A woman becomes a widow, a single person again, often after many long years. As frequently as this happens, anticipated or otherwise, the death of a spouse is a huge shock. And the unaccustomed loneliness that fills the aftermath is even worse.
I used to scoff at my widow friends who talked on and on about how wonderful their husbands were. Many of these worshippers of latter-day saints had been at constant odds with their spouses when they were alive. Often the couple seemed, in the twilight of their years, to have little in common beyond offspring and a physical desire to dine early and sleep late. Perhaps while their husbands were still alive, these women — in their heart of hearts — supposed they could have done a lot better, while grudgingly making the best of what they had.
Once widowed, however, they seem to be as lonely as a cowpoke under a darkling canopy of distant stars. It is a cruel adjustment. Whether the departed was exasperating, enigmatic or expendable, he is much missed. Even if conversations with him had long been reduced to shouting matches or barely audible grumbles, either one now seems preferable to the empty silence.
When my husband died some months ago, he temporarily made up for the void by leaving me with a house, garage and outdoor shed full of stuff with which he simply could not bear to part. He was a man of many interests, one of them being to hold on to just about everything he ever acquired. Perhaps that is why he kept me around so long! He was unashamedly an inveterate pack-rat of the highest (or lowest) order.
It has taken four humungous weekend garage sales (sometimes called “yard” or “estate” sales) to divest myself of most of his accumulation. Were he alive, he might be as amazed as I to re-discover those long-stashed belongings, though he certainly would have welcomed them as old friends. Yet why, for example, did he save a dozen cue sticks, when we haven’t owned a pool table since the ’70s? And what is the point of hoarding obsolete camping gear, when newer replacements are available at half the weight and twice the ingenuity? And did he really think he would “do ” something with all those stone cabochons he had created in a long-ago lapidary class?
But garage sales not only rake up the coals of memory, they provide unexpected amusement and involvement at a time when levity is solely needed. For years, for instance, I threatened to get rid of something my husband had bought during a motorhoming trip on his own to the north country. Throughout its entire life under our roof, this hideous object had a price tag of $95 dangling from it, though I doubt my thrifty spouse would have paid that much. Why he forked out anything at all for a large caribou foot made into a woman’s drawstring purse is a mystery. Obviously, it was never entrusted with my lipstick and wallet. At first, I tucked in its buckskin flap and used the gross foot for a wastepaper basket. Then for a doorstop. Finally, I hid it behind the door. At one point, I attempted unsuccessfully to pawn it off on a local antiques dealer.
So there it was, front and center, on a table in my first garage sale. And miraculously, when the garage door lifted, it was the first thing to go A guy spotted it immediately. “I love it!” he shouted across a phalanx of loaded tables. He also went on to buy a beat-up zebra skin rug, a highly shellacked mastodon (supposedly) bone, and an oosik. (If you don’t know what this is, try looking it up under “deviant art.” ) The buyer, in fact, was my husband incarnate.
But nobody ever really takes the place of a departed spouse. Even in the midst of the divestiture process, I had a hankering to tell him about some funny incident, to consult him as to how to price an item — and to wonder if he would ever have allowed me to sell anything at all!
Women who lost husbands years ago tell me that their memory, in time, becomes only a shadow. They recall them fondly … maybe too fondly. But that is how it should be — for the living and the dead.
©2011 Doris O’Brien for SeniorWomen.com
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