbnb, 2,000 miles from the place where Jon no longer was.
But the distractions never last. Soon, inevitably, my future is right there in front of me again, in my face.
I don’t like my life. I don’t want it. I really, really don’t want it.
More widow stories at “Widowed: Or, How to Wrestle a Christmas Tree Into Its Stand.” Also, “Breaking News: The Afterlife is ‘Fantastic.'” And “Talk to My Deceased Husband? I Can’t Do It.” And don’t miss “My Husband Passed Away and Took the Encyclopedia With Him.”
Well, Barb you have done it again, the feeling that we have of our loss of husbands. Where we go, what we do, who we talk to it always bring back memories of him. Jerry was a wonderful man, even though he had that roughness like his dad, he had a heart full of love for his family. Hopefully our lonely loss will go away some day. I don’t feel like a happy person like I did with his love 💕. Thanks for sharing. It helps to know we’re not alone.
I remember Jerry from my childhood when he was a little pesky kid (lol), but cute. I also have memories of him as a grown man, not at all pesky, but kind to my kids when they came by to admire his rabbits. He has always been an important figure in my life, even though we lived so far apart. As for his dad, my last memory of him is of a guy who’d mellowed into a sweet man — which he’d probably always been down deep. I remember Dickie telling me one summer night how much she missed her husband, and this was some time, maybe years, after George had died. So, we’ve got Dickie for company, too.
Dear Barbara,
You have my empathy. There are many lovely and loving distractions in my life, but life without my spouse, alone at home and acutely aware of his absence, is plain sad. It is the absence of a particularly wonderful companionship a good, full and loving marriage engender.
The acceptance of the reality of death, the non-suicidal choice to support life, the “distractions,”
in no way diminish the desert the death of an outstanding spouse creates.
Kathleen — It looks like I’m not alone in these feelings. Thank you for keeping me company in this.
A year ago you wrote some words here that have been very helpful to me. I keep referring to them in my mind. You said, “I think one can simultaneously feel joy about something/someone else and other emotions, too, but those feelings stand next to one’s grief in a parallel reality.”
Parallel reality. Yep.
I am so sorry you lost Jon.. Please know your grief confirms how much he meant to you . You will always miss him but it it won’t always be this raw. Please know you and your writing mean so much to many people. Keep writing and tell us how you are doing. We care about you.
Thank you, Mary Lou. Thank you for caring.
I hope today is a better day for you .
It is! Thank you! I’m doing things like arranging to get the house painted and installing a new microwave. So . . . life must not be all bad.
As usual, you have put into prose the feelings that invade our happiness and bring back the grief of our loss. Our lives without our spouse, not fun. With our shared time, our days were filled with the joy of just being together. I miss Ralph every day and only break into tears when something reminds me of the hole in my heart he had always filled. We were lucky to have had their love and shared the years, but I still want him back. A quote from Queen Elizabeth really struck me…”Pain is the price we pay for love”. Thanks Barbara for you words that mirror my feelings.
Thank *you,* Nancy. It’s good to know that I’ve got company.
I, like you , have been married for years. I’m 69 and my husband and I just celebrated our 50th anniversary. I can’t imagine living alone without him. I so resonate with your pieces about widowhood.
Fifty years! What a blessing! I am still figuring out how to make a life without Jon. I’m pretty sure will manage that.