Meema

We met a year ago, and are getting married next May.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since I got engaged a few weeks ago. When I married my late husband I kept my maiden name, but when he adopted my son a year later, it was very important to him that we all have the same last name, so I took his last name and kept my maiden name as my middle name. I’m dreading the hassle of changing my name again, but it feels like I’d be not fully committing to my new husband if I didn’t. My son is a grownup now, so sharing a last name doesn’t feel that important anymore. I think what I’ll do is change my last name to my new husband’s, keep my late husband’s name as my middle name, and ditch my maiden name altogether.

I just saw this. I am very sorry.

Congratulations!

I've been dating a widower for 4 months now. He just reached the one year mark, I'm closing in on 7 years. I think the difference in our length of times of being widowed has worked well for us. He can still be overwhelmed by emotion at times, but I have enough distance that it doesn't scare me--been there, done that, I know it gets better--and he's helped me process my own grief in deeper ways than I thought I could or needed to. I'm also very glad that he's in therapy, goes to a grief group once a month, and has close friends, so I'm not his only source of support. That would be overwhelming to me. He's a sensitive person who feels things deeply, as am I, and we understand each other pretty well. I'm the first person he's been with since his wife died, though I think he'd been looking for a few months before we met. I started dating at about a year, slogged through my share of creeps and losers until I met this lovely man. We talked about grief quite a lot in the first month or so, then I think we both got tired of it at the same time, and the subject crops up much less frequently now. We both knew pretty quickly after we met that this was the real deal. The challenge has been to find the right pace of moving forward and not rush too quickly into talk of living together, marriage, etc. Neither of us is at all ready for that, and we're both happiest when we can stay in and appreciate the moment, enjoy what we're feeling now, and not worry too much about the future. I've made it clear that I'm not giving up the life I've struggled to build for myself over these years. I think he still has some work to do on that, which is okay. My son is a grownup, he doesn't have any children, and in many ways we're free to build whatever kind of a relationship that works for us. It's kind of awesome.

I didn't know who I was for about 4 1/2 years after my husband died. Then slowly I started to notice that I felt like me again. But a different me than I was before.

It was six years for me in March. I’ve dated, but nobody I wanted to stay with for very long, a couple who were actually quite awful. I’m learning to be okay alone. I have good friends, I’ve started a new business, I travel a lot, which I love. My life is very different than it would have been if my husband was still alive. I miss him every day, but that previous life I had with him is starting to feel like a long time ago. I recently had to put down the two dogs we got together almost 13 years ago. It was so hard, and so sad, but a relief, and freeing, at the same time, and it feels like both another ending and new beginning of I don’t what, which is sort of, maybe, possibly, okay. Maybe even better than okay. I don’t even try to predict anymore.

“I would wish that even though he refused to accept that he was dying, that he would have left something for our kids. A recording, a note, a letter, anything.” Yes. I’d forgotten that. I spent months combing through all his things, over and over, his computer and phone, searching for a message, anything for me or our son.

This is a sore spot for me. We had two years to prepare between his diagnosis of stage 4 pancreatic cancer and his death, but my husband was unable to accept or make peace with the fact that he was dying, and any preparations we made were ones I came up with on my own and had to insist on or sneak past him. He had never gotten around to writing a will. I had to insist on that, reasoning that it was something he should have done anyway, and that I would do needed updates to mine at the same time. Still, he did it grudgingly, grumbling that I was jinxing him. He refused to give me most of his passwords while he could, and then he was too zonked on pain meds to remember them. I wish I had insisted on that. There was a short period of time between when it was clear he’d never drive again and when he couldn’t be left alone at all, that I got him to sign papers to trade in his car for one more appropriate for our son to inherit. I had to promise that of course we’d get him a new car when he “got well”. That saved time and hassle and my son was able to then drive himself to school when I could barely leave the house. I wish we had put the house in my name only. Six years later the insurance company is still refusing to change the policy into just my name for some archaic reason I couldn’t have predicted. Our finances weren’t that complicated, and showing the will and death certificate made most things fairly easy. Luckily I was advised to get at least 10 copies of the death certificate—that came in handy, and I ended up getting 10 more. The utilities were all in my name anyway. The practical stuff I don’t remember as being very big deals, but I wish more than anything that we’d been able to talk honestly about his impending death. We had an open and honest relationship where we could and did talk about everything—except that. It still hurts. He was completely aware of the physical facts, but somehow convinced himself that if he believed hard enough, and everyone around him, especially me, believed too, that somehow he’d pull through. Then he was mentally gone, zonked on painkillers, months before he was physically gone. The man I knew and loved was gone before his body died, and I feel like I never really got a chance to say goodbye or get permission to go on living. His sixth death anniversary is coming up in a few weeks, and I’m feeling pretty raw this year, partly I think because I’ve been dealing with living alone with a fractured foot, and the pain and limited mobility just amplifies my loneliness more than usual. I don’t know if any of this helps your discussion, but it’s been helpful to me to write it out.

Fuck that I fractured my foot and I have to deal with it by myself and there’s so much fucking snow and ice I’m afraid to leave the house. Fuck it all.

I hit five years a month ago. It was really hard for me, too. Not as bad as the first year, but close.

I hear you. I'm in a similar situation. For two years I've been seeing off and on a man who says he loves me but is incapable of meeting my emotional needs or acting in ways that feel like love to me. We've broken up several times, and I've briefly dated other people, but I keep coming back because he's by far the best I've found in the last 4.5 years, he's fun to do stuff with sometimes, and it's been better than being alone. I don't know, though. Recently the balance has shifted, the frustration and hurt have built up so that I think I might be better off alone forever than putting up with any more of this shit. I'm finding it very difficult to put that into action, though. Makes me feel kind of sad and pathetic. And really, really lonely.

I still get mail occasionally for the wife of the man we bought this house from. I think she died around 2002.

Me too.

I've been chatting off and on tonight with someone on okcupid, silly light-hearted stuff, until he just asked me if I'd ever been slapped around by a man before. Nope. No thanks. BLOCKED

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. At 3 1/2 years, I mostly put on a really good show of being fine now, so good I even believe it myself sometimes. But then every once in a while I drop into a pit of despair and it feels the better I get at building a facade the more I'm unraveling behind it.

Every once in a while I scroll through my filtered messages on OKCupid. I found this one tonight: "Look, you owe me 99 cents because your profile melted my heart like a snickers bar in a pocket on a hot summer's day." Is that ridiculous or just depressing? I can't decide.

There actually are gigolos in Vegas. I researched it. Online, not in person.

It's definitely painful, but so far not even close to the pain I felt when my husband died. I think it makes a difference that I chose to end this relationship instead of being the one that was dumped, and I wasn't getting my emotional or any other needs really met by this guy, so I'm feeling a tiny bit of hope and freedom at the moment. I'm sure the loneliness, boredom, frustration will kick in any minute now, but I think it was more painful being in that relationship than it is now being out of it.

Wow. I could have written this post, too. I am in the process of disentangling myself from an emotionally stunted and psychologically abusive man. I was in a daze of loneliness and boredom when I met him. He's smart, interesting, and approaches life in a kind of full-on way that I found very attractive, but after he moved in he became less and less affectionate, more and complaining about all kinds of things, and demanding more and more "space". I learned to live with it, told myself it was better than being alone, that the good outweighed the bad. He told me that he was a good guy protecting me from the bad guys out there who would take advantage of me, while he had no qualms about asking me to support him while he sat around and came up with "brilliant" ideas. I'm not stupid. I have good friends, interesting work, a great kid, and it was 3 years in March since my husband died. But it took this man holding me down and screaming in my face about something pretty trivial to finally wake me up--the fear that ran through my body at that moment made me realize I had to get out. Now. It took 3 days and a threat to call the police to get him to move out. He still has stuff in my garage and stuff of mine I want back. He can't fathom why I'm afraid of him and why I changed the locks. He's come up with a million different reasons why I should take him back. Texts, emails, phone calls. I can't just block him because of our various stuff. I've told everyone I know how awful he is, including the guy that mows my lawn, because I know now how vulnerable I am to wanting to be convinced to take him back. The attention. Even after all that I feel the pull. I don't know if I've always been this vulnerable and just got incredibly lucky when I found my husband, or if being a widow has damaged me. There's been a part of me since he died that's a little attracted to self-destructiveness, you know, what difference does it make anymore. Yet I discovered when it came down to it that I will stand up for myself. I do still want to be alive.

I spend hours killing time playing stupid games on my iPad instead of, say, going for a walk, inviting someone to dinner, reading a book, etc. I hate how much my face is stuck in front of a screen.

I've been living with new guy for almost 4 months and I haven't told anyone in my family except my son, and him only because he'll be home from college for the summer in a couple of weeks and would have figured it out pretty quickly anyway. I haven't mentioned to any of them that I've even gone on a date. I feel so protective of my privacy in this area. I hate the idea of being the focus of family gossip, I hate being judged either for or against, and I hate that they'll think I'm "all better" now.

He kept all his oncology records neatly filed in binders as if it was somehow going to change the outcome of having stage 4 pancreatic cancer. I got rid of those 3 days after he died.

A half-empty bottle of chocolate syrup in the fridge that was used to make the chocolate milk which was the last thing he was able to get down before he stopped eating and drinking altogether. I haven't touched it in these last three years. And a sixpack of diet ginger ale sitting in the pantry. He used to drink a lot of that stuff to try to soothe his stomach. I'll never drink it. But I can't get rid of it, either.

That sounds wonderful. I'm really glad for you.