When Husbands Die

Introduction

When Husbands Die has evolved as a sharing of personal reactions, recollections and relationships by women who are living through the enormous life change they faced when, in an instant, through no action, choice or fault of their own, they became widows. It is offered in the hope that other widows will find within its pages survivors like themselves who can help them on their life journeys to the good places that are attainable.

It is also for families, to help them understand what is happening to the mother, sister, daughter they think they know so well. It is also for friends, to let them know how strong or weak, needy, isolated or emotionally exhausted their good old pals really are and will continue to be for weeks, months, and years to come.

And it is for people who are still married, to ask them—to beg them—to learn, to understand, to leave denial for a time and face the reality of their own deaths and what they can do, now, to help the one who will be left behind.

The stories told by the women who responded to the project’s questionnaire are poignant, sad, disturbing and, in many ways, healing. Every story is personal. Each person’s grief is personal; it is grief that will not be relegated to a studied, step-by-step process. Unless you have experienced the grief unique to this situation, you cannot explain what it’s like. Unless you have to live it, as several women said, you cannot understand it. There are some generalities, but grief work and recovery are open-ended.

We take our own steps. We stumble and then we go on, each in our own way. We can learn from others. The stories women are willing to share may well become vital to your own progress after the death of your husband—through your grief and mourning, through changing relationships with friends and family, through solutions of financial matters, to the necessary reinvention of yourself.

The women who shared in this project have become our friends, more than that, in the way of women, they have become our sisters. They may become yours. Their stories will bring solace and support for your own experiences and misgivings. If you do not see yourself in every response, that’s because you are not there. Each situation has its own specifics; no two are any more alike than the storytellers themselves. There are similarities; there are common threads. You will find them. You also will find humor, strength, despair, encouragement, honesty and above all, hope. Use the stories to learn about yourself: about the person you are becoming, the work you must do. More than seventy-nine women are sharing their thoughts with you to help you move from one part of your life to another. They, too, have been suddenly singled—made single—and forced into an unwanted life change: to be wives no longer, to become widows when their husbands died. Each of them had to learn to live without her lover, her best friend, her partner, her companion—and her marriage!

—Shirley McNally, Santa Fe, New Mexico

1

The Project

Begin at the Beginning

Women whose husbands have died feel a kinship. They are proof, one for the other, that survival is possible. The women who share their stories here do so in hopes that they will be of help to women who are preparing for or experiencing the months and years of trauma that follow the tragic loss when husbands die. While the mutuality of this loss is not a particularly positive beginning for a friendship, it is an opportunity to share experiences and moments of empathy or sympathy, as well as moments of great strength that may be helpful and healing.

The basis for the friendship among the three of us who began this project, Barbara Harrison Mulhern, Mary Witt Wydman and Shirley Reeser McNally, is our four years at Smith College, a women’s liberal arts institution in Massachusetts. Although we were in the same college class and knew each other, we were not close companions during those college years, nor did we maintain a relationship following graduation.

By June of 1989, when the story of this project begins, we had each outlived our husbands. Bob Wydman died in 1984, Art Mulhern died in 1986, Jerry McNally, my husband, died early in 1989. Old school friends and current strangers, Mary, Barbara and I were about to become deeply involved. Quite independently, each of us had developed concern for the many women who, like ourselves, will have to experience great loss and trauma when their husbands die and they must move to a solitary way of life after years of marriage. How we came together and what we want to share about our own experiences are part of the story.

Shirley Reeser McNally, 1991

Jerry McNally died at home, around two o’clock on the morning of February 9,1989. We had fought his cancer for three years. With his death, all of us—husband, wife, son, daughter and son-in-law—were freed from the cancer. The consequences of that death were many. One of them, a major one, was that I was no longer married. In an instant, I had become, in society’s eyes and labeling, if not yet my own, a single person. This happened because of circumstances far beyond my control. It was an appalling reality!

Soon after Jerry’s death, I began to write about my feelings: the frustrations, the problems, the misunderstandings, the despair and the changes. I made notes about the vulnerability I continued to experience, the anguish, the confusion, the deeply felt need to talk about him—and about the love and support I received from expected and unexpected sources.

I asked myself many questions. Were my reactions typical? Were the fatigue, the lack of focus, the sense of isolation, the moments of mindlessness, the intense loneliness, the sudden termination of my position as partner and caretaker, the horror of this unwanted move from married woman to widow as devastating to other women as they were to me? Did everyone experience the quick and overwhelming rush of tears? The anguish? Could I bear the awful loss of intimacy, the absence of his touching me, the impossibility of my being able to touch him in our own gentle, meaningful ways? Not to feel him next to me in bed, not to hear his breathing? The forever of it was impossible to accept.

How were our adult children dealing with their own grief? They had lost their father. What were their concerns about the new status of their mother? What did they expect of me? What could I expect of them? Our daughter and her husband were wonderfully available. Our son was silent and often absent.

Was what I was experiencing normal? Was there any norm? There was real physical pain. There were blank spaces in my memory. There were deep and sometimes illogical concerns about finances. There were far too many papers to deal with, too many important new problems to be solved, too many decisions to be made. I wished someone could take over for me, to work with the lawyer and accountant, to answer the daily mail, to do the shopping, to be there when my loneliness became unbearable.

Friends telephoned, offering invitations and assistance. Let us pick you up, they said, we’ll go to the meeting together. I had to refuse. I could not accept this particular kindness. I was appreciative but I had to drive my own car, to be able to get away, to leave at my own time. Then I could meet my need to escape from one kind of loneliness to another. I learned how to put on what one woman called my social mask—a smile on my face that would hide the feelings beneath. Days passed in a blur. Evenings were better. They led to night, darkness and oblivion when I could sleep. Many times I made it through the day only because I knew night would finally come. I lived in the past and the present—with no expectation of a future.

The man was gone. So was the marriage. I mourned both. I was angry, not about his death, not about his dying, but for having to become his widow. For me, the label is a constant reminder of a tragic circumstance. A month after Jerry died, I had occasion to consult a new physician. I could not bring myself to check the widow box then, and I continue to ignore it wherever possible. Labels have always been abhorrent to me, that one in particular. I have come to terms with single.

My daughter and her husband, who lived nearby, invited me to their home for dinner two or three times a week. We spent the evenings retelling old stories, discussing politics, books, business, friends, family—laughing when we could. Each of us was aware that life must go on despite the heavy overlay of grief we were experiencing. Their home was one place I could go and not be anxious to leave. But the leaving was terrible. I drove home weeping, even howling with grief. I was in pain. Literally, I was grief-stricken. It took two months before I could make it from their house to mine without bursting into tears.

A month later, I put myself back to work, volunteering where he and I had been involved before his illness required all our attention. I took on new responsibilities. I made plans to do things we could not because of his illness, or did not because they held no appeal for him. I made changes in the new house we had completed the previous October. I wondered if he would approve. I carried on our traditions, worried that I might fail him if I neglected any details. Then I realized I was allowing my memories of him to become restrictive. What I was doing and would do in the future could not in any way deny even a single moment of our thirty-four years together. Lighten up, I told myself. Get on with it!

Mary Witt Wydman phoned me in March of 1989—a voice from the past after a hiatus of forty-two years. Getting in touch, a whim at the time, has turned out to be a great gift for both of us. Six months earlier, Mary had purchased a house in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I live. Having read in the previous autumn issue of the Smith Alumnae Quarterly that our daughter had been married in our new home, she decided, she told me, to find out if we could revive what she remembered as a tenuous but cordial friendship. Her call had a remarkable effect on me. We are both sure that I recognized her voice. She was in town; we would have lunch. And, yes, we would find each other, no need for red carnations. The fact that Mary had not known me during my marriage gave me the opportunity to recall my earlier single self, to bring back a past identity that had included fairly successful career experiences. I believe the situation gave her an important recall opportunity as well. We began what has developed into a wonderful friendship, based on mutual past experiences but looking most often toward the future.

Throughout the summer, Mary and I discussed an idea that had been in my mind since Jerry’s death. She developed a keen interest in the project I was proposing. We found our conversations more and more focused on it and its possibilities. She encouraged me to write to Smith College about the idea. Go ahead, do it, she kept saying.

In September 1989, I wrote to Mary Maples Dunn, then President of Smith, suggesting a study of what happens when the unthinkable tragedy of a husband’s death occurs. I explained that several of us, Smith alumnae and others, were discussing the enforced and traumatic changes we experienced. Almost without exception, I wrote, these women agree with me that too little has been done to prepare us for the life changes we will encounter after our husband dies. Men die younger than women, we know this, actuarially, even if, as married women, we don’t want to think about it. Mary Dunn replied that the college was interested, and that I would hear from Nancy Steeper, Director of the Alumnae Association, to discuss your idea.

I sent copies of my letter to our class secretary, asking her to forward them to the other class officers. Barbara Harrison Mulhern responded immediately. The concept Mary and I had in mind matched her conviction that more must be done to help married couples prepare for the eventuality of a death. She based her interest on her own experiences before and after her husband, Art, died in 1986. Barbara and I had lived in Comstock House at college, and, as with Mary, our relationship had been pleasant, but we had made little effort to keep in touch after graduation. We did enjoy meeting once at a pre-reunion Alumnae College session many years ago. Now we would begin a new relationship—a project of sharing what happens to women when husbands die.

On August 28, 1990, Barbara, Mary and I met with Nancy Steeper at the college in Northampton, Massachusetts, to decide if there would be a first, practical step. Nancy mentioned that she had not experienced the death of any close family member. Consequently, much of what we had to say took her into new territory. At the end of a very long conference, we four committed to the project under the auspices—a somewhat vague connection—of the Alumnae Association. When Husbands Die would begin as soon as we could develop the questionnaire.

In the introduction to the questionnaire, I wrote that by the spring of 1991, I had moved past the second year of being single. Some aspects of my life, I noted, are better; some remain unhealed. My sadness continues, as does my dislike of being so often alone. The most poignant reminders of Jerry’s absence occur when there is something wonderful I would like to share with him, and it is diminished because I cannot.

I explained that every day, my faith, my family and my friends are helpful. I will always be grateful to our best friend, widowed several years before. She continues to be my guide. Carey, our black and white Cocker Spaniel, is my constant companion. She dispels the emptiness in my home, welcoming, protecting, amusing—and loving unconditionally. I find it interesting that her breeders named her Carey, I’m a Survivor. Her demands are therapeutic for me. She has permitted me to retain a semblance of my past role as caretaker and provider. I continue to write about what is happening to me. I am beginning to look with some joy toward the possibilities of the future.

Now years later, I am well and I am busy. I live in the same house that, much to my great good fortune, has become part of a two-house compound I share with my daughter, Elizabeth, and her husband. This has turned out to be a remarkably successful arrangement for all of us I am both delighted and relieved to be able to say. My little dog, Carey, is no longer with me. Elizabeth and Rob have a poodle and a cat whose care and company I share. More of my story is woven into the pages of this project as commentary and example. It has been impossible for me to put the material together without incorporating what I have experienced and learned since that early morning of February 9, 1989.

Barbara Harrison Mulhern, 1991

Let’s face it: there is no way anyone can fully prepare herself or himself for what happens with the death of a spouse. The emotional trauma is far too strong. I think, however, that all of us who have been through it can identify certain experiences, people or events that helped to get us past the days of stunned shock, disbelief and grief.

At the time of Art’s death, I felt fortunate that I had had a married lifetime of handling the household money. I knew about our investments, our retirement arrangements and how to prepare the income tax forms—partly because Art wanted me to and partly because, many years before, I had listened to a friend who was widowed in her thirties. She insisted that I prepare myself for the eventuality, at least on the subject of finances.

In the six weeks between Art’s final diagnosis and his death, we were, with the help of a lawyer, able to review and simplify our legal affairs. I removed relevant documents from the safe deposit box, such as insurance policies, pension papers, Navy discharge papers, and anything else we knew would be needed to settle his affairs. We did not realize I would need the original of our marriage certificate to set up receipt of my widow’s pension from Social Security.

Our daughter Pegeen was at our home the week before Art died. Our wise and caring oncologist made time to counsel her and to suggest some things that she should get me to do during the final days. Macabre as it may seem, he suggested that I read Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Illyich. He also insisted that I quietly make funeral arrangements and write Art’s obituary before his death. I acted on and was glad for both suggestions.

I am still grateful to the doctor for his honesty. He did not pussyfoot about the prognosis and, when he knew the end would come sooner than he had first thought, he strongly urged that we move up the date of a planned family gathering. It was a bittersweet weekend for us all, with much laughter and many tears: one we will not forget.

My six children and their spouses were exemplary during Art’s illness. Each found time to settle old disagreements, to share memories and old jokes, and to say good-bye. In spite of their own grief, their concern seemed to be for the two of us.

Living in a small town where everyone knows your business can be a plus. Even people who did not know me well cared about what was happening to us. The pats on the shoulder in the grocery store, the friendly hugs from Gary at the video rental shop meant more than the donors ever knew.

Neighbors, old friends, hospice volunteers and nurses, our good friend and priest all did many things to help me get through those early weeks, but much of my strength came from Art, himself. In the way of the Irish, he was never able to talk about his own death, even when it was imminent. He did, however, make it quite clear to me that I was not to look back, that I should look ahead and make a new beginning, a new life for myself.

Four years after Art’s death, I took stock of Barbara Harrison Mulhern for the purpose of this story and this project. Those four years had been ones of enormous change and growth for me. I turned 61 just