The Widowed Self: The Older Woman’s Journey through Widowhood

By Deborah Kestin van den Hoonaard

How do older women come to terms with widowhood? Are they vulnerable or courageous, predictable or creative in dealing with this life challenge?

Most books about widows usually focus on younger women; this book interweaves the voices of older widows their experiences and insights to show how they have come to terms with widowhood and have recreated their lives in new, unsuspected ways. The widows speak about how they relate to their children, their friends, to men. With powerful emotions they describe their husbands’ final illnesses and deaths, and the challenging early days of widowhood. Disputing stereotypes about older women and widows, The Widowed Self allows the reader to visualize the impact of losing one’s life partner and offers a new way of thinking about widowhood.

This new book by Deborah Kestin van den Hoonaard fills a void in previous work on widowhood. Rather than seeing these women as unfortunate, passive victims of life, the reader will come to appreciate the strength and creativity with which these women face one of life’s greatest challenges, a challenge that affects more than half of all women over the age of sixty-five.

Widows and their families, scholars, social workers and other professionals who work with older adults will all be interested in reading The Widowed Self: The Older Woman’s Journey through Widowhood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: Oct 22, 2009
• ISBN: 9781554587223

Deborah Kestin van den Hoonaard

Deborah Kestin van den Hoonaard grew up in New York. She obtained her Ph.D. in Sociology from Loyola University of Chicago. Dr. van den Hoonaard is an associate professor of Gerontology at St. Thomas University, Fredericton, New Brunswick.

Book preview

The Widowed Self

The Older Woman’s Journey through Widowhood

Deborah Kestin van den Hoonaard

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Van den Hoonaard, Deborah K. (Deborah Kestin), 1951-

      The widowed self : the older woman’s journey through widowhood

Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0-88920-346-6

1. Widowhood.  2. Widows — New Brunswick.  I. Title.

HQ1058.V36 2001                     306.88                   C99-932479-9

© 2001 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

       Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3C5

Cover design by Leslie Macredie,

using a pastel by Suzanne Maloney entitled Énigme

Printed in Canada

All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping or reproducing in information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to the Canadian Reprography Collective, 214 King Street West, Suite 312, Toronto, Ontario M5H 3S6.

This book is dedicated with love to my sister, Ricki Kestin,

who always challenged me to be more than I thought I could be.

And to my parents, Krass and Estelle Kestin, whose love and

confidence in me have seen me through all the days of my life.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part One: Embarking on the Journey

1 The End of the Old Way of Life

2 The Journey Begins

Part Two: Experiencing Relationships

3 They Have Their Own Life: Relationships with Children

4 Relationships with Friends

5 Relationships with Men

Part Three: Discovering New Paths

6 I Never Knew I Could

7 And Speaking of Money

8 Connections to the Community

9 Conclusion: Discovering New Paths

Part Four

Appendix A: Methodology

Appendix B: Interview Guide

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

I’ve always felt that writing acknowledgements must be the most entertaining part of writing a book and the most humbling. You get to sit around and try to remember everybody who had a part in your writing your book—and, as has been said many times before—writing a book is never an individual achievement.

First, thanks must go to the women who shared their stories of losing their husbands and attempting to rebuild their lives. This was often a painful experience for them, but they shared many confidences with me and have inspired me with their courage and resilience. Many mentioned that they hope their participation in the study will help others.

Helena Z. Lopata carried out the first major study on widowhood, and she has encouraged my interest in the topic. All who study widowhood have benefited from her groundbreaking work, and, on a more personal level, she has always prodded me to work at a higher level.

Others at Loyola University of Chicago, where I completed my Ph.D., have been instrumental in encouraging my interest in widowhood. Christine L. Fry, co-director of my dissertation with Helena Lopata, and Judith Wittner both have maintained an interest in my work and have contributed to my ability to do good qualitative work.

Howard S. Becker allowed me to sit in on his Field Methods course at Northwestern University and was a member of my dissertation committee as well. The stories of his experiences in research are a true inspiration. I also appreciate being able to keep up with his work by simply clicking on to Howie’s Home Page on the Internet.

The Third Age Centre at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick, was a partner in the research. Its then-director, Mary Lou Arseneault, first encouraged me to apply for research funding. Her enthusiasm for the project has been unflagging, and the friendship that has resulted is precious. Others at the Third Age Centre, notably Chris Korth and Kerry Smith, provided excellent administrative support. Shelley Coyle prepared the more than 2,000 pages of interview transcripts. Mary Radford and Rachel Matchett helped to develop the six-week Striving on Your Own workshop that the Third Age Centre put on when my plans to observe a local support group fell through. Ann Ingram of The Daily Gleaner wrote a number of articles about the research.

Although a book is written in solitude, the enthusiasm and encouragement of others can keep you going when you feel that the manuscript will never be finished. Colleagues at St. Thomas University showed unwavering interest in my work. I would particularly like to mention John McKendy, Sandra Wachholz, Gary Kenyon, Bill Randall and Penny Granter. As well, participants at the Annual Qualitative Analysis Conference put up with and were even excited about papers based on this project for several years in a row. Karen March has been particularly supportive. Other friends, particularly Tim and Bev Rayne, had a continuing interest in the book which never ceased to motivate me to finish.

The research on which this book is based was funded by a Community Researcher Award of the Seniors’ Independence Research Program of Health Canada (NHRDP award no. 6604-111-603). A pilot project was funded by the Grants to Small Universities Program of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Sandra Woolfrey, formerly of WLU Press, was unfailingly helpful, and she helped shepherd me through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program process. Others at the Press, notably Carroll Klein and Leslie Macredie, have been most helpful in the later stages of preparation.

Families of authors always seem to occupy the final paragraph of acknowledgements. My three children, Lisa-Jo, Lynn (aka Cheryl) and Jordan always made me feel that my writing this book is important to them—and they have listened to hundreds of hours of my talk about the project at meals. My husband, Will, makes such a profound contribution to everything I do that there are no words to describe it. From keeping a chart of my progress on his filing cabinet to telling everyone he meets about my work, his actions display a profound belief in both the importance of this book and my ability to write it that is almost overwhelming.

Introduction

This book is about how older women experience widowhood. I first became interested in this topic when a student lent me a book called When Things Get Back to Normal (Dohaney 1989), a published journal of the author’s first year of widowhood. It took me two hours to read the book, and I found myself crying along with the author and feeling that, for the first time, I was at the beginning of understanding the profound impact that losing one’s husband has on one’s life. This was a far cry from the dry literature on social support and well-being that I had encountered in most of my reading in the area of gerontology in general, and widowhood in particular.¹

When Things Get Back to Normal had such an impact on me that I found myself seeking out any published, autobiographical accounts of widowhood that I could find. These accounts were universally moving and evocative, and they convinced me that hearing widows’ stories in their own words would shed a much more comprehensive light on the social meaning of widowhood as well as allow us to catch a glimpse of the profound emotional ordeal that is at the core of that experience.

The women who wrote these accounts underwent a pivotal loss of identity, identity foreclosure (van den Hoonaard 1997), through which they felt stripped of who they were at every level—they did not know how to define themselves to themselves, and they became different people to their friends, who in large number excluded them from their previous social groups. These authors report that this crisis of identity led to the development of a new and, according to the authors, a more mature identity.

But the authors of published accounts were young-to-middle-aged women who had the personal resources that resulted in the publishing of books. What of older women? Would they experience the same loss of sense of who they are? How would they go about rebuilding their lives after losing someone to whom they had been married for thirty, forty or fifty years? How do older women experience and talk about being widows?

To answer these questions I chose a research process that would allow me to look at women’s experience of widowhood as a process of transition rather than simply as a status. In-depth, narrative interviews provide an opportunity for people to tell their own story in their own way, including whatever they feel is necessary. As Daniel Bertaux (1981, 39) has pointed out, "A good life story is one in which the interviewee takes over control of the interview situation and talks freely" (emphasis in original).

I conducted interviews between August 1994 and January 1996 with twenty-seven women in a variety of urban and rural locales throughout New Brunswick.² The interviews took place in each woman’s home and lasted between two and four hours. The design of the interview schedule was very open and sparse, allowing the women who participated in the study to frame their own stories in their own ways, and to include or leave out whatever they chose. I had an idea of what themes I wanted to cover in the interviews, but the widows certainly brought in issues I had not anticipated and demonstrated that they define their experience as widows in a way that reflects continuity within their own lives.

To provide an opportunity and encourage each woman to bring in any issues she thought relevant, I first asked her to recount her experience as a widow:

What I would like for you to do now is just tell me about your experience with being a widow. You can start where you want, end where you want, put in whatever you like, leave out whatever you like. I’m just interested in finding out about your experience.³

The intention of this request was to allow each woman to recount the social meaning of widowhood from her point of view, an intrinsic characteristic of research carried out from a symbolic interactionist perspective. This book reflects this approach, and explores older women’s experiences of widowhood in a way that has not been reflected in most studies on the subject.

The next few pages of this introduction will explain how the research on which this book is based differs from more traditional ways of studying widowhood, as well as the assumptions of symbolic interactionism and the impact they have on the manner of presentation of empirical data and theoretical insights in this book.

The first major study on widowhood was published over twenty-five years ago (Lopata 1973). Helena Lopata’s books Widowhood in an American City (1973) and Women as Widows (1979) still stand as virtually the only books that provide a comprehensive exploration of widowhood. Since that time there have been many studies focused on smaller aspects of widowhood, and three themes have dominated this research: the psychological processes of coping (for example, Parkes 1975); the process of role loss that is associated with going from being a member of a couple to being widowed (for example, Blau 1973); and the role and nature of social support (for example, Vachon and Stylianos 1988). These themes are of interest primarily to social scientists rather than to widows. They tell us very little about the world as it confronts older widows in their everyday lives, a void that this book hopes to fill.

Studies on psychological adjustment have concentrated on depressive symptoms (e.g., McCrae and Costa 1988) or emotional distress (e.g., Thompson et al. 1991). As Laurel Smith (1991) has pointed out, much of psychology has also dealt with the pathological consequences and the early stages of widowhood (Haas-Hawkings et al. 1985; Vachon et al. 1982). In fact, it sees grief itself as a pathology (Averill and Nunley 1988).

There has also been an interest in stages of widowhood that are similar to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s (1969) study on the stages of dying. As early as 1944, Lindemann outlined stages of grieving, and interest in this area of research has continued (e.g., Parkes 1972; Heinemann and Evans 1990). This approach, which began as description, has become prescriptive, an enduring dilemma. With this book, I hope to escape a stage model of widowhood, by examining how women respond to very open-ended requests to simply describe their own experiences in their own voice.

Researchers who have looked at the social process of role transition have primarily considered the role loss that is involved in the loss of one’s husband as simply going from being a wife to being a widow. As Anne Martin Matthews (1991) has pointed out, this fixation on role loss has meant that, apart from a very few studies (e.g., Lopata 1973; van den Hoonaard 1997), no one has examined if and how widows change their sense of self. As we will see throughout this book, women manage to combine developing a redefinition of who they are while maintaining important parts of their identity.

Other studies have looked into the characteristics of widows and have focused on widows’ income (Morgan 1986), living arrangements (Fletcher and Stone 1980), etc. This kind of research seems to conceptualize widowhood as an event rather than as a new family stage or a process of transition (O’Bryant and Hansson 1995, 452).

Much of widowhood research has been comparative and has used a survey method. Thus, unlike the current book, many studies only see widows in comparison with other groups rather than as a group worthy of study in their own right. For example, Strykman (1981, cited in Martin Matthews 1991), when considering women’s decision to remarry, compares them with men rather than concentrating on the widows themselves. This book endorses Heinemann’s (1982) opinion that it is important to study widows in their own right, thus opening the possibility of understanding diversity among older widowed women as well as achieving an in-depth understanding of how they comprehend their own lives.

By using quantitative measures of interaction with both children and friends (e.g., Morgan 1984), most studies reduce an understanding of widows’ relationships to a count of how often they see others. As well, researchers have looked at relationships with children in terms of support and, therefore, generally only see what the women need from their children rather than what they contribute (O’Bryant and Hansson 1995). In this volume we see the process of negotiation between widows and their children as they redefine their relationships, as well as how expectations can affect a woman’s assessment of her relationship with her children—issues we cannot get at simply by counting how many times a week women talk with their children. There are similar drawbacks to literature on widows’ relationships with friends and on dating and remarriage.

Even though most widows are old, most literature on widowhood has not studied older persons (O’Bryant and Hansson 1995, 440). An important exception has been Sarah H. Matthews (1979), who used a qualitative method to explore The Social World of Old Women. Although Matthews interviewed only widows in the research for her book, the focus of her study was not the experience of widowhood. Arlie Hochschild’s (1973) study of older women who live in a subsidized retirement apartment building also involved widows, but did not make widowhood the topic of her study.

Some topics are surprisingly absent in widowhood research. For example, most previous research on widowhood has ignored the role of religion in the life of widows.⁴ Helena Lopata (1979), one of the few people who has looked at the place of clergy, has noted that she found little evidence that widows receive help from the clergy. What little other research there is has focused on superficial, countable aspects of the role of religion, for example, frequency of attendance at church (Wortman and Silver 1990). In contrast, because a number of the participants talked about what religion means in their lives, this book includes an in-depth discussion of the role of religion and churches in the lives of older widows.

Finally, beginning with Helena Lopata’s groundbreaking study in 1973, most research has involved women who live in large cities. Because the participants in this study live in both urban and rural New Brunswick, we have the opportunity to look at widowhood in the small cities and rural areas where many old people live.

Curiously silent in all of this research on widowhood have been the voices of widows themselves, particularly older widows. We therefore know very little about which issues are important to them. In addition, we have, for the most part, looked only at the negative aspects of widowhood. Thus, we know very little about the more positive things about widowhood as a process of transition, or about the active and dynamic development of relationships that widows engage in as they rebuild their social world (Martin Matthews 1991).

This book is an ethnography that sits on the foundation of symbolic interactionism—a way of looking at the world from the perspective of those being studied. As such, it seeks to describe the system of relationships in which a widow is involved as well as the social processes involved in the negotiation of those relationships (Becker 1996). It recognizes that all terms that describe people are relational, and that a trait, such as being a widow, is not simply a fact but rather an interpretation of that fact (Becker 1998, 132, 134). Hence, symbolic interactionism and qualitative research are the most relevant approaches in the exposition of such social processes.

Howard S. Becker (1996) highlights three important points in the epistemology of qualitative research. First is the insistence on investigating the viewpoints of those studied. The in-depth interview style that I used in the collection of the data that form the subject matter of this book is uniquely designed to encourage study participants to communicate their point of view. The interview asks as few questions as possible and in as broad a way as possible.

The second point Becker raises is the emphasis on the everyday world and everyday life of study subjects. Qualitative research allows people to talk about what happened in their own words. Underlying this practice is the recognition of older widows (in this case) as sentient, experiencing, passionate creatures (Reinharz 1993), who both have an important understanding of their own lives and are capable of telling us about their interpretation of events. It is through focusing on these first two points that we may begin to see older widows’ definition of the situation, which has real consequences for how they live their lives and interpret others’ words and actions.

The third point Becker delineates is that ethnography provides a fuller description than variable analysis. This type of work is notable for its breadth. It elucidates a wide range of matters that impinge on the question under study rather than relatively few variables. Thus, this book does not simply look at a few items (i.e., independent variables) to see how they affect a few other items (i.e., dependent variables). Rather, it looks at widows as multidimensional human beings who interact with other individuals, bureaucracies, the memories of their deceased husbands and with themselves in order to understand their everyday lives.

If we sum up the implications of symbolic interactionism as described by Howard S. Becker, we can see that the focus is on meaning rather than rates (W. C. van den Hoonaard 1997, 57). For example, rather than report on how many times a week each participant sees one of her children, a symbolic interactionist concentrates on how older widows talk about their relationships with their children, what those relationships mean to them, how they negotiate those relationships and how all of these things affect their experience as widows.

This theoretical approach seeks to understand social process rather than offer causal explanations (W. C. van den Hoonaard 1997, 58). Instead of simply trying to understand why older widows find it difficult to have friendships—or relationships of any kind—with men, we