6. Things NOT to say to a military widow

"Death leaves a heartache no one can heal; love leaves a memory no one can steal."
~Unknown 

When I first lost Jon, I didn't know how to let anyone help me.  I retreated behind an emotional wall and kept almost everyone in my life at arm's length.  I didn't have the energy to get mad and tell them that nothing they said helped anyway.  Their words of comfort sounded stilted, cliche, insulting even to Jon's memory.  They may have known or even loved him too, but he was my rock, my future, and that future was gone.  The only person I wanted to talk to about how I was feeling was the one person I couldn't talk to ever again.  Trying to wrap my mind around how the world could continue to function without Jon's presence baffled me, and I spent hours each day just trying to comprehend what cannot be understood logically by the overly analytical human brain.


Even when I was surrounded by people, I still felt alone in my thoughts and alone in my grief.  I resented that friends and family could show up for the funeral, shed a few tears, and then had the luxury of going back to their everyday lives with few discernible consequences.  I wanted nothing more than to curl up in a tiny ball and disappear because the shell of a life that remained after the dust settled on my new reality didn't seem worth living.  I felt sure that I would now be "punished" with a very long (emphasis on the long) and lonely life without him.  Jon would never be a father.  We would never get to celebrate our first...or fiftieth wedding anniversary together.  He wouldn't be around to see me graduate from law school.  "Our" house suddenly became "my" house.  I didn't feel "single" by any stretch of the imagination and yet I was suddenly categorized that way.  Whenever I filled out a form that didn't offer the option of "widowed" for relationship status, I would pencil it in myself.  Or just circle "married" because in my heart I am still and always have been Jon's wife.  There is simply no way to sugar-coat or change that reality.  There wasn't anything people could say five years ago to make it better and there is also little they can say now.  It's sad, just sad, and although it often makes people visibly uncomfortable when I tell them what happened, I've learned (after making this mistake for the last few years) that I don't need to apologize for that fact.  They cannot understand...and hopefully they will never have to.


I realized recently that I took off my wedding rings too soon.  Although I've worn them from time to time on especially difficult or meaningful days, I  took them off before I was truly ready and I regret it.  At the time, I was trying to please others (another mistake I have made all too often) and prove to them that I was making progress and moving forward.  A few weeks ago, I retrieved my wedding ring from its box and now wear it again on the finger where it belongs.  It gives me comfort and represents what I think of as the best time of my life, a time of true happiness.  The greatest part is that I don't really care what people have to say about it, if and when they notice - I'm doing it for me.  


What I do care about, however, are some of the things people think, for some inexplicable reason, they should say to comfort a grieving military widow.  I'm still no expert when it comes to what you should say, but I could undoubtedly write a book about all the things you shouldn't say.  I think by this point I've heard them all, but these are a few of the big ones:


(1)  "You are so young...you'll move on and find someone new."


Okay, when is everyone going to get that I don't want someone new?  It's not like getting a new pair of shoes when the old ones wear out!  I want my husband.  Case closed.  And at this point, I speak from experience when I say I have serious doubts that anyone will ever measure up to Jon's caliber.  Initially, I was open-minded - I didn't cling to the notion that I'd be a widow forever and I gave relationships a try over the past few years.  Three relationships, three massive disappointments.  In each case, I tried to convince myself that he was just as good a man as Jon was; I even believed at one point that Jon would have approved of my choice in a partner, but my gut instinct always told me that something just wasn't quite right.  The first I rushed into much too quickly, which probably doomed it from day one.  That relationship may literally have saved my life at the time, but it came at the cost of losing what could otherwise have still been a meaningful, treasured friendship.  The second was the definition of poor judgment, plain and simple - he was wrong for me on so many levels, I was vulnerable and confused, and I rushed into it yet again without thinking things through.  The last and most recent takes the cake for all-time disasters of relationships - after finally feeling ready to open up to the possibility of getting married again and having children with this man, I discovered that he had been lying to me for the better part of our entire relationship.  Besides the fact that he was unfaithful to me from the beginning, I also had the great fortune of finding out that there was no "divorce"as he claimed, and he was in fact living with his wife and their kids in another state.


So, in light of all that, forgive me if I don't really find this whole "young" and "someone new" thing particularly comforting.  I'd quite frankly rather be alone for the rest of my life, long though that might be, than settle for anything less than what Jon and I were lucky enough to share together.  It's taken me five years to get to this point, but I finally realize that I never gave myself enough time to tackle my grief because I was so frantic and focused at the time on recreating a life that simply didn't exist.  I thought I had to figure out how to start over right away, that I couldn't wait to seek out happiness if I ever hoped to find it again.  No more.  I'm young, yes.  But I am still deeply in love with my husband and I miss him every single day.  Death didn't change that.  Uncomfortable though it may be, the grieving doesn't stop when most people think or wish it would.  So I'm afraid you can't tell me just to get back out there and "find someone new."  I know it's not what most people want to hear, but it just doesn't work that way.


(2)  "You won't always think of yourself as a "widow."


Really?  Interesting...so how does that work exactly?  After X number of years since Jon's death, I'm  magically just "single" again versus "widowed?"  Again, I understand that our instinct as human beings is to package everything up with a pretty bow and a happy ending.  But being a "widow" isn't a sickness.  It's not contagious - you can't catch it from me.  There's no need to shirk away from the term "widow" just because it sounds scary or because I'm technically categorized by a term that is usually reserved for people 60 years my senior.  Being a widow is a hard enough reality for me to swallow, so it drives me crazy when people try to minimize that title in order to make me - or maybe themselves - feel better.  As Phillipe Aries wrote in Western Attitudes Toward Death, "a single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty...But no one longer has the right to say so aloud."


At my age, many people have never been married, much less widowed, and yet here I am - Jon and I met when I was just 18, we were engaged by the time I turned 20, our wedding took place just a couple of months before my 22nd birthday, and I was notified of his death a few months before I turned 23.  Some people have pointed out that I was very young to get married when I did, but I never felt for a moment like I was missing out on something or settling down too soon.  When you find a man as rare and incredible as Jon, you don't tell him "hey, honey, would you mind waiting around for me while I go out and have a good time so I can say I enjoyed being young?"  I found him early on in life...and I always thought that was a wonderful thing, not something I had to justify.


Today, I find it very difficult to relate to others my age.  It's not that I'm claiming to be older and wiser or superior in some way; my perspective has simply been shaped by some life experiences that I wish I didn't have to have.  Unless you've been lucky enough to find that perfect person without whom you feel you simply cannot live...and then lose them, it's impossible to comprehend.  Ironically, I was "too young" to get married back then and I'm "too young" to be widowed now.  I can't seem to win on this one.  But don't tell me I won't always be a widow.  It's part of who I am, and denying me the credit for struggling through the heartache of losing my husband is actually more hurtful than it is helpful.


(3) "At least you and your ex-husband didn't have kids."


There are so many things wrong with that statement.  First of all "ex-husband" is a term reserved for divorce.  Jon and I did not get divorced - at no time did we decide to end our relationship or terminate our marriage.  In fact, there was no choice whatsoever in what happened, and that's what makes all of this so painstakingly difficult.  And not having kids?  Yeah, no kidding.  We didn't have the chance!  It's certainly not because we didn't want them.  In the last card Jon sent me on Valentines Day of 2007 he wrote about how he was so looking forward to watching our unborn children grow up as we grew old together and enjoyed the simple pleasures in life.  By a cruel twist of fate, however, those children do not exist and Jon will never know the joys of old age.  My "widow friends" have often told me that they don't know how they'd continue to get up out of bed every morning if it wasn't for their kids.  I realize, of course, that raising children without a father is a type of heartbreak in and of itself.  But I would literally do just about anything to still have a little piece of Jon here with me today.  All of the personal and professional success in the world does not even begin to make up for that loss.


So I ask you - am I being punished here for being too careful?  For not accidentally getting pregnant when I was 18?  For trying to be responsible, pursue an education, and build a financially stable life with my husband before bringing the children I've always wanted into this world?  Those questions probably sound ridiculous, right?  Well, just imagine how ridiculous it sounds to me when someone tells me I'm lucky that my "ex-husband" and I didn't have kids.


(4)  "Don't worry, it will be okay - you are so strong!  God only gives you as much as He thinks you can handle."


Never tell a widow that it's okay.  It's never okay.  It may be the hand I was dealt in life, but it's not okay that my husband is gone.  And why did God have to pick me to handle this?  What are you going to tell me next, that there's also a reason for everything?  That it wasn't meant to be?  That there's a reason my sweet, loving, 25-year-old husband died when our life together had barely begun?  I'm still waiting for someone to give me a good reason for that one.  Looking back now, I think about how I was always so excited for the time that Jon and I would finally have that little house we'd been dreaming about...I couldn't wait for when we would wake up together every morning and go to sleep in each other's arms and never again have to miss any birthdays or Christmases due to deployments or Army training.  Little did I know that those days of eager anticipation would turn out to be the best days of my life.


The fact is that what we can handle is simply unknown until we have no choice but to handle it.  Grief is far from a nice, neat, linear process.  X amount of time does not equate to X amount of recovery.  The people who think I seem to be doing "okay" and say that I'm "strong" are not there with me in my worst moments of heartache and loneliness - they only see what I let them see.  When people ask how I'm doing, I know they don't really want to know that I'm feeling really crappy today because I can hear the sound of my husband's contagious laughter in my head but I'll never hear it again in real life.  They're not with me here at my house when I'm alone at night and all I have left of Jon are pictures and cards and letters and a wedding video that breaks my heart every time I see my husband smiling and walking around as though he's still right here with me.  I especially love when people tell me that they don't know how I do it and that they could never do it themselves.  Well, it's not like I have many options.  As much as I sometimes wish I could, I can't back go back to the store and tell the God of life stories that I don't like mine too much anymore and would like to trade it in for a new one.


(5)  "I understand exactly how you feel.  I lost my [fill in the blank with a noun other than 'husband']."


At this point, I think the fact that most people just don't get it is probably pretty well established.  But what really kills me (no pun intended) is when people try to reach out and relate in a way that adds insult to injury.  My favorite is when losing a husband is lumped in the same category as losing a grandparent or an aunt or uncle or cousin or friend - pretty much anyone who doesn't represent a part of your day-to-day life, who doesn't constitute the other half of who you are, and who doesn't share your dreams in the present and your hopes for the future.  I have lost grandparents.  I have lost friends.  The loss of a grandparent is, without a doubt, devastating, but in the natural progression of life, we expect to lose those who are older than us in the years before it's time for us to go too.  What we don't expect to lose is a 25-year-old husband.  And being told that only the good die young does not begin to ease the depth of that sorrow.


The one "exception" to this rule is, of course, the loss of a child.  In talking extensively with Jon's parents (with whom I am still very close), I've come to appreciate that the two types of loss cannot be quantified or compared.  This is not, however, apparent to everyone.  At the reception following Jon's funeral, a family friend took both of my hands in her own and told me that "the only thing worse than losing a spouse is the death of a child."  At the time, I was too shell-shocked to respond, but the memory of that moment never ceases to amaze me.  When I think back on it now, I wonder how she could possibly have thought this statement would be of some comfort to me.  Had she personally experienced both types of losses and carefully weighed the pros and cons of each?  Does she know what it's like to think of time as a spectrum of "before" and "after" I lost Jon?  To see a date and think to myself "oh, he was alive then" or "oh, that was after he died?"  To find myself comforting other people when they apologize for "bringing it up" when apparently what they don't realize is that they're not bringing up anything I don't think about every waking moment of every single day?  To have someone send me a picture of Jon I haven't seen before and allow myself to pretend for just a moment that the picture was taken yesterday and that he'll be coming home any day now?


Even among those of us who have lost our husbands, there are vast differences.  We all have our own stories and can't truly understand certain specific aspects of each other's grief.  One widow I know was married for almost 20 years with two teenage daughters when her husband was killed.  Others were like Jon and I and thought they still had their whole lives ahead of them.  Some women were separated from their husbands and had hopes of reconciling when their husbands returned home from deployment.  I have found, however, that our experiences in dealing with the stupid things that people say are relatively uniform across the board.  Those of us who find ourselves in this unfortunate, unwanted position could probably sit and talk for hours about the lack of insight that even the most seemingly intelligent of people exhibit at times. Over a glass or two of wine, my widow friends and I have done just that, and I cherish those moments.  It helps to know that you're not so alone...and to laugh a little at shared sorrows.  I have no doubt there will continue to be many more things people say for us to talk about together in the future.  Uncomfortable though it may be for others, we're here and we're proud beyond words of the men we lost.  While we live, they live.  And we're not going anywhere.