Widowed: I Get to Have It My Way Now

Marriage is all about give and take. It’s a 50-50 proposition. It’s about compromise. That’s what they tell you. But Jon is gone now — gone enough to have forfeited his right to have a say in things. Which means — I’m widowed. I get to have it my way, 100 percent of the time.

This have-it-my-way mood started soon after Jon died:

Jon’s laptop. It’s mine now. Given all the paperwork in the days following Jon’s death, I saw that I needed — wanted — a second laptop to keep handy near the kitchen. So I moved Jon’s laptop from his upstairs office to the dining room table.

This created a wrenching empty spot on Jon’s desk. But I needed that laptop. I took it.

Jon’s half of our bedroom closet. It’s mine now, too. For years I eyed Jon’s half of our closet, coveting it for the crush of clothes I kept at my end of the closet.

I once asked Jon if he’d like to move his wardrobe to the closet in our son’s old bedroom — spread out a bit, get comfortable. He said no, huffily asserting his right to his half of our closet. For years, I made do with my half.

But then, within months of Jon’s death, I saw my chance to have it my way, closet-wise. I shed the obligatory tears over my husband’s dear belongings. Then I merrily dispatched his entire wardrobe — dress shirts, slacks, navy blue wedding suit — to Peter’s closet. And now I have my own private walk-in closet.

Our king-sized bed — it’s too big for me. Christina and her husband Tim will be here for Thanksgiving week. They need Jon’s and my big, fat, king-sized marital bed — way more than I do.

I’m a scant 62 inches tall, with a wing span of 57 inches. I fit just fine into the old four-poster full-sized bed in Christina’s bedroom that nicely accommodated my 20th-century parents — the both of them — for decades.

It was time to make the switch. And yet, and yet — Jon and I had shared this bed (till snoring did us part) for years — could I let go of it? And it was on this bed, after all, that Jon lay, downed by a stroke, waiting for that ambulance.

I thought it over, and soon the sorrow of giving up our bed gave way to a the happy prospect of moving Christina and Tim from that cramped double bed into one big enough to hold two full-sized Millennials.

I called the movers. The beds were switched.

It felt good. It felt so good that now I’m seeing lots more stuff to say good-bye to. Things from the past — all of it getting in the way of the present:

• My mother’s vintage table lamps.
• My mother-in-law’s vintage table lamps.
• The hand-painted plate I bought in a rush in Rothenberg. I didn’t like it then and I don’t like now.
• Books that I last opened in the 1960s by people like Bertrand Russell and George Santayana. I didn’t get them then. I don’t get them now.
• The compromise china that Jon and I picked out as our wedding approached. It was Spode. It was elegant. But I never really warmed to it. It was a compromise.

Marriage is all about compromise, they tell us. Widowhood, for better or worse, is not.

More about making decisions as a widow at “Do I Stay or Do I Move?”  Also at, “Widowed: I’m Staying Put. And So Are My Bricks.”