Widows' Index

One of my many Big Ideas is a site that puts all the widow bloggers’ content together through an index.

It started after I left support group and started reading the huge variety of blogs produced by widows and widowers, especially the young ones. Despite our diversity, we share many of the same experiences so there tend to be common topics:
-- When they removed their wedding ring.
-- Their feelings at having to check “widowed” on a form, or God forbid, “divorced.”
-- When they sent their spouse’s belongings to the Goodwill (on my blog, this very casual post that is among my most visited).
-- And of course, the ever-popular, impossible-to-beat, post about First sex after death.

And then Michele Neff Hernandez told me about her project of interviewing many widows, asking the same set of questions, some of which were similar. See, that’s how I can tell she’s a genius. (Too.)

An index that connects our entries by the topics widowed people are looking for would generate traffic and share the commonalities more easily. For those of us writing blogs, it would be a great way to continue the conversations we all have informally, non-linearly, without interrupting our own narratives.

And it feeds into my other hypothesis: that young bereaved people are an underserved group, socially, economically, with certain needs that could be identified and dealt with. But that’s a Big Idea for another day.

I’ve started a list of the topics that might be included in a “widow index” of blogs – a “W-Index,” if you’ll forgive me. (No one ever does.)

I won’t bore folks with the logistics or technical details. The project could be self-building or we could each index other blogs as we wish.

This is probably too many topics, but what do you think?
Advice
Anger
Anniversaries
Anti-depressants
Art
Being single
Birthdays
Blogs and bloggers
Career and job
Church
Communities
Dating stories
Dating, online
Death
Depression
Divorce
Faith
Finances
Friends and friendships
Grief counseling
Grief, anticipatory
Grief, competiveness
Grief, complicated
Grieving Kids: age 0 to 3
Grieving Kids: age 4 to 5
Grieving Kids: Grown children
Grieving Kids: high schoolers
Grieving Kids: K-5 gr
Grieving Kids: middle schoolers
Grieving Kids: over 18
Home
Loneliness
Losses during bereavement
Loss of a child
Loss of a parent
Love
Marital status on forms
Meals
Mental Health other than depression
Milestones
Movies
Moving house
Music
Neighbors and neighborhoods
Other culture
Parents, yours
Parents-in-law
Peers
Practical advice
Religion
Remarriage
Sadness
School, your children
School, yourself
Sex
Siblings
Siblings-in-law
Skin hunger
Step parenting
Stuff, spouse’s
Support groups
Survivor guilt
Therapy
Time management
Triggers to grief
Wedding ring
Writing
Year 1
Year 2
Year 3
Year 4
Year 5
Year 6+

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The "Grief" Category: Ruminations on BlogHer09

I finally figured out what was getting me about the BlogHer conference back in July. Why I went in expecting to feel different from everyone else, and came out disappointed that the only thing different about me was that I had hoped to be left out, but no one would play along.

(I’ll leave the psychoanalysis aside for a moment and just talk about grief in blogging.)

I went to BlogHer expecting grief in blogs to be like grief in real life: a difficult issue that no one is willing to talk about. I often found myself frustrated that there was no real category for me in the indexes (BlogHer, Bloglines, Blogopedia, Technorati, AllTop, Blogarama, Scribnia… ). I’d list my blog under “family life” or “parenting” even though those choices cut me off from single widows, with whom I generally feel great comradeship.

Checking the wrong box left me feeling misunderstood. After all every widow has a story about the first time she has to check “widowed” on a form, and another about some clueless organization that expects her to select among “single,” “married,” or “divorced.”

When I was at this conference with 1300 other people, mostly women, largely Moms, who write for different publics, I found that grief in blogs really is like grief in real life: a deep vein that shows bright if you scratch the surface. A stone a lot of people are carrying in an inner pocket. You can’t see it, but they might even be fondling it while they talk to you. Grief is so common and such a part of life that it doesn’t make sense to put all those people off in a separate room.

(Leaving aside for a moment, again, that a grieving bloggers conference would be TEH AWESOME). (See. I learned blogger lingo. I’m a pro now.)

We all hope to be lucky enough to write only occasionally about our loss and adaptation. Then we could talk about other subjects: recipes, cute things our kids did, politics... the whole world. Of which grief is, yes, an important part.

Maybe we grief bloggers are just stuck. I’m sure that’s what it looks like from the outside.

Or in some HEY LOOK AT ME phase of tearing hair and rending garment. I suppose it’s a good thing that we might move on to something else.

Blogs that serve only one need for the author do tend to die out. There are abandoned grief blogs all over the place.

But my demands are often unreasonable. Maybe topical categorization is less useful for subjects that span our serious, lumpy, camouflaged, ever-changing emotional lives. Seems we bereaved people do a fairly decent job at finding one another online using the same vehicles we do in real life: through friends (and their blogrolls).

What’s so wonderful about blogs is that they are as in-between as we are. A fresh source of rich, personal information and perspectives that shows humans in all our color and glory (leaving aside, for now, the skew towards people with internet access).

If this diverse democratic distribution of words and images favors the creative, the trouble makers, those who don't fit neatly into one category, who am I to complain?


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(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.


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