Putting on the widower’s cloak

“I am too young to be a widower and too old to be a bachelor,” I said to myself on one of those dark days when Jane was in the hospital in one of the three comas that would eventually claim her life. It is the kind of thing I said to myself  to convince myself she would not die–that we would find our way through this crisis and she would come home.

…no death changes that.

In the end, I slipped on the mantle of “widower” easily enough when she died. It is the cloak I have worn every day of the 56 months since that night. It is a comfortable and comforting identity for a man who has lost everything he cared about–and who is surrounded by the meaningless reminders of what was.

Common ground

I cannot say that nothing good has come of my taking up that role. My father, who lost my mother less than a year before Jane died, and I found in our shared widowerhood a bridge across all the animosity between us. It gave us a shared experience we could talk about– a shared pain none of my siblings could comprehend. We made a peace that let us set aside our adversarial past.

I am too young to be a widower…

He died a year ago this week. A part of me was happy for him. My mother was his lodestone. When she died, he was ready to die. In some ways, he spent the last three years of his life waiting to die. His ashes and hers are mixed in my sister’s garden.

A father’s life

He was 85 years old. He had lived a good, interesting and productive life. He had six children, all of whom were still living when he died. And his work in engineering will likely survive even his great-grandchildren. But he was interested in the world until the day he left it.

My mother was his lodestone.

He was a widower, but the word did not entirely define him. He was ready to die, but he didn’t want to. He was too curious about what was over the next hill. If someone had offered him a good quality of life for another 50 years, I think he would have taken it. But his body was failing him–and he knew it.

Taking off the cloak

For the last six weeks I’ve been teaching a journalism course in Boston. It was good for me. It forced me to think about something other than cancer and loss for a few hours every day. It reminded me that I am too young to be a traditional widower. I am not old enough to spend what remains of my life waiting for death.

…the word did not entirely define him.

I am, in that regard, my father’s son–and likely would be even if I were much older. I want to see what is over the next hill. I want to see the death of cancer. I want to see the things Jane never got to see, that my mother never got to see, that my father never got to see.

But I have become too comfortable with the cloak of widowerhood. I need to be something more–need people to see me as something more. Jane is gone–and I am still broken in so many ways. But Jane would not be happy–actually, she’d be damned angry–if I let the word “widower” define however many years I have left in my life.

A stalled journey

I wrote earlier about the topiary heart Jane made early in our marriage–and how it was the one houseplant that died during her illness. I talked about having found another piece of ivy growing in another pot and how I had trained it onto Jane’s original mold.

I am, in that regard, my father’s son…

The original strand has stalled in its journey maybe three inches short of a full circuit. But new shoots have emerged from the surface and are moving up the base. Perhaps they will fill the space that remains. Perhaps then, my soul will heal.

Too young to be a widower

This much I know: I am 63 years old. I am still too young to be a widower. I am still too old to be a bachelor in any traditional sense. I am caught between two things I really have no interest in being–because I am more than either of those things–or at least I think I am.

The original strand has stalled…

We all have many roles we play in life–and it is easy to define ourselves by any one of them. But when a single role ensnares us–when we let that single role determine not only how we see ourselves but how we allow the world to see us–we stop growing and begin to embrace our own deaths.

More than a widower

At the end of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, John Proctor asks, “What is John Proctor?” He is a complicated man facing the immediacy of his own death. And the answer to that question will determine what his life means–whether he will go to the gallows and die or live a lie.

We all have many roles we play in life…

Yes, I am a widower. But I am more than that–even though I have forgotten that fact more often than not in recent years. I am a writer, a teacher, a warrior, and a peacemaker. I cook, I garden, I build. I go for long walks and long drives. And I love. I am a human being–and no death changes that.