Saturday Night Widows

Becky Aikman

Preface

I got kicked out of my widows’ support group. I would say that things had gone from bad to worse, except the worst, no question, had already happened. When your husband has died while you’re still in your forties, seriously, anything less and you have to laugh.

The hallway at the Y was fairly jumping the night of the first meeting as I dashed past signs for options more likely to perk a person up: Beginning Ceramics. Make Your Own Collage. Wine and Cheese for Singles. Once, my involvement with any of these exercises in self-improvement would have seemed as unlikely as it got, but for sheer strangeness, nothing could top my actual destination. Support Group for Widows and Widowers, said the notice on the door. End of the corridor, end of the line.

Inside, the room was ridiculously mournful. There were torturous-looking folding chairs arranged in an oval and industrial carpeting the color of worn asphalt. Fluorescent bulbs cast a pickled glare over the whole affair, granting it the ambiance of a drug rehab center, or maybe a parole board. I couldn’t help wondering—how long ’til I got sprung?

Most of the other widows were already in place. Pretty much everyone, I could tell, was a couple of decades older than me. No surprise there. Widows don’t have a lot of company in my usual demographic. Still, I was gasping for a connection, any connection, with women like me, uncoupled in what now seemed like a world of couples. I was eager to meet them and start sharing positive, inspiring, even practical ideas about Moving Forward After Loss, as promised in the brochure.

There were props. A small box of tissues rested on one of the last empty seats. God, was it going to be one of those? I inched in, sat down warily, and balanced the tissues on my lap. There was nowhere else to put them. No tables, no cushions on those metal chairs, no amenities, strictly economy class. Unlike those starry-eyed singles down the hall, we widows weren’t offered refreshments. Whine without cheese, I thought, swallowing a crooked smile.

The other widows and I cut each other glances, but no one spoke a word. There were eleven—no, twelve of us, most wearing basic black. This was New York—we all had the wardrobe. So did I, of course. But tonight I had thought carefully about what to wear. It was the opposite, I hoped, of widow drab—a pale green linen skirt and skinny-ribbed tank top, with silver flats that I’d bought for dancing at a wedding when my husband was still alive. I intended this ensemble to send a signal: that I might be a widow, but I was a widow on the move, ready to march forward in stylish yet relatively comfortable shoes. Forward, whatever had happened up to now.

Or perhaps I was sending a subconscious plea: I don’t belong here. I can’t belong here. This is a cosmic mistake that will surely be corrected once somebody up there notices that I should be down the hall, rocking the macramé studio.

Aside from the women, I now saw, there was one dapper, pixie-sized gentleman, even older, giving us all the eye. Wearing elastic-waist slacks and clunky grandpa shoes, he engaged the room with sprightly curiosity. The others had the closed, raven-eyed look of a jury, keeping their sentiments to themselves. A jury of my peers? Everyone seemed somehow jumpy and dispirited at the same time, and suddenly, in that shuffling silence, so was I.

I was having one of those out-of-body moments, one of too many in the last few crazy years—at the oncologist’s office, the intensive care unit, the funeral home. Now here. What was the point of squirming in unforgiving chairs, illuminated by ghastly greenish light, with these strangers, no Chardonnay or Gouda to break the ice? I wasn’t looking for help with the grieving part of widowhood. I already had that one down. The five a.m. weeping; the stony, vacant stare. No, it was all the rest of it that I needed to tackle now. The part about what to do next. The part about who to become next.

I’d never faced such a predicament before. Everything had always been simple: I was a brisk, modern, independent woman, and I worked at a brisk, modern, independent job, as a newspaper reporter in midtown Manhattan. But I had also been half of a whole, and now, without that other half, I wasn’t certain what was left. During twenty years of marriage, my husband and I had been partners and collaborators, personally and professionally. Not a day passed, sometimes not an hour, when I didn’t call Bernie, a writer and teacher, from my office and ask, “What’s a better word for unctuous?” Or when he’d want to know, “When will you be home?” Tonight, it didn’t matter. I was a widow. No one waited for me now. Widow . . . I could barely get the word out of my mouth . . . widow. I didn’t seem to fit anyone’s definition of a proper widow, least of all my own—you know, the Ingmar Bergman version, gloomy, pathetic, an all-around, ongoing downer. Surely, I thought, sneaking another look, these other widows wanted to bust out of the stereotype as much as I did. We’d be in this together, compañeras. It had been one year and three months now since Bernie’s death, and I knew I needed to leave behind the nightmares, the heartache, the perpetual yearning for what I couldn’t have. I needed to function again, and fast. It was time to—what was that called again?—Move Forward After Loss.

Another man entered the room, closer to my age, holding a clipboard and a sheaf of papers the size of the federal budget.

“My name is Jonathan,” he said with studied solemnity. “I’m the social worker who will be leading the group.” Jonathan was a man of average height, nice enough features, and a putty-colored pallor that was shadowed with uncertainty. “First, let me say that I am sorry for your loss.” He employed the commiserative tone and hangdog look that I recognized from every encounter I’d had with everybody since the funeral.

I expected him to turn the floor over to the widows, but instead he contorted himself into one of the chairs and passed around some photocopied pages. The Stages Of Grief, said the title, by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Not these again—the Holy Grail of Pathos! Ever since Bernie died, these five stages of grief had been pushed on me by my landlady, a clerk in human resources, the cashier in a taco truck. It seemed that the whole world had heard of these famous stages and was expecting me to follow them on some sort of widowcentric timetable. In the last year, I kept checking my calendar, waiting for them to show up.

Jonathan read aloud from the handout like a tech support worker in Mumbai. There were the usual five stages, in the usual order: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. These stages, every time I heard them, made as much sense to me as computer code. Anyway, it seemed that I should have left them in the dust by now if I were adhering to a schedule. I wasn’t following any sorts of stages at all. Instead, I swung back and forth, sometimes wallowing in early-morning weeping, sometimes laughing my ass off like a normal person. Then I’d turn to share the joke with Bernie, and . . . back to the weeping again.

I was failing the stages of grief. I didn’t even understand them. I was a misfit widow.

I glanced around the circle again, seeking eye contact, a fellow misfit perhaps, but the widows were following their handouts through an assortment of reading glasses, hiding their thoughts behind invisible veils. When Jonathan finished, he passed us another tract. We were supposed to check off boxes next to symptoms like Insomnia, Crying Spells, and Difficulty Making Decisions. These were typical signs of grief and nothing to be alarmed about, he said in his mechanical voice, and I had to agree that they were a nice summation of the new, more depressing me on my worst days. He added that we were probably clinically depressed if we checked Psychomotor Retardation, Prolonged and Marked Functional Impairment, and something called, simply, Worthless.

More reading material followed, this time on Low Self-Esteem.

An hour had passed, and Jonathan said we’d have to rush through the last twenty minutes to introduce ourselves and explain how our spouses had died. I knew this was what I’d signed up for, but now my self-esteem plummeted at the thought of it. The first woman to speak launched into a graphic account of her husband’s long final illness, which involved a lot of bedpans and disputes with insurance companies. With billowing frustration, she complained that her neighbor had stopped asking how she was doing three weeks after the funeral. “I’m here because my friends don’t get it,” she concluded.

From there, others followed her lead, and the meeting devolved into a Who’s Most Pitiful contest. The widows, one by one, vented their bitterness toward friends who didn’t sympathize enough, family members who interfered too much, doctors who failed to do enough, and husbands—yes, husbands—who left too soon. Everyone’s spouse seemed to have died within the last couple of months, and I remembered my own morbid absorption in the negative at that time, but did I want to dredge it up all over again? I shuffled the stack of psycho-literature on my lap. This wasn’t at all what I’d had in mind. I’d come to brainstorm with new confidantes about what to do now. Like, what should I do with Bernie’s old jazz records? And should I try to meet another man, and if I did, where would I find one? This grim gathering was magnifying everyone’s sorrow, not assuaging it. We were cramming our personalities into the boxes on Jonathan’s checklists. Anger, check. Depression, check.

I noticed an expectant silence and looked up to see the circle of faces trained on me.

“Um, well . . . my husband died just over a year ago from a rare cancer,” I began, trying to convey the basic facts. “He managed to live for four and a half years with all kinds of chemos and surgeries and . . . everything else. The last couple years, the cancer spread to his brain, so that was . . . hard.”

I sputtered and stopped. Quick, I thought, try something else.

“What I want now,” I blundered ahead, “what I want to say is . . . well, I want to cheer up! Something awful happened to him, and to me, but I don’t want to live in some kind of purgatory for the rest of my days because of it.” I managed what I hoped was an optimistic smile. “I want to be happy again, don’t you?”

I looked from face to face, but the veils were back in place. There was a perfunctory silence, and the woman up next gave me a squinty look. “You notice there’s only one man here,” she addressed the group. “That’s because all the men are out there already, dating other women.”

“Yeah,” said the woman on my other side, jerking her thumb in my direction. “A younger one.”

Was I paranoid, or were these ladies ganging up on me?

I hoped for a break in the mournful tone when a widow directly across from me captured my attention with a dignified manner of speaking.

“I’m seventy-five years old,” she said in a measured voice. “My husband and I had fifty wonderful years together.” The rest of us nodded in respect to that achievement. “Now, I feel like my life is over.” She broke off to collect her thoughts. “But that young woman over there”—she fixed me with a murderous stare and thrust her finger straight at me across the ring of folding chairs—“she has it all! Her whole life is ahead of her! And I . . . I have nothing.” She lunged for a tissue box.

Whoa! Hold on, babe, I wanted to say. Fifty wonderful years might have been nice! Instead, I froze, stupefied. The rest of the group intervened, speaking out of turn for the first time, directing sympathetic murmurings at Mrs. Fifty Wonderful Years and slinging accusing looks at me.

Jonathan announced that time was up. Reaching for her bag, the widow beside me, the one with the squinty eyes, glanced my way. I recognized those eyes, so much like my own, unmoored but searching. Of course our circumstances were different, but here, face to face, just the two of us, I had the strongest urge to say, Hey, let’s cut the bullshit. What’s this widow business like for you? Had we met somewhere else, outside this totalitarian format, I felt sure, we could have found our way to common ground, or at least a civil conversation.

“I’ll see you next time,” she said, her features softening with a suggestion of kindness, perhaps even of apology.

The room cleared, but I stayed fixed for a moment, alone, numb in my hard little chair.

The bad juju of the support group haunted me through the night in my profoundly empty apartment. Was this the role I was expected to play? Jonathan had said we could call him with questions or concerns, so in the morning, I dialed a number he’d scrawled on his stack of papers.

“I was a little uncomfortable,” I said. “Did you notice anything strange about the meeting?”

“Yeah,” he said. “They really went after you.”

“There seemed to be a lot of hostility in the room.”

“That happens all the time,” he assured me, his voice complacent. “Especially if one of the women is younger.”

“I could have used some empathy,” I said. “I was hoping we could all share some constructive advice. Like, what do you do with your husband’s old jazz records?”

“With what?” He continued frostily, “Anger is one of the stages. People need to get it out.”

“Really? I mean, couldn’t you have said something? Like, maybe, we all have problems, but let’s try to understand and support each other, too?”

Jonathan started to sound more than a little uneasy. “It’s your group. I can’t interfere with what anyone wants to say.”

“But you spoke for more than an hour! You talked about all that depression stuff, how worthless we must feel, how inconsolable we must be. Don’t you think we know that? If we weren’t depressed before, we sure are now. Couldn’t you have said something about not attacking each other, too? You’re not a potted plant.”

Congratulations, I thought. You’ve finally achieved the anger stage!

Jonathan, it seemed, was getting there, too. “You seem really upset about this,” he said with growing resentment. “If you don’t like what the others are saying, you need to stand up for yourself. You need to put up a fight.”

“I didn’t go there to fight! I felt sorry for them! ‘My life is over,’ she said—it doesn’t get worse than that. Why would I want to pile on top of that?”

The line went quiet while we both considered our positions.

“You seem unhappy with the group,” Jonathan said at last, regaining his even tone. “Maybe you just don’t fit in. Maybe you shouldn’t come back.”

“What? I shouldn’t come back?”

“I don’t think you should,” he said. “It’s disruptive to the group to have someone be so critical.” He repeated, slowly, as if he doubted my ability to comprehend: “I don’t think you should come back.”

A white blaze of confusion silenced me. I hung up and shredded Jonathan’s dismal paperwork in my shaking hands, straining to make sense of the whole loony episode. What had just happened here? Something both weirdly sad and weirdly funny. I had been kicked out of my widows’ support group. I didn’t fit in—Jonathan had said so. I was a wife without a husband, and now I was a widow without a widows’ support group. I wasn’t like myself anymore, I wasn’t like my friends anymore, but if I wasn’t like these widows either, who was I now?

Screw Jonathan, I thought. I even said it out loud—who was to hear? “Screw Jonathan.” I wasn’t about to let this depressing guy or Elisabeth Kübler-Ross or that my-life-is-over lady tell me what I could or could not do. An idea began to form through my grief-muddled agitation. I would start my own group of widows. A renegade group! That was it—Outlaw Widows! I couldn’t help but laugh. There would be no tissue boxes. No folding chairs. No mental health checklists. We would simply live and explore and share, together and apart, out there in the world, whatever that world might hold.

I didn’t know how I’d find them, but I knew this: If I wanted to Move Forward After Loss, I’d have to round them up on my own. A support group of renegade widows...