Coping, Not Moping Widows Need Time To Get Accustomed To Aloneness
One afternoon last summer, I had a glass of wine with three women whom I adore. They are of my mother’s generation and, like her, have been widowed for several years. After being married at least half a century, they are still getting accustomed to aloneness.
Betty said her house feels like another person to her, as familiar as a warm body - especially when all its lights are on. She keeps them burning most of the time. Like blood flowing to the limbs, electricity invigorates her home. A house, she added with charming drama, needs its lights on in the same way a woman needs her makeup on.
The other women agreed. Light is essential and, for all its shortcomings, TV is a godsend. It’s also a more intelligent companion these days because of the many choices now available.
“I’m sure my utility bill is higher than it needs to be,” Betty said with a wink. “But that’s the price of companionship.”
These women aren’t the moping kind. They’re coping - in as many ways as their health and mobility allow - with something almost impossible to imagine during our career and/or child-rearing years: too much time alone.
For a while after their children leave home, parents can be heard confessing giddily how good it feels to wave goodbye when kids who’ve been home from college head back to school. Their rooms revert to neatness, the hum of me-me-me-me ceases, and the parents pick up with lives of their own that in many cases they’re just discovering they have.
Of course, children can’t fathom this. With withering chagrin, I think back on that first Thanksgiving holiday after my brother, sister and I had all left the nest. Home from my senior year in college and sure my parents must be wildly lonely, I suggested that they adopt a Vietnamese orphan.
My dad, in his 60s then, hit the roof. I was stunned to discover that my parents had lives apart from us.
Lives apart from is a phrase that swings in and out of our days as long as we live. As teens we want to be apart from our families, but close to our friends. After the kids move out, a little solitude is welcome - but not too much. We know that by late in life, we may find ourselves too much apart from the world.
One of those three women, Evelyn, laughed about the year shortly after her husband retired. She had a driving range built in the back yard for his birthday. She was shocked that he wasn’t thrilled with this elaborate gift. Not only did he prefer the view of the trees that had been chopped down to accommodate it, but also he loved the sociability of getting out of the house to play golf with his buddies.
In contemporary mid-life, working men and women are redefining the perks of work, one of which is the social life. Work is more stimulating than laundry. It’s where cross-pollination of ideas occurs. It’s where we gossip, laugh and keep up.
The comic strip “Sally Forth” recently toyed with the guilt wives and moms feel upon discovering how much they enjoy their workplace as a refuge.
It has taken roughly 20 years - since the full-time career woman/ mom/wife role became the norm - for women to discover this, what men have always known.
But it has taken far less time for the new kind of worker - the telecommuter or cottage industrialist, who is often male - to discover that the technological liberation of working in bare feet and T-shirt and during whatever hours suit you is offset by a deafening isolation.
As organizing principles of our life, aloneness and sociability may not measure up to health, integrity and financial security, but day in and day out, they are part of the balance of a happy life. Driving home this point was a passage that I found years ago, suggesting Three Needs of Daily Life:
To give care as well as get it.
Spontaneity and surprise.
Companionship and touch.
In many ways our culture is beset by futility, indifference and despair. But this emerging emotional intelligence, recognizing our need for each other and for bringing all the parts of our lives into harmony, is progress above all.