Widowish: A Memoir(40)

Who else will I even be attracted to? Who else will I want to open my heart to? Who other than Joel will even come close to understanding me?

I was intrigued by what the psychic had told me about someone new, but I had no idea who she meant. When I’d mention to Ellie that the psychic said there’s a new man on the horizon and he’s someone I already know, we would laugh over who it might be.

“Maybe it’s that taxi driver we met in Vegas. He literally wouldn’t take his eyes off of you. Remember? We almost got killed!” she’d say, laughing.

“Yes,” I’d say, “but that was a woman, not a man.”

“Then maybe it’s that doctor of Joel’s? The one you’d call Prince Charming?”

Joel had had a doctor on his MS team who literally looked like a prince from a Disney movie. Long dark hair, strong jaw, athletic build.

“He’s too young and has no children. The psychic said the new guy has a son,” I’d remind her.

“Hmm,” Ellie would wonder. “What would Joel do?”

“I don’t know,” I’d say.

“Joel!” Ellie would say looking toward the sky. “We need you!”

“We do, but let’s not bother him with this.”

“Oy,” she’d say. “This is all too much.”

“Way too much,” I’d agree.

Life was moving forward without Joel. We lived in the same house. I drove the same car and slept in the same bed, but everything was different. It was confusing. Like being lost in a place that was entirely familiar. It was as if all of a sudden, everyone started speaking a different language . . . Imagine every street sign, every piece of mail, every instruction manual, every song, every conversation was now in another language. You never learned this other language, but since everything else was still the same, you just forged ahead and managed somehow. Then one day, you realized, Hey, everything is the same, but totally different! And you had that thought in the new language. That’s where I was in the grief process. I was living my life in this new language. I was still learning it, getting the hang of it, but it was sounding more and more familiar.

I noticed that with Allison. Whenever I met another widow or widower (I like to call them wisters—widow sisters and widow misters), we spoke the same language. It’s based in grief and resilience, a knowing we’ve been to the same place.

My Spanish friend Maria did Clooney with me one day. She wanted to go off the main path to a different one, a harder climb, the end of which had a waterfall in a lush pasture. I’m sure it was beautiful. I’m sure the extra bit of exercise would have done me good. But as we huffed and puffed our way up the original mountain trail, I said to her, “I don’t think I can make it. Not today, but let’s do it another time.”

“Oh, come on,” she pleaded, “you can do it!”

“I know I can, but this is hard enough right now.”

She stopped midstride, thoughtful.

“Do you know something?” she said. “You are right. For you, everything is difficult right now. So you know what?” she asked. “You’re making the right decision. You need to take it easy. From now on, everything you do, choose easy.”

“Easy?” I asked.

“Yes! Every thought, every task, every chore, do whatever is easiest for you,” she said. “You lost your husband. What is harder than that?!”

“True,” I said.

“I mean it,” she said, shaking her index finger. “I think we are onto something with this.”

We continued up the hill. I liked the sun on my face, the soft breeze through the trees. It felt peaceful. Maria understood that just living my life every day was difficult because Joel was no longer in it. So the idea of making everything easy struck me as a solution to the weight I felt I had been carrying around since he died. I felt heavy and tired all the time, even when I was doing things I enjoyed. That was grief. But maybe I didn’t need to push myself to do the things I found difficult just because I thought I should be doing them.

I’d feel guilty using the dishwasher when there were only two of us at home now. But making things easy meant I would use the dishwasher more often. That was easier than washing every plate, fork, and glass that piled up in the sink. It meant alleviating my meal planning stress by accepting that we would eat more frozen pizza and ready-made salads. Easy meant I didn’t feel compelled to answer every email and text the minute I received one.

Making things easy meant that I could give myself permission to admit that losing my husband was the hardest thing I’d ever been through, and that I was doing the best I could.



Marcos told me that he had exactly a half an hour to spend looking through our music equipment. We had texted the day before, and I was glad to be moving forward. I got the impression that Marcos was a busy guy. In addition to his music, teaching and playing gigs around town, I knew he was involved with the food pantry and neighborhood church, which is also where he lived and taught music—in a bungalow in the back. A few years earlier, shortly after meeting him and talking about him with some other parents, I thought I knew his whole story.

“Hun,” I said to Joel one night when we were getting ready for bed. “I bet Marcos is in Alcoholics Anonymous.”

“I don’t know,” he said, flossing his teeth, not really interested. “Maybe.”