Pat Taub
* Carly Simon, “Legend in Your Own Time”
GUEST POST by ANNE PENWAY
This was not supposed to happen. Not when it did.
I expected my midlife would include caregiving for my parents. And it did. I was the first responder to gradually escalating parental health crises for sixteen years. I expected to outlive my husband. Most women do. The women on my Mother’s side tend to live well into and sometimes beyond their 80’s. My Mother had died in January 2014, three days after her 90th birthday, living well beyond my father who died at 78.
The author, like many of us at mid-life, became a caretaker for her parents
I expected to enjoy more than a decade of “empty nesting” with my husband, once our child had been established in a separate living arrangement.
Mike, a lover of poetry, a champion chess player and a stay-at-home Dad, was diagnosed with stage 4-colon cancer in December 2014, when he was only 53. I was 55.
When he entered hospice, we joked, “call me when you get there,” and he said he’d come back as a hummingbird.
Each spring, I hung a basket of fuchsia in front of our bay window. They attracted hummingbirds, and he loved them. A few days after he died in August 2016, two months and three days before his 55th birthday, when I was on the phone with a sympathetic caller, a gray hummingbird came to the fuchsia.
A gray hummingbird at a fuchsia, similar to the author’s sighting
Mike and I were supposed to have more time. I quit a good job to take care of Mike, when he began behaving strangely, before we knew.
After he died, I quit the good job that had sustained us during his illness to take care of myself. Then I quit the only job I’ve been able to get since, to take care of our child, who needs more time to sit with this massive loss, this incomprehensible absence, and try somehow to process what life could possibly be like without Dad.
And then Father’s Day. The unavoidable ads on the car radio, the perky questions in the supermarket: “What are you doing for Dad on Sunday?” No one thinks about the fatherless on Father’s Day.
Being widowed in midlife has taught me about grief and gratitude and how to keep going when you’re “not ok.”
I learned grief has many aspects, but it doesn’t have “stages.” All of it–denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance and the new one, “meaning,” the title of a new book by David Kessler, Kubler-Ross’ co-author–mash up together and knock you around in waves. Right when you think the waters have calmed and you’re getting better, another big wave rolls in.
The author discovered that a widow’s grief is often too complicated to be broken down into “stages.”
You accept it. You put one foot in front of the other. You find significance in everything–that butterfly, that hummingbird, that song on the radio, suggesting his spirit is with us–and squeeze all you can out of each moment, no matter how mundane, because now you know how much time you’ve wasted, and you don’t want to waste any more.
I read widow books. I wrote one. I planted a garden specifically to attract monarch butterflies (the first poem Mike recited to me began, “Sail, Monarchs…”).
The author’s garden with its monarch butterflies
I started a blog, and discovered a hidden universe of unexpected widows from their early twenties to their 70’s and 80’s. Each lost relationship, and the widowhood that followed, was unique. Widowhood in mid-life isn’t typical, I thought, but I found there is no such thing as “typical widowhood.”
Several widow bloggers were trying, like me, to learn to live with gratitude and make every moment count, but the most common thread in the blogs I read was dismay at externally imposed, vocally expressed expectations of how, when and how long a widow is to mourn, and shock that anyone would criticize a widow for how she grieves.
So bring the hugs and casseroles, but stow the expectations.
Anne Penway holds a B.A. from Pomona College and a J.D. from Northwestern University. Long and gratefully retired from law practice, she spent most of her career in non-profit administration (American Library Association) and graduate/professional admissions (IIT, Valparaiso, Medill). Caregiving knocked her off the professional track and gave her the opportunity to learn how to operate an electric pallet jack, drive a forklift and embrace financial uncertainty while pursuing more of what she loves – writing and performing. Her blog is at www.ridiculouswoman.com.
