By Joan Whetzel
I’m coming up on the first anniversary of my husband’s death –
just three months away. It’s not a milestone I’m looking forward to. For the
first six months following his death, the few days surrounding the 22nd
of every month were always rough, so I’ve been anticipating trouble with this
one too.
In January, my sister Amy gave me a book called “Confessions of
a Mediocre Widow” by Catherine Tidd. It’s an autobiographical account of a
young woman who was widowed with three small kids. (Her husband suffered a head
injury during a motorcycle accident and died a few days later.)
I wasn’t sure I was ready to read it, but as soon as I cracked
the cover, I couldn’t put the book down. I found that, during my own recent
widowhood, that I experienced a lot of the same feelings and chaotic,
whacked-out, spazz atacks as she did. I also found that, like Ms. Tidd, there’s
no right or wrong way to grieve, that everyone does it in their own way, and at
their own pace.
I was relieved to hear her share how she didn’t feel like she
was grieving the way everyone expected her to grieve, that she felt like she
needed to make everyone more comfortable so they wouldn’t have to endure the
depth of her grief, and her frantic need to clear out her husband’s things so
she could make her home her own. And
here I was going around thinking I was crazy. It seems that many other widows
have gone thorugh these phases as well.
In one of the sections in the book she discusses milestones, and
how she felt, and how she finally figured out the connection between the
milestones (wedding and death anniversaries, Christmas, Valentines', birthdays,
special events they shared) and the unexpected spazz attacks that cropped up
around these days. She gave me a few hints on how to take care of myself during
these times and how to not take it out on everyone around me.
One of the ways to make these
milestones less painful, and changing them into days that I look forward
to again, is to make them my own. Find new ways to celebrate my own way. This
last Thanksgiving, for example, which also lands somewhere around our wedding
anniversary (November 24th), I celebrated with my sister Amy and her
husband Jim. My daughter Emily and oldest granddaughter Haleigh went with me.
Jim slow smoked us a scrumptious Thanksgiving brisket. It was the best brisket
I ever ate. We even got to spend some time visiting with my other Austin
sister, Mary Jo and her husband Michael. It changed the holiday enough to make
passing those two milestones for the first time much more tolerable.
For those who haven’t gone through widowhood, it may be
difficult to appreciate the emotional roller coaster ride Catherine Tidd
describes. But she does manage to express some of it with a great deal of
humor, which makes this book a great read. In fact, I really appreciated the
fact that I am not the only one who finds humor in weird places. You get a
whole different perspective on life from the other side of widowhood.
If you're interested in reading more from Catherine Tidd, she
also has a webpage called Widow Chick
(found at http://widowchick.blogspot.com/2013/09/where-ive-been-going.html
) which is also well worth the read.
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