Saturday Night Widows (2 page)

More reading material followed, this time on Low Self-Esteem.
An hour had passed, and Jonathan said we’d have to rush through the last twenty minutes to introduce ourselves and explain how our spouses had died. I knew this was what I’d signed up for, but now my self-esteem plummeted at the thought of it. The first woman to speak launched into a graphic account of her husband’s long final illness, which involved a lot of bedpans and disputes with insurance companies. With billowing frustration, she complained that her neighbor had stopped asking how she was doing three weeks after the funeral. “I’m here because my friends don’t get it,” she concluded.

From there, others followed her lead, and the meeting devolved into a Who’s Most Pitiful contest. The widows, one by one, vented their bitterness toward friends who didn’t sympathize enough, family members who interfered too much, doctors who failed to do enough, and husbands—yes, husbands—who left too soon. Everyone’s spouse seemed to have died within the last couple of months, and I remembered my own morbid absorption in the negative at that time, but did I want to dredge it up all over again? I shuffled the stack of psycho-literature on my lap. This wasn’t at all what I’d had in mind. I’d come to brainstorm with new confidantes about what to do now. Like, what should I do with Bernie’s old jazz records? And should I try to meet another man, and if I did, where would I find one? This grim gathering was magnifying everyone’s sorrow, not assuaging it. We were cramming our personalities into the boxes on Jonathan’s checklists. Anger, check. Depression, check.

I noticed an expectant silence and looked up to see the circle of faces trained on me.

“Um, well … my husband died just over a year ago from a rare
cancer,” I began, trying to convey the basic facts. “He managed to live for four and a half years with all kinds of chemos and surgeries and … everything else. The last couple years, the cancer spread to his brain, so that was … hard.”

I sputtered and stopped.
Quick
, I thought,
try something else
.

“What I want now,” I blundered ahead, “what I want to say is … well, I want to cheer up! Something awful happened to him, and to me, but I don’t want to live in some kind of purgatory for the rest of my days because of it.” I managed what I hoped was an optimistic smile. “I want to be happy again, don’t you?”

I looked from face to face, but the veils were back in place. There was a perfunctory silence, and the woman up next gave me a squinty look. “You notice there’s only one man here,” she addressed the group. “That’s because all the men are out there already, dating other women.”

“Yeah,” said the woman on my other side, jerking her thumb in my direction. “A younger one.”

Was I paranoid, or were these ladies ganging up on me?

I hoped for a break in the mournful tone when a widow directly across from me captured my attention with a dignified manner of speaking.

“I’m seventy-five years old,” she said in a measured voice. “My husband and I had fifty wonderful years together.” The rest of us nodded in respect to that achievement. “Now, I feel like my life is over.” She broke off to collect her thoughts. “But that young woman over there”—she fixed me with a murderous stare and thrust her finger straight at me across the ring of folding chairs—“she has it all! Her whole life is ahead of her! And I … I have nothing.” She lunged for a tissue box.

Whoa! Hold on, babe
, I wanted to say.
Fifty wonderful years might have been nice!
Instead, I froze, stupefied. The rest of the group intervened, speaking out of turn for the first time, directing sympathetic murmurings at Mrs. Fifty Wonderful Years and slinging accusing looks at me.

Jonathan announced that time was up. Reaching for her bag, the widow beside me, the one with the squinty eyes, glanced my way. I recognized those eyes, so much like my own, unmoored but searching. Of course our circumstances were different, but here, face to face, just the two of us, I had the strongest urge to say,
Hey, let’s cut the bullshit. What’s this widow business like for you?
Had we met somewhere else, outside this totalitarian format, I felt sure, we could have found our way to common ground, or at least a civil conversation.

“I’ll see you next time,” she said, her features softening with a suggestion of kindness, perhaps even of apology.

The room cleared, but I stayed fixed for a moment, alone, numb in my hard little chair.

T
HE BAD JUJU
of the support group haunted me through the night in my profoundly empty apartment. Was this the role I was expected to play? Jonathan had said we could call him with questions or concerns, so in the morning, I dialed a number he’d scrawled on his stack of papers.

“I was a little uncomfortable,” I said. “Did you notice anything strange about the meeting?”

“Yeah,” he said. “They really went after you.”

“There seemed to be a lot of hostility in the room.”

“That happens all the time,” he assured me, his voice complacent. “Especially if one of the women is younger.”

“I could have used some empathy,” I said. “I was hoping we could all share some constructive advice. Like, what
do
you do with your husband’s old jazz records?”

“With what?” He continued frostily, “Anger is one of the stages. People need to get it out.”

“Really? I mean, couldn’t you have said something? Like, maybe, we all have problems, but let’s try to understand and support each other, too?”

Jonathan started to sound more than a little uneasy. “It’s your group. I can’t interfere with what anyone wants to say.”

“But you spoke for more than an hour! You talked about all that depression stuff, how worthless we must feel, how inconsolable we must be. Don’t you think we
know
that? If we weren’t depressed before, we sure are now. Couldn’t you have said something about not attacking each other, too? You’re not a potted plant.”

Congratulations
, I thought.
You’ve finally achieved the anger stage!

Jonathan, it seemed, was getting there, too. “You seem really upset about this,” he said with growing resentment. “If you don’t like what the others are saying, you need to stand up for yourself. You need to put up a fight.”

“I didn’t go there to fight! I felt sorry for them! ‘My life is over,’ she said—it doesn’t get worse than that. Why would I want to pile on top of that?”

The line went quiet while we both considered our positions.

“You seem unhappy with the group,” Jonathan said at last, regaining his even tone. “Maybe you just don’t fit in. Maybe you shouldn’t come back.”

“What? I shouldn’t come back?”

“I don’t think you should,” he said. “It’s disruptive to the group to have someone be so critical.” He repeated, slowly, as if he doubted my ability to comprehend: “I don’t think you should come back.”

A white blaze of confusion silenced me. I hung up and shredded Jonathan’s dismal paperwork in my shaking hands, straining to make sense of the whole loony episode. What had just happened here? Something both weirdly sad and weirdly funny. I had been kicked out of my widows’ support group. I didn’t fit in—Jonathan had said so. I was a wife without a husband, and now I was a widow without a widows’ support group. I wasn’t like myself anymore, I wasn’t like my friends anymore, but if I wasn’t like these widows either, who was I now?

Screw Jonathan
, I thought. I even said it out loud—who was to hear? “Screw Jonathan.” I wasn’t about to let this depressing guy or Elisabeth Kübler-Ross or that my-life-is-over lady tell me what I could or could not do. An idea began to form through my grief-muddled agitation. I would start my
own
group of widows. A renegade group! That was it—Outlaw Widows! I couldn’t help but laugh. There would be no tissue boxes. No folding chairs. No mental health checklists. We would simply live and explore and share, together and apart, out there in the world, whatever that world might hold.

I didn’t know how I’d find them, but I knew this: If I wanted to Move Forward After Loss, I’d have to round them up on my own. A support group of renegade widows—how bad could it be? The worst, you see, had already happened.

chapter
ONE

i
plopped a sad glob of guacamole into an exquisite black Art Deco bowl, and I knew. The guacamole would not be right.

In fact, now I was sure, none of the food would be right. Potluck indeed. Too insecure about my cooking to prepare the dinner myself, I had asked everyone to tramp through the January cold with a dish. Now I didn’t know what would turn up—sodden casseroles, gluey bean dip, goopy guacamole. Oh, right, the goopy guacamole was mine, the same guacamole that once came in last in a family guacamole-making contest. And my family originated in Scotland. Worse, I had run out of time and left out the jalapeño, and I had forgotten the cilantro completely. And possibly the lime. So the guacamole, at least, would not be right. This party would be lost.

The room would not be right, either. I could see that now, as I placed the bowl on a side table next to the couch and straightened up to scope out the scene. Denise had offered to host in her Upper West Side apartment, one of those classic 1920s buildings with
French doors and endless bookshelves and rooms the size of Stockholm. It was the most convenient location for all of us. But now, after arriving early and waiting around for everyone else, I was sure that the living room would not be right for our purpose, the layout a nightmare, too spaced out for any real intimacy. There was a couch, backed up against the wall on one side, facing one lonely armchair along the other. I could picture it now, five of them, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder along that couch, like patients in a waiting room, waiting for bad news, and me in that chair, like Jonathan without his five stages of grief to fall back on, wondering whatever had possessed me to plan this evening.

The people wouldn’t be right, either. They were strangers, a real grab bag. I was the only unifying factor. Me. They’d each met me, just once. Some of them twice. I’d collected them haphazardly by asking around, consulting friends and friends of friends. Only now, as Denise was dressing in the bedroom and I plunked down on that couch, sinking, sinking, it began to hit me: These women had practically nothing in common. The youngest was thirty-nine, the oldest fifty-seven. One was a blunt, scary-successful lawyer, one a chatty homemaker, and every postfeminist option in between. Some lived in the city, some in the suburbs. Some had children, some did not.

I reviewed their names in my head, hoping not to botch the introductions: Denise, Dawn, Marcia, Lesley, and Tara. Why had I invited them? There was only one thing they had in common, and that was not the sort of thing guaranteed to light a fire under a party: Every one of them had become a widow in the last couple of years. And that was definitely not right. That was not right at all.

What was I thinking? Why had I tried to orchestrate what
would surely be a social debacle on the scale of … well, getting kicked out of my widows’ support group? I tried to remind myself that this evening had grown out of an idea that hadn’t seemed so misguided until a few minutes ago, an idea that grew out of my own confusion and pain and rebuilding when I too became a widow, and what I had learned from all that. What I still hoped to learn.

The idea was pretty straightforward. I would invite these five women, five young widows, to join me once a month for a year. We would meet on Saturday night, the most treacherous shoal for new widows, where untold spirits have sunk into gloom. We would do something together that we enjoyed, starting small—this dinner would certainly qualify—and ending big, maybe a faraway trip. By the end, we would test my theory that together we might find a way to triumph over loss, take off in unexpected directions, and have some fun along the way. There would be setbacks and pain, I supposed. And tears, certainly there would be some tears. But there would be kidding and silliness, too. There would be progress. There would be hugs. No one would be asked to leave.

If nothing else, these women would provide each other with traveling companions past the milestones of this common but profound transition—the first holidays without a mate, the first time taking off the ring, the first time daring to flirt. We would converge at this most vulnerable, weak, and awkward turning point and pledge to each other that this was not an end, it was a beginning.