Prologue

Being a widow is the pits! This is the hardest marital status to live with and the one over which we have absolutely no control, which makes it even harder to live with. And live with it, a widow must. A widow’s mantra truly is “I have no choice.”

I am really sorry for you for your husband’s death. I know how hard this is for you. My husband died on July 21, 2007 and I still feel sadness at his death. I know that I will never fully ‘get over’ his death. But, I am learning, and re-learning, to live this life without him here, and to let him continue to live through me.

Because I am not you, I cannot know exactly what you are going through, but I do fully understand the pain you feel and the feelings of helplessness and life spinning around you. You will be okay. You will never totally get over his death. But you will be able to get on with the business of life. Accept that everything has changed and will never be the same. You will gradually learn and relearn how to live with this new, unwanted, reality of your life.

I wrote this book as a way of honoring the effects my husband’s death has had on my life. I hope I am also honoring our life together and the effects it had on me and will continue to have on my life. I hope this book will please his spirit and help him to see how very much I still love him and always will. He touched my heart years ago when we met and he is still doing that, through my memories, the life we shared, and I learned from him and from loving him and being completely loved.

My hope is that this book will help you to find your inner strength to get through this terrible part of your life, especially the first few years. I hope that you realize that you can still really love your husband and always honor him and his memory by continuing to live the best life that you can.

May God bless you always, and continually shine his light on your path.

There is No Such Thing as a Normal Widow

There is no “normal” way for a widow to act, think, feel, or be. You and only you can decide what is “normal” for you. And much of that will just happen. Like it or not, you have to learn to go with the flow, as it were. I think the only real givens of being a widow are the initial feelings of total despair, disbelief, chaos, and the very real belief that you are losing your mind.

There is no road map. I’ve done quite a bit of reading about grief in books and newspaper articles. Since Orin died, my eye is drawn to those kinds of articles. It is amazing to me that the definition of the stages of grief is changing. Society wants to put grief in a little bottle and throw it out to sea, as though it never existed. If it were only that simple. As far as I am concerned, grief is that chaos of a life that we have to learn to live with. Grief has no logic or time frame to it and no finite stages. So, if someone else expects your grief to look exactly like this: denial; anger; bargaining; depression; and finally, acceptance; don’t buy into that. Your grief is just that, yours! Don’t try to make your grief fit someone else’s definition or time frame.

You will question yourself a lot. This is perfectly okay. Normal after death is far, far different than normal was before your husband’s death. Other words and feelings have different connotations, too. Happiness now means finding bits of happiness, not the total happiness you felt in life while your husband was alive.

My life with my husband, Orin, was not perfect. He had a minor stroke in March, 2004. Almost from the start of his ‘new’ life as a stroke survivor, he had lots of physical and emotional problems with the blood pressure medicines he had to take to help prevent another stroke; one that would probably be far worse than the first “wake up call.” We had a good partnership: he took care of our home and me; and I was the provider for us. This was fine with me. Even with our little problems, we were both very, very happy with each other.

I now find happiness in the little things. After the first six months or so of his death, I would do okay during the days, most of the time. And then I would feel totally alone at night. He isn’t there on his side of the bed where he belongs. There is no one to kiss and cuddle with as I go to sleep. I do, however, tell him good night and that I love and miss him. Even now, as I write this 5 years after his death, I still miss Orin a lot. I know I will always miss him and our life together.

I needed my solitude even with lots of people in the house right after Orin’s death. You, on the other hand, may want or need to be with others as much as possible during the first days following your husband’s death. Remember, do what is right for you!!

The days immediately following Orin’s death, I spent lots of time in our bedroom, which is connected to the master bath and a large walk-in closet. A few days after his death, I was just walking around our room and decided, out of the blue, to start packing up his underwear and socks that were still in the store packages. I gave those to a local church. It took me months to start going through the clothes that he actually wore. I gave most of his clothes to the same local church. There are many items, however, that I will keep for a long, long time, perhaps forever. He treasured his belts and the buckles, his collections of knives, lighters, and baseball caps. He had several favorite shirts. I wear some of them around the house. It makes me feel close to him.

Deal with your husband’s personal belongings when and how you see fit. Don’t let anyone force you into doing anything with his stuff that you don’t want to. I know some widows who could not go into their husbands’ closets for years after his death. And I know of well-meaning families and friends who went into the widow’s home and disposed of all of her husband’s clothes right after his death. What an awful intrusion!

I left Orin’s guitars in the family room, right where he had left them, and the amplifier and the music stand. I refused to use the propane gas fireplace because I would have had to move the guitars. I changed some things in the house right away. I had my rocking chair moved downstairs the day he died. The week after his funeral, I put up our store bought pictures and lots of pictures of him and me. In fact, I put up a little collection of pictures of us on one wall in our room, in a haphazard fashion.

It is perfectly all right and natural to get mad: at God, your husband, the car, etc. It is also perfectly all right and natural to not get mad. What ever you feel is right for you, and no one else! If you do feel anger over your husband’s death, get mad, cry, scream, and let go of that anger as soon as you can. If you need to, getting mad is therapeutic and will help you get on with your life. Staying mad, however, will only prolong your agony, grief and weigh you down.

You have to keep living: go on with life, not move on. You don’t want to “pretend” that everything is back to normal, whatever normal is now. There is no such thing as normal in the world’s definition of the word. You will find your new normal in your own time and way.
I was fortunate that the financial foundation of my life was pretty solid at the time of Orin’s death: nice house, a good business, and I worked from home most of the time. I have pretty supportive brothers and their families. I have several really good close friends, and many casual friends. Our cat has been a real life-saver,

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Texte: Linda Foldvik
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 20.11.2012
ISBN: 978-3-95500-853-6

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Widmung:
To my inspiration, Orin, my beloved husband. Though he is dead, he is still very much with me and always will be.