15. W.I.D.O.W.

"'You'll get over it.'  It's the cliches that cause the trouble.  To lose someone you love is to alter your life forever.  You don't get over it because "it" is the person you loved.  The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes.  How could it?  The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death.  This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no one else can fit.  Why would I want them to? 

~Jeanette Winterson

According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, a widow is defined as "a woman who has lost her husband by death and usually has not remarried."  And there it is.  In the very definition of "widow" itself is this obsession with remarriage that becomes almost like a war cry among friends and families who don't know what else to say to make us feel better.  People started mentioning the possibility of remarriage to me within only weeks of Jon's death.  It was a taboo topic, and yet also a mantra for those who wanted me to hurry up and glue the pieces of my broken life back together.  Did they not understand that my heart is no longer mine to give to someone else?  That it belongs to Jon and always will?  That if I were to remarry, I would lose some very precious, basic rights, like the right to be buried with Jon at Arlington National Cemetery?  That, according to the dictionary definition, I would technically no longer be considered a widow?  And yet, I will always be Jon's wife.  So if I'm his wife, not a widow, and remarried, what exactly does that make me?


I got close to remarriage once - or so I thought.  I believed I was ready and that he was worthy of that kind of love and commitment, but, luckily, I discovered just in time that neither of these two things were true.  I guess I should have known better when the guy complained about me wearing my wedding rings from time to time.  Another of the guys I dated told me he was afraid that, between him and Jon, I would always choose my husband if given the choice.  Well, no kidding.  Are you seriously going to tell me that you're jealous of the love I continue to have for a man who was so suddenly and unfairly taken from me at a time in my life when I couldn't have been happier?  That was back when I struggled with my feelings on faith and, despite desperately wanting to, I wasn't sure if I believed in the concept of heaven; this same guy adamantly insisted that there is no such thing, that this life is all we get and there's nothing after it but darkness and dust.  Well, thanks.  That's encouraging.  The only thing any of the three guys I dated told me that made sense was that, in his estimation, 8 out of 10 guys couldn't handle dating a widow.  Well, I guess I can see why now.  How does one even begin to fill the shoes of a man whose memory and presence are still so much a part of my life?  Who is and will always be so much of who I am?  When I think about it that way, I'm not sure I could do it either.  


In an article written in May of 2011, several recent young widows were interviewed regarding the American Widow Project (AWP), an organization founded in 2007 by Taryn Davis to reach out to the newest generation of grieving war widows.  As Leah Eischen, 23, of Lincoln, Nebraska stated, "everyone expects us to move on and get married again...[but] that's not how we feel.  Our outlook [on] it was that it was our choice to be with that person forever.  A lot of the women don't want to get married again.  They committed to their husbands for their whole lives."  Tara Fuerst said people always want to "fix" her:  "Nobody likes to see a 22-or 23-year-old widow, and people by nature want to "fix problems or people," she explained.  "In reality, I think we just need someone who can listen and understand what we are going through versus trying to tell us how to deal with it or how to move on with our lives."  Perhaps most poignant is Taryn Davis' own statement that the first thing she changed was her address book because she had "lost friends and lost touch with a lot of people.  They gave up on how to deal with me.  When Mike was killed and I was handled that flag, I knew this wasn't the end.  I'm not going to stop talking about him and I'm not living in the past because he made me the person I am today.  We have to put in a lot of effort to make people understand [that]."  (see full article at http://spousebuzz.com/blog/2010/05/reaching-out-to-military-widows.html#ixzz1qHS8cH1X)


Glory, glory, hallelujah!  Do you hear what those other women are saying?  Do you see that it's not just me who feels this way?  This is evidence, proof (and I'm studying to become a lawyer, so this is important stuff!) of the fact that I'm not crazy and I'm not alone.  I am a widow.  W.I.D.O.W.  This country has fought two wars for over ten years now...and since less than 1% of the population has volunteered for service in the military during this time of war, just try to imagine for a moment how the fraction of that 1% whose wives have been forced to pick up the pieces and continue on without them feel when the memories of their fallen heroes are met with uncomfortable silence and cheesy words of comfort.  As much as I hate to see other young women join the ranks, I recognize that it will take a lot of us to effectuate a meaningful change in people's sentiments and attitudes toward the idea of the young widow who still, in the minds of the general public, has "so much life left to live."  It's true, we do have a lot of life left to live.  So let us live it by commemorating the men who made it worth living.  And leave the "moving on" and remarriage crap out of it.