Widow’s Tears
Achimenes “Such Worth is Rare”
I have never been a widow.
During a rather dark period in the middle of a heart wrenching divorce I remember having a remarkably inappropriate thought, “It must be easier for widows. No need to explain, defend or clarify the most calamitous and painful time of my life.”
That wrong headed notion rattling around in my head took place before I watched my mother become a widow. I became an intimate witness to her profound loss. The indelible mark of fifty years of marriage ran deep.
Their pragmatic match was one of opposites, my father, deeply private provided a balance to the energetic outside world my mother revealed in. Growing up I saw that they were opposite in most ways, however, I was never too young to notice a genuine love between the two and a spark of romance which never seemed to fade.
I grew up often finding my parents dancing to songs playing endlessly from the radio in the kitchen.They spent their Friday nights before children at the Moonlight Ballroom at Myers Lake, so this just made sense to me as a kid. They were having fun, getting better at dancing. I ignored them, going about my business hunting for snacks in the cupboard, sneaking a dirty dish into the sink. The faster the song the less attention paid to my covert activities. I would often wait for a fast tempo song to enter the kitchen when they were dancing. Benny Goodman was my friend.
In my teen years I must admit, I became slightly embarrassed for them as I picked up the looks, the hold, the evidence of a still lit passion. I soon stayed out of the kitchen when they were dancing. Looking back, I realize that they never fell out of love. The dance became slower over the years, but they danced until the end. It took his death, a foreseeable release after years of physical pain and suffering, to appreciate the depth of their love. The mixture of relief that he was no longer in misery, yet at the same moment devastated at the catastrophic loss.
My mother was left without her dance partner. Grief overtakes for a time. Friends and family watch and wait for any small signs that the grief is reorganizing itself from all consuming front of life to the adjacent walking companion. I was witness to my mother’s realignment to this new life which I would describe as a metamorphosis. Grief can be the fire in the furnace transforming a base metal into gold.
I witnessed my mother become a wholly independent woman, having the physical and mental strength to sort through the accouterments of her life spent in the same house since 1954. She moved across the country, built a new life with new friends in a strange city and helped me, a single mother trying to raise my son. She became active in local politics, helped provide infant clothes for mothers at the day shelter and finally navigated her own terminal illness with grace and strength. In the end her example has stayed with me, a gift from mother to daughter.