Mizpah

This is going to sound illogical and wishy washy, but I agree with everyone, even the people who are diametrically opposed. Yes, it sucks to have things deleted against people's wishes and efforts. Yes, it sucks when things get hostile and dramatic and destructive (I left YWBB when the LiveWire/RabidBadger stuff got out of control). Here's the thing about someone looking for advice and then making clear they don't want it when it comes - I feel like that's when they need us the most. Sometimes we're in turmoil and don't know if we want or can handle feedback, but feel we need to yell into the void. Aren't we all prickly at times? When we're unhappy or worried, we who are not perfect can be difficult. What's the phrase - hurt people hurt people. I'm not saying we should be doormats or waste our time, and I'm not targeting the original poster but speaking in general. I know that I get very defensive of my choices or person or situation when I feel it's under attack, sometimes even when it's under attack by ME and then people who love me back me up - it makes me see the good stuff, and think maybe I've misrepresented things - to myself and/or others. I'm not saying the situation described wasn't clearly problematic. I'm just saying maybe it's better to be slower to frustration with each other, even when the advice seeker gets surly. To reach supreme maturity, self-awareness and willing to do what is the healthiest thing despite the emotional toll - that's a lofty goal, one we all work toward, but it's difficult to achieve sometimes. We don't all make perfect decisions or end up with perfect people or in perfect relationships. There's a huge, huge grey area between the black and the white, and what's acceptable to some isn't the same as what's acceptable to others. We tell each other to be gentle with ourselves. I think we should exercise the same with each other, even when tough love may be the only non-enabling, right thing. IMHO.

I love therapy for the simple fact that I always feel better when I leave than I did when I got there. I feel like articulation makes things manageable. And that another person's perspective can bring something fresh even when I believe I'm as self-aware as can be. I asked my therapist once, when I was feeling cynical or out of stuff to say, what the point of therapy is, and she told me it's to identify and change patterns of thought and behavior that make us less happy than we can be. That we replay or try to replay relationships and incidents, hoping for different outcomes, or ensuring the same negative or destructive outcomes, or sometimes in the case of having lost something wonderful, hoping for the same thing. If you know it's unhealthy, maybe therapy will help you see how you ended up in an unhealthy situation, and how to end up in healthy situations in the future? To me, therapy is also about making me accountable to myself for my own happiness and healthiness.

At two years, I realized I was ready for a BIG change, but I didn't want the responsibility of deciding and making it happen. I kept telling my friends that I wished I was in a relationship with a man who had to relocate for work to somewhere bizarre I'd never want to go like Wyoming or something, and I'd just have to make a life, no choice. Then I vacationed in Israel and wanted to move there. Then I found myself getting involved with a man who lived a couple hundred miles away in my hometown - just a fling, then a long distance relationship, then I got pregnant and moved here. I'm of two minds: half of me is like, "Be careful what you wish for," because I got it, and it's HARD to rebuild a life in a new place. The other half of me is like, "Wow, you can make things happen just by wanting it and being open to the twists and turns in your life that will lead you closer to that." It seems you love your relationship but if you aren't moving and your partner isn't and you don't want a lonely life where you are, what to do? I don't envy your position, and wish I had something awesome and easy to suggest. Maybe it's time to start applying to jobs somewhere else and see what comes your way - throw it out there and see what bites, and where it all leads. It could change everything, or show you what else needs to change, and what you want to remain the same. People say I made big things happen, but I really just took things as they came.

Popping in from four plus years out to say yes, I had worries and experiences like this in the first year too. I lived in NYC, and aside from leaving the City to visit DH's grave on Long Island once a month, I didn't leave the City for a very long time. I clung to routine for survival. My suggestion: decide ahead of time pieces of routines/rituals that you can "bring with you," or do while you're away, even if it's simple and minor. And yes, I needed a ton of alone time, time with no stimulation, a lot of calm around me because I felt so disquiet inside. I was pleasantly surprised to find that traveling wasn't as upsetting to me as I thought it would be. It showed me that I was stronger and more capable than I'd come to feel, and made me want to get back to being more mobile. (And so, at two years, I traveled to the Middle East by myself!) And like others have said, you bring all these "pocket people" with you wherever you go. Lean on your widows!

It sounds like your internal compass is guiding you right. Trust your gut. And don't be so hard on yourself. I'm four years out. A little snippet from my life at 15 months: I let a man kiss me for the first time since my DH had died. My reaction: I scream/sobbed in his mouth/face (yes, I did this, as though he was stealing my purse, I screamed), and turned and ran away. Ran down the sidewalk crying. Like a crazy person. This journey shouldn't be measured in time. Time becomes irrelevant to the process in so many ways. Throw "should" out the window. Who needs that pressure?

I had resigned myself to a sense of this: He doesn't exist. He is nowhere in this world. I am left in a world without him. I will never feel the feelings I felt with him again. I'll never be loved like that. I'll never have that euphoric "everything I need/want is right here" feeling again. By accepting that, I had low expectations, and I kept life very simple. And after a long time of that, happiness seeped into me. Simple happiness, based on stuff like, "This cantaloupe tastes good right now," or, "I feel good after that run," or, "It's sunny and not too humid." I eventually went on vacation and got a ton of sun and was in his homeland, and I got really happy. And it didn't go away (until I changed my life in a big big way and got real unhappy real fast, but that's another story). I'm not one who's into "positive thinking," I think it's artificial garbage myself, so accepting the worst made me open to all the little things that make up a healthy, happy life. And I found happiness, made of tiny little shards of the simple things in life. I hope that will happen for you too.

I only know my own experience, and it's based totally in my own personality and my own circumstances and those specific particulars of my partner as well. In my case, it's hard. It's really hard. My DH and I and he and his DW were perfect for each other. We had really good lives and really good situations. The two of us remaining are very different from each other and from the ideal partners our lost loves were. I have to admit here that I am extremely jealous of his late fiancee. Extremely jealous. It's hard for me to live in the house she lived in. I think about her constantly, which makes no sense because I never knew her, so I know my idea of her is probably nothing like the real thing. I compare myself to her. He compares me to her. I feel far less loved than I did with my DH (DH and I had an amazing, extraordinary, insanely healthy, and a bit obsessive/worshipful relationship). He never went to therapy, and his coping mechanisms are extremely stubborn avoidance and denial. I did tons and tons of therapy and faced it all head-on, thoroughly. When we got together, he still wasn't ready, though I didn't know it at the time. He'd never really recovered in any way or found happiness again in himself/his life (now, her family tells me that he was depressed the whole time he was with her and made her miserable). I had found happiness again. I spent two years mourning EXTREMELY and then felt alive again, on my own, then we met and got together. I know for many widow couples it's a bond and a commonality. For me, it's been almost the opposite. It's been a wedge, wishing our current lives and relationships resembled our old lives and relationships more in the ways that matter to each of us. It is HARD. But I'm jealous and he's not into self-awareness, reflection. Here's my opinion, for what it's worth: being a widow(er) doesn't change you (just my opinion). It magnifies who you already were, or parts of who you were (which I suppose is a change of sorts). Relationships are two people, and the widow aspect is just one. A relationship between widows will rise or fall based on the personalities, tendencies, habits, compatibilities, etc., of those two people. Once we're in adulthood and not in our first relationship, aren't we all "damaged goods"? It's all about how we deal with that damage, how deep the damage was (for example, I think my current relationship is plagued more by his abused childhood than by his widowhood). Babbling. Did that make sense?

I feel like that's ok lifelong. Maybe unhealthy past a certain point (when? no idea), but we were supposed to grow old and die with these people.

I keep checking in over here with you raw, fresh-out widows and feel so much compassion for you. I like to think that hearing from those further out is helpful in some way???? My DH died in April. His birthday is in February. That first year, I went out to his favorite restaurant with people who knew him and we toasted to him and told stories. The next morning, as I was about to get in the shower, I looked down at my hand and thought, "I never want to take this off, ever." And in the next moment, without it making any sense to me at all, I took it off. I'd been wearing a locket around my neck with his picture in it, and put the ring on the chain. I put the ring on, once a year, on his birthday, as a sort of gift to him, because he loved "owning" me (not in a creepy or abusive way, in a super-loving, obsessive, romantic way). There's no right time. It's more meaningful to us than it is meaningful in general, I believe. But to us widows, I suppose finding meaning and acting with meaning is a big part of survival and thriving.

SimiRed, I don't know you, as some others here seem to, but I worry for you (and your son). I want to ask, "Are you ok?," but it seems you are not, so a stupid question. Wanted you to know I'm thinking of you. And even though it's a stupid question: are you ok???

Aw, Grace, I'm sorry!

Oh, hon. My heart's breaking for you. (I also misread the feelings behind your last post and was all, "Yay, fun, don't regret it," and I feel badly about that.) You regret it, BUT you nipped it in the bud, so hopefully it can start receding into the past??? You've been upfront and mature. I can really relate to this above. My DH and I were soulmates, and soulmates isn't even something I believed/believe in. I could've written what you wrote. Listen, girl, two years is NOT that much time. Don't pressure yourself. I think it's clear from what you're saying that you're just not ready (and that is FINE). (It is also my belief that, if someone finds "the right one," or someone who can be right for you in whatever way, you suddenly become ready, or you want to jump in even if you aren't ready.) I just started to feel alive again at two years. I have a bunch of close young widow friends in real life, and a lot of them were even "slower." My "widow mentor" told me he wasn't "ready" again for SIX YEARS. I know you want your kids to have a parenting partner, a father figure, and that puts a rush pressure on you. But there's nothing wrong with you or where you're at. Why isn't it better yet? Because an extraordinary man who was your world is gone. It takes time. And as someone who was also with someone truly extraordinary and who now lives in the more ordinary world of men and women, it takes a lot of "resigning" yourself to that fact. Or a lot of luck to find Truly Extraordinary again. I don't know. I have no answers, but wanted to lend some support.

It was the custom a long, long time ago - called a Levite marriage I believe. Does anyone remember the woman on YWBB who was only there for a short while in 2011? Her husband committed suicide. I think she was BellaPiccola or PiccolaBella or something. Her husband was Italian, and I believe she'd never met his brother, who lived in Italy (they lived in CA). She was planning a trip to Italy, and I think she wanted to fall in love with, marry and have kids with the brother (or maybe just have kids with him? I'm clearly not remembering this clearly!). I think many have this impulse. Anyway! I love this story. Whether or not it "goes anywhere," it sounds like a lovely, mutual night and not like something you should regret or feel shameful over.

Widower Baby Daddy and I have a daughter who's turning one next week. She's of course not cognizant now, but in one area of the house, we have some photos of me and DH, and of him and DW. I'm not saying I think we should wipe out all evidence of our former lives, but I *do* worry that seeing photos of us so happy with other people could have a strange and confusing and potentially upsetting/"bummer" effect on our daughter. I don't want her to think, for example, that either of us wish we were with our old love and don't love each other, essentially wishing away her existence. I suppose this is a question for a child psychologist (or for the young widowed parents section??? but she's not DW or DH's kid so...), but I'm curious about your thoughts on this. I've thought about packing it all away. I've thought about leaving it all out. I've thought about choosing one photo of me and DH and one of him and DW, and putting it in a frame with a quote (from i carry your heart) and keeping it somewhere non-conspicuous in our bedroom or somewhere away from public areas.... I feel torn between honoring THEM and prioritizing our present life/family. Anyone have insight/wisdom/experience/child psychology expertise?

In the beginning, it's upsetting and angering that people are living regular old life and don't seem to understand - the world has stopped. The world has ended. There is no one in this entire world who is DW/DH. How the f*** can all these people be carrying on or interacting with me? We're in separate universes. I think it's similar/analogous that for the first few months/year, I couldn't read any books about anything other than the Holocaust - anything else seemed so frivolous and innocent and full of a lightness I just could not deal with. I could only read something that had no frivolity or lightness, and was full of horror and sadness, as I was.

I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, no one knows what a relationship truly is but the two people in it. On the other hand, sometimes it's SOOOO much easier to see things clearly from the outside. There's some movie, isn't there?, with a line: "We're all stupid [when we're] in love." I know it's been true for me, at least post-loss. And it's not necessarily a (totally) bad thing. I'm glad to have people who sometimes want more for me and look out for me than I want for and look out for myself.

For me, it took a good two years of feeling dead inside to come back to life. Two years! (My first widow friend - a widower 11 years out - my "widow mentor," if you will - told me it took him 6 years to start to feel better/able to be happy again. This is a marathon, not a sprint.) I remember smiling at five months. I don't remember much of the first few months at all, and I definitely don't remember three months (thank Gd - the pain is unbearable and I feel for all of you so fresh and raw). I was skinless. I've grown new skin. You will too. I tried to remember in the beginning that I now had a sacred duty - to live for both of us. No one appreciated and loved life more than DH so I try to emulate him, to love life as he would have. Until I started to feel good myself, I tried to just live well as a tribute to him. I don't know if that helps you at all.

Of course. It's like the personal version of the line between BCE and CE - before death and after death. Before he died, the dividing line was before him and once we met. (Now, in a way, it's before the birth of my daughter and after, but it's still kinda before he died and after.)

I happened to stop in from 4 years out, to tell you it gets better. Even for my widow friends who are relatively "stuck" as opposed to others (so worse case scenario - not worst, because worst would be if you mean what you said), I'd say it gets way better. Way way better. It gets more bearable. It gets better than merely "more bearable" too. Keep going day by day, finding comfort and solace where you can, in the simple stuff. Let time carry you. Don't be ambitious and put pressure on yourself. It won't always hurt so bad, and if it does, you find ways to live with it so that it doesn't hurt so bad, if that makes any sense. Thinking of you.

DH was 28 when he died and we'd only had 3 years together. In fact, the day I left the hospital for the last time, I got home to a delivery of the custom/handmade anniversary card I'd gotten for him. We'd called each other husband and wife since the first couple months and wore wedding bands with each other's names engraved and I'd changed my name and we were legally domestic partners, but we took forever deciding how to "make it official" (because we thought we had the time to make it perfect for us - had JUST decided to do it alone on the beach in Kauai in Oct 2011 - oops, he died April 2011). Were going to start a family, etc., etc. I get it. He lost the opportunity to be a husband and a father. So young. No matter how much I ever heal, I'll always be heartbroken for him and all that he never was able to experience. Edited to add: The day when I realized he'd been gone longer than we were together was a hard one. When you intend to spend decades and decades - your whole life - with a person who only had so few.... I don't know how to finish that sentence. You get it.

I love this article, and I think things get so much more complicated with age. My daughter is almost a year, and if she's sleeping and I'm running into a store for a short time and can just lock up and leave the windows open, I really don't see the damage (as opposed to bringing her either in her carrier (crazy heavy and can jostle her awake for no reason) or intentionally waking her to carry her (why?!)), and if anyone's concerned enough to be watching, they should stick around to see if it's just a short jaunt or if I'm leaving her period. I feel like the world has lost all sense of sanity and balance. There is a huge grey area in everything that's just getting lost.

My DH was five years younger and it was very strange to me at first. But he always called me his little girl (helped that he was a foot taller and had greying temples) and he was in so many ways a wise old man inside. I know what you mean though. A lot of widows have that day when they're like, "I'm now the same age he was when he died." For me, when I met him I was already older than he'd ever be. Mindf**k. Thinking of you.

Three (cringe). DH and I had one that was not on often, as well as a "no electronics in any bedrooms" rule - we only had one bedroom but wouldn't have let (future) kids have TVs in their rooms. Now with new partner: living room (always on, it kills me), our bedroom (never on) and his son's room (won't stay in his room for bedtime without a movie on so boyfriend allows with no qualms to my horror). I don't want my daughter to ever have a TV in her room (or watch too much TV), so we'll see how this plays out. Ugh.

It's these two statements exactly that completely symbolize what I said much more long-windedly: the urge to indulge in the "yay!" (bc, right?!, we've ALL paid our dues (and our DW/DH's) and then some!) combined with the need to hold it in so as not to be a hurtful gloating @$$hole. And just what MrsTim was saying about nothing being simple. Yes. I love knowing I can come here to babble about anything and it's understood even when we struggle with putting it into words. [edited: MrsTim, I definitely didn't mean to equate new relationship with "grief over." I don't feel it's the case. There are things about grief that are specific to our lost person, but there are things about grief, such as loneliness and lost general dreams (parenthood, travels not-alone), that are general and not person-specific. It's the general stuff that I feel guilt over - the chance to be a mother in this specific case at this specific time, and to share that with a living man. It still breaks my heart that Simon never got to be a father, and that I never will have our children. But I am a mother.]

You don't have to. It's only a first date. Someone who is perfect on paper doesn't necessarily fit perfectly into your life and into the space next to you for partnership. My DH and I loved the things were annoying about each other. My new guy and I didn't feel the same way at first but we share a child and so we have tried to be patient and time has brought us to a good place (sometimes/usually). What's that quote about how if you like someone, everything they do is great, but if you don't like someone, everything they do is super annoying? I'm not saying that's the case. This could just be an adjustment to dating and to this new person, but it could also be that you met this person and he's not "the one" or "one of the ones" for you.