Paragraphs discussing "closure."
"One of the things that's hard is, I'm no longer the most important person in someone's life. It would still be nice to be someone's most important person."
"If I bring my husband's name up in conversation, and people say, 'Do you still talk about him?' I say: 'Why not? He'll be part of my life forever.'"
Kevin Riordan: Joined in losses, they have found sisterhood together
Theresa Savage, 24, lost her husband on her 22d birthday in 2010. They were married for less than a year. "I just wantedto sit in my apartment and be alone," she says. "But this group means a sense of normalcy."
Laura Watabu and the four other women around her Cherry Hill dining-room table call themselves "The Bad-Ass HALOS."
The acronym stands for Healing After Losing Our Spouses. The adjective is self-explanatory.
"We're amazing!" the hostess declares, as the gathering gets under way with salads, sandwiches, and glasses of red.
Having survived life-shattering losses, the five middle-class professional women have found in one another the freedom to be happy, sad, angry, ecstatic - perhaps all at once. Theirs is an unusual, essential, even wonderful sisterhood.
"It's a stress-free comfort zone," explains Watabu, a human-resources manager with an 11-year-old daughter.
She and the others were strangers when they met in 2011 at a support group offered by Samaritan Healthcare & Hospice in Marlton.
Tailored for widows and widowers under 50, the therapeutic sessions lasted only six weeks. But two years later, five of the seven original group members have become best friends forever.
They feel a kinship with their counterparts in the new book Saturday Night Widows: The Adventures of Six Friends Remaking Their Lives by Becky Aikman, a former newspaper reporter who lost her husband when she was 49.
One reviewer described the book as "often desperate, sometimes feisty, partly hilarious, and warm as a fleecy blanket." Which strikes me as a pretty good description of the HALOS, except for the desperate part.
The ladies are Watabu, 44; Denise Ordille, 41, of Hammonton; Tina Bowser, 47, of Mount Holly; Angela Nadeau, 52, of Medford; and Theresa Savage, 24, of Philadelphia.
They're busy with careers, raising kids, and running households they formerly ran with a husband. They bear these responsibilities alone and share with one another what it feels like, say, to hear well-meaning but tone-deaf comments about "closure" after loss of a loved one.
"People should just say, 'I have no idea what you're going through, but I'm here for you,' " observes Bowser, a businesswoman and the mother of a 5-year-old.
The HALOS bolster one another when they're reminded of their unexpected single parenthood, their unasked for solitude.
"Friends think you have family, family thinks you have friends, but the reality is, you're alone," Bowser, widowed in 2010, says. "I don't know what I would have become if I didn't have these girls."
"Sometimes you just don't want to come home to an empty house," adds Nadeau, a CEO and mother of two whose husband died of a heart attack in 2010.
"I didn't want to go to the support group," Savage says. Her husband died on her 22d birthday in 2010; they had been married for less than a year.
"I just wanted to sit in my apartment and be alone," Savage adds. "But this group means a sense of normalcy."
Ordille's son was just 2 when her husband died in 2010. The boy talks about his dad every day, and he wants to know when he'll get a new one.
"I just need to talk to someone who's going through it," says Ordille, a client-services director.
Tonight is special: a belated birthday party for Nadeau. She's the group's senior member, and after the cake is cut, she becomes reflective.
"One of the things that's hard is, I'm no longer the most important person in someone's life," she says. "It would still be nice to be someone's most important person."
I bring up the question of dating.
"Evil!" Savage says and laughs.
The rest laugh as well; meeting someone new is so tough to imagine, it can seem absurd. And outsiders don't realize that moving on has many dimensions.
"We're progressing with our lives," Ordille says. "But we're not moving on in the sense of forgetting.
"If I bring my husband's name up in conversation, and people say, 'Do you still talk about him?' I say: 'Why not? He'll be part of my life forever.' "
Contact Kevin Riordan
at 856-779-3845 or kriordan@phillynews.com, or follow on Twitter @inqkriordan.
Read the Metro columnists' blog, "Blinq," at www.phillynews.com/blinq.
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