serpico

There may be many good reasons why you don't want to invite your late husband's family, but I don't think misleading them would be the best approach.

'We are just keeping it a really small service' should suffice for anyone that asks.

Do you have someone at the bank who knows your situation and could cash it for you?

If not, maybe try an ATM deposit. Just sign his name and then yours. From my experience those deposits aren't checked very thoroughly.

it Is strange to still be so deeply in love with my LW and dating other women.

I wouldn't say it is stramge, but I can see it being confusing for the women you are dating if they have designs on something long term.

It figures that I'm the odd man out on this, probably because I'm too analytical.

The odds of my wife getting killed in a car accident were astronomical, and I don't see it happening again.

I have friends who lost their daughter in a car accident, and a couple years later a group of us went on a long trip. Some friends jokingly said they wanted to sit next to us on the flight because lightning wouldn't strike the same people twice!

And I get that some conservatives and Christians may feel uncomfortable here, because this place is exceedingly all-inclusive.

The reason why such persons don't feel comfortable isn't because this place is all-inclusive, it's because of things like this...

I will not detail the many times a poster added a post with religious content and then being taken to task for it.

At times, that feeling of Christian content not being valued was so pervasive here that some OPs would sometimes post a message in the title such as “Warning – Christian content” or some such.

It’s not overt – rather, it feels like a low key sneering towards those that are Christ centered.

As a Christian female with many conservative social views, I have seen my faith and/or views bashed on this forum.

I have seen people of various faiths discuss topics from their faith perspectives freely, but Christianity and/or those holding conservative views have been called out by name and at times damned.

Thank you, Maureen. And seriously, Christopher and Jen, take it offline or get a room. Something. Jeez.

More like Calimoderator  :

An apology to any of you that work at this type of work I am the thorn in your side type of client(but I'm never angry or belligerent, just a little pouty and sarcastic)

No apology needed, klim, and I sometimes enjoy jousting with difficult clients - especially if they are non-belligerent   Of course, had I been your lender I would have told you politely but firmly that we could not have refinanced your loan until you had the deed put into just your name.  The reason has nothing to do with not thinking you can make the payments on your own, but rather that a deceased person cannot consent to a mortgage.

Of course laws could be different where you live, but it wouldn't have been possible in at least one of the 50 states.

I have no advice other than to say that probably 80-90% of the conflicts between my new wife and me involve our differing parenting styles and our kids' responses and behaviors.

It's a rough transition.

I think Sugarbell and Bunny are right on the money.  Men and women are very different in many ways, not the least of which how we deal with the loss of a loved one.  Those differences aren't good or bad... they just are.

I would love your thoughts and opinions.  I am at a bit of a loss......

It sounds to me like neither of you has pushed for a meeting yet, for whatever reason.  It also sounds like he respects you and your boundaries, at least from how he responded to your text.

You make a good point about potentially being 'something in his head', and the reverse may be true as well.  I think it makes sense to push for a meeting and see what happens.  If nothing else it'll force the issue one way or the other.

And don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Interesting way to sum up your post, given that you spent most of it telling arneal otherwise, lol.

She said 'we can lose self-respect'... how about we take her at her word?  She didn't say 'we/you will', 'we/you should', or even 'TooSoon will/should'.  She spoke her view, which is just as valid as anyone else's.  How about we leave her word stand?

I appreciate hearing your feedback, RyanAmysMom, and I'm glad to hear you got something out of ALL the input on this thread.  In the first year after my wife was killed I made some really dumb decisions and discussed some of them on this board's predecessor, YWBB.  Some of the responses I got weren't exactly touchy-feely and they certainly didn't tell me that I did nothing wrong. Just because we are widows doesn't mean we're incapable of doing wrong, after all, and I found that it helped me tremendously to be called on my mistakes, even if it was sometimes painful.

Ours is a difficult journey and we all do dumb things, but those things don't define us.  I hope you continue to ask for input and consider what you hear from everyone here.

This isn't about women's behaviour; the problem is men's behaviour, men telling women how they should behave and how they should feel about it.

Perhaps we can set up a separate sub-forum here where us patriarchal dudes (don't worry, I'm sure you're not one of them) can submit our posts to see if they will give offense.

It is not politics to be bothered by a man saying I have lost my self-respect because I have had sex with someone with whom I wasn't in a relationship.  I realize he wasn't saying it to me, but take the logic he's setting up, and apply it, and plain and simple: it's insulting.

He wasn't saying it to anyone.  He was saying it could happen.  'What do you have to lose?' 'Your self-respect'.  He didn't say 'you tramp, I can't believe you'd think about having casual sex'.  He said you could lose your self-respect.  Does he have to add the proviso that she also 'may not' lose her self-respect?

What you're saying, serpico, and what Portside said are not the same.  I get being anti-stir, but you stated a counterpoint in an objective way, an actual concern: casual sex can damage a person psychologically.  Ok, something to think about maybe.  TOTALLY different than saying what you have to lose is your self-respect.  That's judgment and shaming.

You and I have radically different ideas about what constitutes 'judgment and shaming'. I see a lot of judgment on this thread, but it wasn't done by portside.

It is always interesting to me how an innocuous post can create such a stir.

Let's examine the 'puritanical' and 'judgey' [sic] post:

Oh, you know - your health and your self-respect. Just to name two. That kind of thing

The question to me is whether the author has a point, not whether that point is politically correct for the crowd here.  I did a quick Google search and the first article I found was this one: www.psychologytoday.com/blog/love-and-sex-in-the-digital-age/201506/what-are-the-psychological-effects-casual-sex%3Famp

Based on that article it seems to me that casual sex can sometimes lead to a decrease in one's psychological wellbeing.  Not for all, certainly, but for many.  I don't believe pointing that out in a forum such as this is a bad thing.

Sorry to have interrupted. I'll check out now.

Alt-righty then (my mother is a liberal making this all the more WTF).

Not sure what you mean here?

Apparently I'm a lot like portside.  I drove by the site of my wife's accident many times in the first few months after it happened.  I could have taken different routes but I intentionally did it to make things 'more real' in my mind and because I didn't want to give that intersection any power over me.

I took it yesterday and I think I got an 18.

This is one of those situations where a blanket policy makes things difficult because everyone is so different.  Were I the owner of a company I would think I would be very lenient as far as giving time off to a grieving employee, but paying for said time off could be another matter.

I'm also considering pre paying for my funeral because I don't plan to purchase life insurance(the agency did everything they could to keep us from using his policy for the funeral, insisting keeping it with them to earn interest and finding the money elsewhere was a better idea), but I don't know if I'm going to be living here the rest of my life.

You may want to consider life insurance again.  For someone as young as you appear to be, and if you are looking to get enough just to pay for your final expenses, it will be ridiculously cheap.  The agent has absolutely no say in how the money is used.

I guess I just see pre-paying for a funeral when you are young to be tying up your money unnecessarily for a (hopefully) long time.

In the past, I would tend to care more about other people's feeling than my own, but I finally asked myself, "why do I think it is okay for my feelings to be hurt?"

I believe my answer would be 'because that is the essence of kindness - caring more about others than oneself'.  Of course it has its limitations, but I wish it was practiced more in this world.

Melbar - I've done the same thing with my current wife and also my deceased wife, neither of whom are/were keen on going to funerals of people they don't know.  I realize it's not something they will enjoy - unlike, presumably, the retirement party, which is normally a festive atmosphere - and their presence won't be 'missed', so I give them a pass.  If my wife were to tell me that she'd really like to be there with me, I would of course be glad to have her, as I suspect your husband would.

I had some friends early on that were there for me a lot but their support seemed to dwindle over time.  At first I had some anger about it, but after awhile I realized I needed to face some things on my own and constantly relying on others wasn't necessary healthy either.  It's a balancing act, and it's fine to lean on others but there comes a time to wean oneself off that support as well.

Lots of good feedback here.  Yes, my wife has some insecurities, but as I've asked someone here before... who doesn't?

If I die tomorrow, she will be the sole caregiver for my three kids, and I know two of the three would chafe a bit under her reins.  She's no doubt thinking about that plus the fact that she would have a huge burden in explaining to the kids, in-laws, former in-laws, etc. why she is burying me NOT next to my first wife, but in a separate plot, presumably next to her.  I think I'm going to put something in writing and throw it in the safe just in case.

I also told her from experience that on the off chance I die tomorrow she'll have 99 more important things to worry about, but I think it's just one of those things she's having trouble shaking.  I also told her all this talk about my death is making me want to check the brake lines on my car  ;D

By the way, I discovered yesterday that Catholic cemeteries DO allow non-Catholic family members to be buried there, so that helps tremendously.

Thanks to everyone who responded!

Not sure I'm really looking for advice but maybe stories on how others have handled this.

I was married ~15 years to my first wife who, like me, was Catholic.  She's buried in the church cemetery and there is plot next to her, ostensibly for me, and I also reserved a third plot in case I remarried.  The problem is that my first wife is buried in the middle of the three plots, which I knew would make it awkward if/when I got remarried, but I didn't realize this until long after she was buried.

Fast forward almost 4 years, and I'm now remarried to a non-Catholic, and after her Mom brought up the topic at Easter yesterday she's been asking some questions like... 'If you die tomorrow, where will you be buried?'.  She doesn't like the idea of me being buried next to my first wife, and I get that, so I told her just to cremate me and put me in a sand trap at my local golf course.  I really don't care, and I stressed to her that I'm her husband now and my first wife (or her family) doesn't have a claim to me or my remains.  She worried, though, that there will be pressure from them (or even my kids, for that matter) to bury me next to my first wife.

Anyone else deal with something similar?