Sh*t People Say to Widows (Video) is DONE!

Here, at last, is the video we created together: "Shit People Say to Widows." Guaranteed 100% authentic quotes from (mostly) well meaning friends, family, and colleagues. Featuring comments submitted by a few dozen widowed people from my community, WidowedVillage.org.

Share it as much as you like... please! It was a lot of work and many, many people contributed.

Thank you!

A Prayer for Califmom from an agnostic UU Mom also widowed by cancer

(Read Califmom's blog and tweetstream)

Once upon a time, it was considered “profane” to invoke a deity if you didn’t have faith. These names should only be issued when you really mean it. A non-believer doesn’t own both “sacred” and “profane” expressions, whether he says “J*sus” or “f*ck,” he’s using profanity. (This is without even going into more complicated theological constructions such as “Holy shit.”)

But our everyday cuss is uttered casually, in rage, in shock. We might use a curse word to provoke, to insult, to demonstrate contempt, or to avoid saying something much more serious. We curse when we’re together, aroused, and when we feel most alone, in awe or completely confused: “WTF?” Hence the double meaning of “swearing” or using an “oath,” archaic terms which have given way to the definitely negative “cursing.”

So any prayer for Califmom, who has been helping her husband “fuck cancer in the ass,” from me, an agnostic contemplating seminary, is by definition profane. She deserves no less.


My prayer for Califmom

Here is what I wish for you, inspiring woman, true voice, brave Momma, hilarious warrior, sister widow, friend I’ve never met:

May you find peace
(#fuckcancer)
May those who love you allow you room
(#fuckcancer)
May your children continue to teach you
(#fuckcancer)
May your “before” world remain bright and clear
(#fuckcancer)
May your friends listen and hear your needs
(#fuckcancer)
May you find company and not conflict in your grief
(#fuckcancer)
May you keep your lovely world close and your kids well
(#fuckcancer)
May you keep first things first, and fun things fun
(#fuckcancer)
May you listen to your grieving body
(#fuckcancer)
May someone else be willing and able to handle the paperwork, hereafter to be known as the Dreaded Bureaucracy of Death (DBoD)
(#fuckcancer)
May you be kind, generous, and patient with yourself
(#fuckcancer)
May you find righteousness and a bitchin’ great story in Chapter Two
(#fuckcancer)
May you find peace.
May you find peace.
May you find peace.

(Also? Did you ever notice that "refrain" means both the phrase you repeat after every verse AND "stop it?")

* * * I'd be honored to hear your response in a comment or through other connection (Facebook, Twitter, Formspring, at right) * * *

No Longer in Active Grieving? HA!

Three years after my husband’s death, it seems I’ve picked up a new hobby: trumpeting how much better things are. How I’m still a widow, living and integrating the loss into a good life, and how much easier this is than active grieving. Tales of how I regained my mojo, dated, remarried and started to settle in with what I refuse to call “a new normal.” (It’s just life!) How my kid is growing to understand that she has had two Daddys and how I am so glad I escaped the Single-Moms-Can-Cope claptrap.

Maybe grief makes me preachy. One morning while I lie in bed wondering why I can’t get anything done, why I’m overcommitted to everything, why my back is starting to go again, and how slow I'm making progress on the packing and moving business, it hits me: low motivation. Muddy thinking. I may not be full-scale depressed again, but I’m back in full grief.

Knowing this allows me to give in. Dinner’s been impossible. I’ve been cooking from scratch, for better health and better taste, plus I know I need to stretch and work my cooking muscles in order to reach full adult height again. But it’s still a damn mess between shopping and cleaning up.

Surrender means I get that one day’s worth of stuff done. I make a giant list to contain my stresses and stare at it for a few days (it should be in the recycle bin by Sunday).

And then I return to Trader Joe’s. Even as I tumble back through the welcoming automatic doors I’m grateful to have permission and something decent to fall back on. I search for the breaded eggplant and decide I’ll give their pizzas a second chance. Short Stack and I relied on Trader Joe’s frozen pizza for “movie night” for more than a year, but they deteriorated and finally jumped the shark. On the other side of the shark we found Paul Newman and he’s been fine for a year now.

(Why has no one else noticed that Trader Joe’s pizzas started to suck? I’ve been Googling it for nearly two years and either I’m the only one, or Google’s broken. But I can taste that Trader Joe’s suppliers have been using different flour and inferior sauce. Mr. Fresh thinks this is another case of the “rising standards” I’ve developed, but I remind him that “bait and switch” is a very profitable and extremely common strategy which most of us don’t want to see.)

A return to active grieving explains why we were two hours late for the dolphin show at the aquarium. Perhaps a normal person might just take the road they’re familiar with. But that is the same way we used to go, sometimes weekly, to Gavin’s oncologist. As we passed the sign for the alternate route we never took, I picked an internal conversation with Gavin. “Someday we’ll take the tunnel,” he used to say. He would have loved it. As we sped through miles of industrial zone, vintage warehouses, piles of salt, gravel, asphalt, unknown substances in cones, silos, hills, pyramids, and under fields of tarp blue, I told Shortie how Daddy would loved these images for his “industrial landscape” drawings.

But fuckit if we didn’t miss the damn exit and end up miles and miles out of our way. Thirty bucks down the toilet. (They did let us see the fish, just not the ticketed event. How could I argue?).

Grief is a saboteur. It explains why when my doctor referred me to Gavin’s cardiology specialist I said, “No, it won’t be a problem” but two years later, I still haven’t had the stress test. (They always liked Gavin. And someone from the office had to come to hospice on his last day to switch off his defibrillator. Of course they had to stop and tell me what a great human he was.).

Am I back? Back there, or back to myself? I don’t know.

Most of my minutes take place in my new life. But I don’t believe I have a “new” life any more than I like the term “new normal.” It’s just one life. We only get one (man, do we ever only get one).

It must be grief: I’m thrust back, every fall, to thinking about my Dad a lot. Because every loss recalls the first. And he used to say, when we fussed about what food was touching what other food: "It all gets mixed up in your stomach anyway." (He thought he was being funny. You know, in that “pull my finger” way.) But in some ways this is a secret of life: don’t spend too much time being careful about categories. They’re not very comfy to live in.

More coffee, some nice Piñon (Gavin spent his early years in Albuquerque and loved the smell) from Trader Joe’s, and I’ll try to get back to packing.

(And I'll report back on the pizza).

* * * Comments * * *

Widows' Cooking, or, What's Burning Tonight?

At least 1000 pots after Gavin's death, I widowed the fucking coffee again today. Around here, if we're in the kitchen, "widowed" usually means more or less burned, although Mr. Fresh insists that last night I "widowed" the partner of the rice, not the rice (or the pot). Peh! If I can destroy a 1-qt 18-18-stainless pot just trying to boil a damn egg, I obviously don't have time for the niceties of transitive vs. intransitive verbs.

Gavin and I had a superfancy Alessi espresso pot with a great story ("was $225, NOW just $5") behind it. After he died, I committed to simplifying by purchasing a conventional drip.

You wouldn't know when you meet him that there are at least a dozen ways to strike out with Mr. Coffee. First of all, you can defeat his wisely installed safety features. One morning I forgot to close the lid on the pot, so boiling water backed up in the filter area. The counter spilled over with boiling water mixed with coffee grounds. Two towels later I tried to correct it (mid-stream, so to speak -- I added more water) but the coffee tasted like dirt. On other mornings, I managed to leave off every possible component: water, coffee, filter, the tray that holds the filter and the pot. I managed to keep it unplugged or not turn it on until it was time to leave. I'd set it up the night before and mmm, wht's that fantastic smell waking me up at midnight? A few times, I left it on all day to sludgify. That one, I know you've done.

And how many ways can you screw up coffee if you count combinations of two errors on the same day? Three errors? As my Sensei used to say, I having experience.

It's only natural for a young widow to be distracted, to try to multi-task a bit more than your average Mom, and to not care much about small things like nutrition when she has so much "on her plate" already.

Many widows will talk about the futility of cooking. It's hard to change recipes (how much is 2/3 of a handful?) and you have to set the table for one less adult, a constant mistake to make, a painful and frustrating reminder not only of loss but in our addled minds, of our failure to adjust. There's always a backlog in the sink, so you get stuck using the wrong pan for the job, either overflowing it or adding too much liquid in an attempt to cover the bottom. And don't get me started on running the dishwasher when no one's around to empty. I'd rather just leave all the clean stuff in there for a while than face that no one else is home.

Combine these feelings with a new incompetence that makes you forget to shake juice (bad) and NOT shake soda (very bad) and you have a lot of extra cleanup and still no meal.

In this situation it can be a blessing that grieving folks tend to have little appetite. But I had a toddler and an elderly MIL to cook for (both with freaky eating habits), and a little bit of pride in independence, so I soldiered on. A few weeks after Gavin died, I found myself at J.C. Penney buying a cute yellow microwave, my first. We have an adorable vintage kitchen and insisted we couldn't spare the counter space. There's something not worth standing up for after your world dissolves.

You can probably see why we quickly became dependent on frozen entrees from Trader Joe's.

After a year of fishsticks, pizza, and salad-in-a-bag, with its accompanist, my deteriorated cholesterol numbers, I started trying to use the kitchen more fully. But I was still a widow.

"Widowing" doesn't just involve burning. Once I got really organized and cooked extra chicken breasts, deliciously I might add, but left them in the (off) pan overnight. Cooking like a widow includes making useless grocery lists that say "chocolate, tampons, 100 other things" but no food. I would buy expensive cuts of meat that I didn't know how to cook or out-of-season produce that would spoil immediately. And I didn't want to eat any damn leftovers. I threw out the fridge as often as most of us thrown out the mail.

It didn't help that for a "timer" I would use a beer. "I'll turn down the rice when this (half-empty) beer is finished." I'm sure you can see how effective that technique is.

Perhaps bad cooking is itself a way to grieve. After all, smell and taste recall the past more vividly than other senses. It's too easy to say, "the last time we ate this, Gavin was here" or "this is the first time we've had Thai without him." The landmarks pile up. Steamed broccoli is always the same, even though our family looks different.

Perhaps cooking badly is a way widows can continue to tear their hair and beat at their breasts: a new way to mortify the flesh in agony, in memory.

But I'm out of active grieving. Now my challenge is to cook enough protein for the meaty Mr. Fresh, who's joined our table and our lives. I am remembering some skillz but I still use a beer for a timer sometimes.

Maybe we'll register for some fancy new cookware? We could still use a 1-qt and I'm in the mood for egg salad.



Disclaimer sidebar: Not all widows are shitty cooks

Some of us not only eat but also, egad!, cook well: Snickollet cooked a luscious-sounding fish dish, for a date no less, and J-in-Wales has published some wonderful recipes (one,  two,  three, and an unnumbered soup.) These plans share the virtue of simplicity, but then, in their authors' first-things-first, no-nonsense wisdom, that's no surprise.

There's also at least one recipe named for us, though it seems like an awful lot of ingredients for an actual widow to have on hand: "Widowed potatoes."

* * * Comments * * *

(Fragment 01) A Widow on Facebook

[Read my excuse for posting bits and pieces.]

Being widowed young disrupts your social networks, along with everything else. As in real life, the break is stark when you interact using Social Media:

01.
On Facebook, the freshly bereaved may be a bit disgusted to find they can choose between relationship status “single” or “it’s complicated.” The latter status may be a bigger bucket now, but as a child of the 60s, I imagine it’s used by the polyamorous and the thought of clicking that box makes me throw up a little. No, it's not fucking "complicated," you dolts. I'm not dating a goat and a girl. I was married and he died. Sounds simple enough to me.

Sure, it’s easy to offend a widow, but how hard can it be to add another check box? Hence there’s the group, “Petition for Facebook to create ‘widowed’ as a relationship status.”

02.
This group is categorized under “Dating and relationships,” which seems a bit off to me. The taxonomy of grieving is a topic that comes up often in these fragmented social media notes; I hope to pull thoughts on this together someday.

03.
Like many, I’m using Facebook to be found by old friends and to maintain relationships that were never (or aren’t now) close. But a lot of folks would just disappear after the initial contact. It’s not called “dropping a w-bomb” for nothing but seriously, how could I answer, “So! What have you been up to for the past 20 years?” without mentioning that my husband died? So I tried to prepare people a little, the way I did with my Match.com ad. Under “Info,” I added:

Friends,
Because I have had a lot of awkward FB conversations with folks who haven’t seen me in a long time, here’s a short bio:
-- I work as an editor.
-- Have had some jobs in the art world, but not now.
-- I went to college and graduated in 19xx.
-- I got married in 19xx.
-- I went to business school finishing in 20xx.
-- I had a baby in 2004.
-- My husband died in 2006.
-- I remarried in 2008.
I am comfortable talking about my loss, though it doesn't consume my life.

I have to say I don’t think it helped that much because the FB interface buries “evergreen” info. But I still like the idea, and I certainly (as you know) bring up “widow” as an early warning system in any transaction where I think it will be relevant. And I am more cautious of how I bring the topic up in that first FB "What up?!" response, given that e-mail is a less rich, less responsive medium than F2F conversation.

04.
I checked the Facebook page of an art world acquaintance a week or so after he had died. Friends continued to post wall messages, and he was a member of a group art project called “A Book About Death.” It gave me a chill. He must have joined before the accident which killed him. The only other option is that his wife signed him up posthumously, which seems unlikely (though I don’t know her well. Would I do it? Yes, but I’d use my name).

The net gets denser every day -- it seems really weird to me that I know the gallery and many of the artists working on the project.


* * * Comments * * *

Dating Episode 1.0 [October 2007]: Really Virtual

I already released my best first sentence ever. Now I get to close the tale by sharing the weirdest e-mail ever.

(This post has been moved)

* Read the next installment in this series! *


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I HATE FEBRUARY.

I shouldn’t, my daughter’s birthday is in February, and I am usually on the upswing by Valentine’s Day, even when I haven’t been in love. I can understand why red signals prosperity for the Chinese – I love seeing those cupids and hearts everywhere, drugstore windows made me smile, and the candy!

Good things have happened in February: I moved here on Valentine’s Day 1989. Childbirth, Chinese New Year, and other explosions. The evenings lighten. I find daphne and camellia and hellebore surprises consistently.

But I spent one and a half days last week convinced I’d be fired Friday afternoon. It was a level of paranoia that I don’t think I’ve experienced … ever – although I think it was also based on some decent observations. And the truth is that since I got married and didn’t need the job so much – this is the first time in my adult life that I've not been the breadwinner – I have been phoning it in, at best. I can’t handle the detail in the kind of work I used to do, which they hired me for. I don’t have the patience for it, or the eyesight. I’m impatient and stupidly unafraid to show it. And I’m bored with doing it after 10 years and I don't fit this particular environment.

And the next tasks which they’ve trained me to do seem to antagonize someone important to a degree that I can’t imagine fighting, or winning, or accommodating and hugging into some great hippie happy ending.

Combine that with all the other things that sucked the past few weeks:
-- Mr. Fresh got a notice from IRS saying he owes $17K. He was super upset. While he has been blown away by my competence and ease at hiring a professional to do tough stuff, it's a stress on a new relationship, one that has had to hit the ground running.
-- Volunteer work for church has been haywire because I couldn’t get the data I need (just got ‘em; supposed to be done tomorrow; Good effin’ luck!)
-- I got angry at one of my NIMBY neighbors and he exaggerated our conversation to the point where the community association has called and asked if it’s true that I have giant plans to destroy the character of the neighborhood. I was provoking him, I’m mad at myself, and of course, I still want everyone to like me. (And no, this will not be what makes me rich, not in the next 10 years anyway).
-- I ran out of time to schedule an art thing that will be fun, but requires preparation, and now I have to do it this weekend.
-- We got an offer from the cab company that destroyed our front yard in September and the company is in bankruptcy. We may have to settle low.
-- We reserved honeymoon tickets, but then had to confront that they cost money.

And oh yes, the economy. Yeah, that. We didn’t want to notice, but the hammer keeps getting bigger every few weeks and those whacks are beginning to smart. On the Tuesday that the stimulus bill passed and the market tanked anyway, I told someone that I felt our whole town woke up and could see the vultures circling above. Did I mention Mr. Fresh was trained as an economist? He had been pretending along with the rest of us, sanguine, it will be limited. No more.

I am pretty sure someone put itching powder under my turtleneck two weeks ago and it’s still there. So in the hallway in my great anxiety I told a friend how I hate February and she said, “Isn’t that when Gavin died?”

Nope.

He died in June. But let me think of that February. 2006. It was effin’ hell. He was dying on the couch. I could see him receding from us. I was furious and trying all kinds of futile manifestations like taking him to a neurologist, vacation, church, anything. Anything! Let it make some difference! Let it HELP! HELP.

The insight is that this loss still connects to everything in my life. Nearly three years later, I’m not in active grieving, but find a thumbtack on my chair and my first thought will be “why me” all over again. All the pain, the anger, the position of widowing comes flooding back. I’m there again, not here, not married again and better, not mothering competently, not holding down a job. There, watching someone fade and flow away from me. Unable to do a fucking thing to stop it. So sad I could kill.

The rage that sent me crying after the argument with my neighbor. Crying in Mr. Fresh's shirt: “Why do those people care what I do with my property when they never did a goddamn thing to help us after Gavin died? They were all one block away and we could have died a dozen fucking times! And they couldn’t bring one fucking casserole?”

But it’s a lie, this position, my widow’s anger. (Though it is true that widows traditionally exploit their properties. That’s another kind of rage.) The fury that made me provoke a good neighbor who is actually one of the only people who helped out that year and a half when we were dying, Short Stack and I, and who put a gate in the fence so she could play in his kid’s treehouse.

Maybe it’s rightful rage – loss sucks – but like so much in my life, it’s been misdirected.

I still expect that ax to fall, and I am still angry. But I already saw one lawn full of purple crocus, and I can work on the resume. [I am so bad at ending on a hopeful note. Ack, February!!!!]


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Pottymouth

Short Stack knows the alphabet and is learning to write it. One evening (this almost qualifies as a tantrum) she insisted that I tell her how to write the word "POOP."

It was not worth fighting.

I told her (see picture).

"Another 'a'?" she said in disbelief.

"Yes, honey, you want me to tell you how to spell 'poop,' don't you?"

I am a bad mommy.

(By the way, she wrote it boustrophedon -- the way early literate cultures did -- as the ox turns the plough. Left to right, then right to left, then left to right again.)


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By jingo!

A friend shares: She is driving her three-year-old on some fast, busy road. She misses a turnoff and exclaims, "Oh G…" (catching herself) "… golly!"

"Mommy, what does 'golly' mean?"

"It's something people say when they are surprised."

From the crease in his tiny forehead she can tell that the little wheels are turning around. Sure enough, a few minutes later, he has figured it out.

"Mommy, Mommy! Does 'golly' mean 'fuck-it?!'"