No Husband, No Friends
By CHARLOTTE BROZEK
Thanks to Noah, the world is made up of people in twosomes. I never thought much about the ark until my husband died one bright, sunny November morning almost one year ago.
My friends headed for the hills. In the last years of my husband’s life, we had come to rely on two or three couples for entertainment, but they disappeared after he died. Were they afraid to face their own mortality, or was it that the dynamics we presented as a duo were lost with me as a widow? Widow. The word means empty. Another charming word I have come to embrace: bereave — to deprive or rob. Here I find myself a bereaved widow, relegated by my erstwhile friends to the occasional lunch or shopping spree. I didn’t have any single friends. (And if I had, I probably would have treated them the same.) I was struggling with the No.1 stressor on the Holmes-Rahe Life Stress Inventory — death of a spouse — sans friends.
Everywhere I go, everywhere I look, couples surround me in the supermarket, at the mall and in their S.U.V.’s awaiting a green light. I never noticed the twosomes before. Now they make me feel obsolete. Whether he knew it or not, Noah set the course for bias against singles. Singles can’t dine in the finest restaurants. Singles disrupt the seating in theater rows. And singles can’t be seen cavorting with couples. I understand Noah’s plan — the world needed two to tango in the face of an annihilating flood. But he should have designated a section on the ark for us.
I spend most of my days alone in the bereavement bunker. That’s what I call the place I rented. After my husband died, I navigated through the many stages of grief. The first one is the merciful one — numbness — the stage at which one makes idiotic decisions, like selling the place you live in without a well-thought-out plan of where you might go. I did a lot of wacky things during that stage, but moving eight months after my husband died to take up residence in a tiny rental a few miles away tops the list. I sent most of my furnishings to auction and discarded the majority of the rest. Two days after moving into the bunker, I was reading with a borrowed flashlight because I couldn’t count a lamp among my possessions. Everything I saved I didn’t need, and everything I threw away, I had to replace.
Some time later I briefly touched on the anger stage of grief. I held the doctors, the nurses, the drug companies and the old slash, burn and poison protocol of cancer treatment in this country responsible for my husband’s death. Now I just blame Noah.
Frankly, I’m sick and tired of the stages. I went from depression to panic attacks back to depression to migraines, to abdominal migraines, to not sleeping, to sleeping too much, to never leaving the bunker, to not wanting to go back to the bunker. To deal with my mood swings, I have seen a grief counselor and a psychiatrist and attend a support group. My counselor advised me I wasn’t acting irrationally — it was all just coping mechanisms. She suggested I make friends. My psychiatrist prescribed anti-depressants so I would stop acting irrationally. How can I go wrong?
Someone once said that being a widow is like living in a country where nobody speaks your language. In my case, it’s only my friends, family and acquaintances who all now speak Urdu — it’s not the whole country. I discovered strangers possess more compassion than my own friends and family. My kids make me feel like I lost my mind, and not their dad. Bereavement isn’t a lobotomy, children. It’s a loss.
Speaking of loss, I not only lost my husband and my life, I also lost my hair. My crowning glory plus my eyebrows — would you believe it — fell out in clumps a few months after my husband’s death. My doctor assured me that the hair loss was because of shock and that it would grow back in a couple of years. And I thought the universe was through with me.
Recently, a policeman pulled me over for failure to move. The traffic was being redirected, but I had frozen and held up a long line. I put out my hands, waiting to be cuffed, saying there’s nothing more you can do to me that’s worse than what’s already been done.
He said, “What’s that, ma’am?”
I said, “I have no husband, no friends and no hair.”
He let me go with a warning.
Charlotte Brozek lives in New Jersey and is working on a series of essays about the grieving process.
For any grieving spouse...whew! Spot on!
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