Turning Toward Tomorrow: Victories over Loss

By Anne Hosansky

In these true-life stories, men and women who lost a spouse or domestic partner (including gay relationships), reveal how they put their lives back together in positive and often dramatic ways. They share candid revelations about how they dealt with issues ranging from learning to live alone, coping with guilt and anger, and the balancing act of single parent, to venturing into the dating scene and the complexities of new love, including sex with a different partner - along with advice from psychologists and bereavement counselors. Written like a novel, this is a portable support group for anyone determined to triumph over loss.

Hosansky is a strong authoritative voice because shes been through loss herself.... Her book Widows Walk is destined to be a classic in the literature of grief.
Dominick Bonanno. Program Coordinator, Cancer Care, Inc.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 22, 2002
• ISBN: 9781453582817

Book preview

Copyright © 2002 by Anne Hosansky.

Library of Congress Number: 2002090060

ISBN #: Hardcover 1-4010-4459-X

Softcover 1-4010-4458-1

Ebook 978-1-4535-8281-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FOREWORD

Chapter One AN ALIEN SHORE

LENORE

Chapter Two LONELY … OR JUST ALONE?

MARTIN

Chapter Three BUFFER FRIENDS

ZACHARY

Chapter Four THE FEELING WE CAN’T AFFORD

IVANA

Chapter Five TAPPING INTO YOUR STRENGTHS

FRANZ

Chapter Six GUILT: THE COMMON DENOMINATOR

JOAN

Chapter Seven THE TOP LAYER

CATHERINE

Chapter Eight A QUESTION OF FAITH

HARRY

Chapter Nine THE HOLIDAY HURDLE

MARGARET

Chapter Ten THE JUGGLING ACT OF SINGLE PARENT

AUDREY

Chapter Eleven A New FAMILY BALANCe

FLORA

Chapter Twelve THE SINGLES SCENE

ARTHUR

Chapter Thirteen THE THREE LETTER WORD

EILEEN

Chapter Fourteen WITH THIS RING?

EMILY

Chapter Fifteen THE RED HOT ISSUE

EDNA and MITCHELL

Chapter Sixteen THOU SHALT NOT COMPARE

TERRIE

Chapter Seventeen THE DEPRIVATION SYNDROME

MARY

Chapter Eighteen WHEN LOSS BECOMES PLURAL

MIRIAM

Chapter Nineteen ON YOUR OWN

PHYLLIS

Chapter Twenty EXPANDING YOUR HORIZONS

AUTHORS CITED

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted to the courageous men and women in these pages who so candidly shared their stories. They have my admiration and respect.

I’m also grateful to Carol Emshwiller, Robert Fagan, Hollis Cohen and Judy Nusbaum for their perceptive insights. Special thanks to Charles Morse for the cover design and for his invaluable support.

Loving appreciation to my grandson Benjamin for getting himself born during the final preparation of this book … a reminder that life renews.

I

dedicate this book to Aung San Suu Kyi, my heroine. I dedicate this book to those brave women who participated in the Tienanmen Demonstration in 1989 as well as those women who stood by their husbands, fathers, sons, brothers, and friends. I dedicate this book to all the Asian women who have suffered so much and ask so little.

FOR

Edith Morse

valiant generous friend

who showed us how to rise above

"That self-pity stuff’

AND

Ruth Carter

cara cugina

whose caring wisdom

still lights the way for me

FOREWORD

by Dominick Bonanno

Program Coordinator

Cancer Care, Inc.

I call the programs I lead, Grief: A Journey In Time. For grief is a journey. It’s a process that takes time, but bereaved people feel that they’re stuck in time. They can’t go back, although they need to review the past. And the future is uncertain. All they’re left with is the present. But the present has a big space and they don’t know how to fill this emptiness. So they’re left with pain and confusion.

Although there are no simple answers, we can gain insights from hearing what others do. For insights are the building blocks when it comes to coping. That’s why books such as this one are so valuable. Men and women who have actually been through grief are the spokespeople. Anne Hosansky sat with these people, listening as they shared their experiences. They, in turn, were experiencing her caring and wisdom. She is their peer, because she has been through this grieving process herself.

As Anne’s bereavement counselor, I saw this process unfolding before me in very intimate and meaningful ways. In the beginning those who are mourning are in darkness, not knowing when—or how—the light will come shining through. Yet step by step, insight by insight, she went toward healing. One of the ways she worked through her grief was by writing her book, Widow’s Walk, which I believe is destined to be a classic in the literature of grief. Through writing and the many speeches she has given, Anne Hosansky has been able to reach thousands of people. She has become a guide, an inspiration, a strong authentic voice in the community of grieving. Her entire life was transformed by the way she handled her loss.

Your life can be transformed, too. Unfortunately, transformation is hard because it means leaving behind the life you knew. People would rather go back to what they had. But since death can’t be altered, there’s no other positive road except through your own personal transformation.

The hard lesson we all learn is that loss is an inevitable part of life. The only way to live fully is to live in the face of loss and not let our lives be diminished by it.

Chapter One

AN ALIEN SHORE

Sometimes you get to what you thought was the end and you find it’s a whole new beginning.

Anne Tyler

[Ladder of Years]

I’m in the car going home from the hospice. My daughter is sitting beside her significant other; my son is next to his closest friend. I feel totally alone. The man I shared my life with for thirty-nine years isn’t in the car, isn’t anywhere in the world. I run my hand over the cold seat, staring at the two gold bands on my finger: my wedding ring and the matching one I removed from his hand just an hour ago. In the silence I hear my voice saying, I’m not a wife anymore.

Like nearly fourteen million other widowed people in the United States, as well as those who lost a domestic partner, I felt in the following months as if I’d been cast up on an alien shore. I didn’t know the customs of this thing called Widowhood, didn’t know the proper things to say, do, even wear. (I wanted to wear black for the rest of my life, as if only that could do justice to Mel.) Nor did I know how to relate to friends who were still securely coupled and who acted as if widowhood were a contagious disease.

You discover it isn’t only your spouse or partner who’s disappeared. The person you were has disappeared, too. As a man who recently lost his wife told me, This is like putting a jigsaw puzzle back together, but it’s not clear where the pieces go. I only know they won’t fit together in the same way.

So our major questions are: Who am I now? and, What do I want my life to become? For we each have a choice: to retreat into the past, or to find out whom we’re capable of becoming.

Most of us come into bereavement carrying what’s called old baggage. My biggest piece was my lifelong fear of being abandoned. Isn’t the death of the person you expected to spend the rest of your life with, abandonment of the worst kind?

I’m from the generation who went from parents to husband without ever living on my own. Mel and I had met while I was still in college. Until death do us part, we vowed, so young we never expected it to happen.

Our marriage became entangled with the responsibilities of careers and parenthood. After our two children were grown, we looked forward to the golden years of time alone together. But as happens with so many people, fate had other plans.

We were arranging for our first trip to Italy and already had the hotel reservations. Mel wasn’t feeling well, tightness in his stomach. Probably stress, he thought, because traveling made him anxious (despite being a travel editor!).The diagnosis was liver cancer.

In the twenty-three months that followed, our mutual anguish and fear brought us closer than we’d been since our first falling-in-love days. The difference then was that our whole lives lay ahead of us.

Two weeks before Mel died he was faced with the inescapable fact that he wasn’t going to make it. Looking at death, his concern was for me. I know how hard it will be for you to live alone, he told me. He also said I should turn to the children for support. But they had their own grief to contend with.

Thrown out of the cocoon of marriage where I had depended on Mel for almost every decision, I was now faced with a new role: a single woman who had to manage life on her own. The prospect terrified me. Yet the more I’ve had to stand on my own two feet and make my own decisions—ranging from major ones about finances down to how to fill another Saturday night—the stronger I’ve become. Now I value this autonomy that I tried on for the first time.

During the first year and a half, I was in two support groups. We all kept in touch afterward. But although we’d suffered an equal loss, we weren’t progressing at the same rate. Some were branching in new directions, while others were clinging to the past.

I saw these same differences reflected in hundreds of bereaved men and women around the country. Some said things like, The best is over, what’s the use of going on? But others were saying—to quote a staunch young widow—Life stops for one person, it doesn’t have to stop for both. It’s people like her who are creating new and independent lives.

Unfortunately, our two-by-two society rates autonomy less highly than becoming part of a couple again. People who are still comfortably (or uncomfortably) married, feel they must assure us we’ll meet someone—whether or not we even want to. In my case, I had written a book—Widow’s Walk—about Mel’s death, and how I was putting my life back together in positive ways. This opened new doors. I began to appear on talk shows, give lectures, go on book tours—all on my own. Yet five years after Mel died, when I briefly became involved with a man, a cousin told me, You’re finally getting on with your life. I found her words degrading. Why is a relationship the sole equivalent of getting on with life? What about those of us who forge new careers, travel alone, meet myriad other challenges single-handedly?

This doesn’t mean that a healthy relationship can’t be rewarding, too. In the following pages, people who’ve found new connections discuss how they resolve the complex issues this brings up. However, despite celluloid fantasies, finding a new partner is not the criterion for success.

I confess to falling for the movie myth myself. During a book tour a woman complimented me on how well I was doing. My brain-washed response was, But I haven’t found anyone.

Yes you have, she said. You’ve found yourself.

So have countless others, as I discovered when I began to interview people in various parts of the country. Searching for answers myself, I needed to know what enables some people to get beyond devastation. To not only survive, but evolve into fruitful new identities. It seemed to me that the dividing line between those who move on and those mired in an irretrievable past is a determination to triumph over bereavement, not be defeated by it. To—in the words of the Biblical injunction—choose life.

Some achieve this by resurrecting dreams stifled for years; others by developing new skills or exploring paths they never dreamed they’d venture (and adventure) on. Whatever the route, it can lead to unexpected places. As a buoyant seventy-year-old told me, It’s like boarding a plane you think is headed for Kansas and landing in Oz instead!

Over and over, I’m asked if there’s a map through this terrain of loss. Even if there were a mythical map, we’d find our way sooner with the aid of guides who’ve navigated the same obstacles we face and have come through to the other side. Guides who share candid revelations of feelings we thought were unique to us (anger, guilt, envy of those still married, sexual desire). For one person’s struggle may become another’s solution.

In the following pages, you’ll meet guides who range from those shockingly bereaved in their twenties to dauntless seniors in their eighties. For though the average age for widowhood is the mid-fifties, grief doesn’t go by the calendar. Most of these people had been married; others were in relationships, either straight or gay. The stories I ultimately chose were the ones I found most inspiring and interesting. Each is true, although some names and details have been changed to protect privacy. You’ll encounter these guides many times, for they weave in and out of various chapters as they continue their determined journeys.

During a book signing in Cleveland, I was presented with a tee shirt that shows two profiles of the same woman. They’re turned in opposite directions, as though one woman is looking at the past—for we never forget, nor should we, the person we loved. But her other face is turned toward the future.

How do we learn to turn toward tomorrow? That’s the question I’m continually asked. I found the first key at a yoga center. There was a wicker basket on a table, containing thin strips of paper like the ones in fortune cookies. Reaching for a fortune I read:

ONE WHO IS LOOKING AT WHAT WAS CANNOT SEE WHAT IS

The courageous survivors in this book have been able to accept what is. To build new lives on what remains-and may yet be. They illuminate the way for us.

LENORE

Married to artist Jim Parker for almost twenty-eight years, Lenore was known in her own right as Executive Director of the YWCA of New York. She took a leave of absence to accompany Jim to France, where he was to run the Parsons School of Design’s Paris branch. Shortly after arriving, they found out that Jim had liver cancer. He died just two months later.

It’s seven years since then. Lenore, who’s in her sixties, currently works as a consultant for the Y. An earthy witty woman, she speaks emphatically as we talk in her spacious Manhattan loft. She and Jim had bought it so he’d have room to paint. His vivid color-field paintings still dominate the walls.

Survival means so many different things. For a while, it meant dealing with the loneliness. Just being able to live by myself was a major triumph. People ask how I did it. You do it because you must. After a while the thing I thought was never going to happen again did: I was able to take pleasure in very simple things—a book, the lamplight, a sunset. The comfort you can take under the worst of circumstances is amazing, a blessing.

I’ve been able to live in the same place. It’s ours, we created it together. But in order to handle it at first, I had to keep Jim at arm’s length. I couldn’t bear to have a photograph around, had to close myself off. I’d poke him out of my mind as fast as I could, but it was never fast enough. His presence was always here.

We also had a house upstate. I think the fact that I kept going there was one of the things that indicated I was making decisions on the life side, rather than the death side. I mean, your choice is either to lie in bed and let sorrow take over completely, or do other things—go to movies, drive to the country. These are indications that you’re slowly but surely going to pull out of it.

But I was overwhelmed with loneliness, and I knew that distraction was the only thing that could get me through it. What saved my life was buying a puppy. Never underestimate the therapeutic value of that dog! If I cried, Rosie couldn’t stand it. She’d walk over my face, licking it, make me laugh. Puppies have to go out, you have to clean up after them, play a thousand games with them, they eat your shoes. It was another person here, one who was demanding. In many ways she made me furious, but she pulled me out of myself.

Three years after Jim died I went to Ireland with my in-laws. First I spent a week in England by myself. Pure misery, both weeks. But maybe because I was away from my normal routine, or whatever the reason, out of it came a realization of where a lot of my feelings were coming from. I understood how much self-hatred I had been contending with, how much guilt because I was alive and Jim wasn’t. Here I’d been so sorry for myself, but he was the one who’d died. It was like you have this giant broth and every so often something bubbles to the top. Nothing was quite as bad after that. But this only happens when you’re ready for it.

Each moment brings you closer to recovery. You know that little voice in your head that gives you some kind of objectivity? I hadn’t heard it much since Jim died, but a few years later I was sitting in a cab and suddenly that voice came back. It said, Well, you met Jim and married and were very happy and then he died—and that’s your life! It was total ACCEPTANCE. Before that you fight against it, say it can’t happen to me, the scenario isn’t right. But once you accept, that’s the point where you’re finally on your way.

After that I began to get a grip on my feelings and even enjoy being alone. I’d think, why would I give up this kind of independence to be at the mercy of someone else’s needs and possible illness and death?

Of course, that was before Robert and I got together. He’d been our friend for ages. Four years after Jim died, Robert broke up with his girl friend and began asking me out. We played bridge a lot. He was always so courtly, but I was thinking, what’s he doing? So I finally said, When are you going to sleep with me? He said, There are ghosts. I thought, not for me. Not anymore.

But I had a dream once that we were in the country and Jim came back. I was so happy to see him. I said, Look, I’ve remodeled the house, done this, that. He said, Wonderful, let’s have a drink and then dinner. As he was starting down the stairs, I thought, Robert’s there! I didn’t mention him. Then I thought, Robert can tell him.

I’ll never get over Jim, but this is a very different relationship. Jim was the friend of my salad days, the father of my child, the shaper of my life. That’s different from the person you take up with at sixty.

But if Jim were to come back I think I’d say, Why don’t we all share?

Chapter Two

LONELY … OR JUST ALONE?

There are times when loneliness is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic.

Colette

When I was a child at the beach I’d take a few nervous steps into the ocean, then dash back to shore if a large wave hurtled toward me. Usually I couldn’t run fast enough and it would catch up, knocking me off my feet. One day a condescending older cousin informed me that the trick was to go into the waves. It took a while to get up my courage, but the first time I did—going toward what scared me, diving right into it—I came up on the other side sputtering but triumphant. I haven’t been afraid of the ocean since.

Coping with loneliness is a lot like that. It’s only by meeting it head-on that we can get past it.

I’ll tell you a very honest story about that, says Helen, a social worker widowed after forty-seven years of marriage. Despite her dignified facade, Helen’s willing to admit to experiences many of us would be shy about revealing.

I was in an art gallery that was empty except for one man who had his back toward me, she says. He reminded me so much of my husband. Before I realized what I was doing, I found myself following him through the galleries, wishing he’d turn and put his arms around me! I was horrified at myself, until I understood what this was all about. I was lonesome. You have to accept the fact that’s what you’re feeling. Ten minutes later, the feeling was gone.

Helen and I are both from the generation who went from parents to husband. No in-between time when we learned how to live on our own (basic training for the years when this is forced on us). That’s a big one, says Helen, and it’s led even this usually practical woman to some irrational moments. Recently I had to get an unlisted number because of crank calls. But I found myself worrying, how would my husband be able to contact me? We laugh together in mutual recognition.

For months after Mel died, I’d come into the apartment and stand there listening to the silence. I had never known silence could be so loud. I’m not even aware when this began to change. Or when my first thought on coming home stopped being about that enormous absence, but the mail, the phone messages, defrosting dinner, the paraphernalia of every day. I did think it might help to move to a new home, but I also wanted to remain connected to all that was familiar.

Noah and I talk about this. He’s a stocky sixty-nine-year-old whose wife died four years ago. He’s living in the apartment where they’d raised three children and which now feels too huge for one person.

I’m rattling around in these rooms, Noah says, but I really don’t want to leave. I figure there are two ways to handle this. One is to get out because there are memories all over the place. The other is to recognize that memories will always bring mixed pleasure and pain, and after a while you’ll adapt to them.

Finances usually play a major role in the decision. A young woman whose husband died less than two years after they were married says it’s hard for her to be in the apartment they’d furnished so hopefully. But it’s rent-controlled and you don’t give that up so easily. She’s found a partial solution. I’m changing every single thing I can—a new dining table, new light fixtures, even the wallpaper. Anything to be as different as possible from the woman I used to be.

Jennie had no choice about moving. A retired teacher, she’d lived with her husband in a low-income Manhattan apartment for forty years. But no sooner had her husband died, than the landlord started harassing her because he wanted to raise the rent to an amount she couldn’t afford. The new apartment Jennie found was a much smaller space, so she had to sort through years of treasured possessions in order to decide what had to be discarded. Faced with this overwhelming chore, she was enraged. But not at the landlord. It was my husband I resented! I kept thinking, why did you leave me to do all this alone?

Yet now that the move’s accomplished, Jennie says being in a new home isn’t as emotionally tearing as she’d feared. I guess anything that makes a break with the past helps. And having to decide what would fit into a smaller place and what to get rid of made me realize I can make decisions on my own. It gives me a feeling of independence. Unwanted independence, she adds mockingly.

The decision about whether or not to move is doubled if you also have a vacation home. Helen couldn’t imagine selling the country house she and her husband had bought, but the first time she went there without him she was unable to make herself go inside. I just walked around and around outside. When she finally went in, she couldn’t face spending the night there. The next time, she asked a friend to go with her. Sleeping in that house without her husband for the first time, Helen dreamed about him. He told me, ‘I’m glad you’re here.’ That gave me permission to stay.

Feeling very brave, she decided to redo her apartment. The decorator suggested giving the bedroom a more feminine look. I’d never even had a bedroom to myself before. I’d always been a ‘we’ person and it takes time to become an ‘I’ after being part of a couple for so many years. You have to redefine yourself. Each step you take is another piece of that redefinition.

Although I’ve become comfortable with memories in my home (how our pronouns change from our to my) the sight of scenes where Mel and I had been can pull me down. My son doesn’t have this problem. A few months after his father died, David went to the office to have lunch with one of the editors. Isn’t it hard to go there? I asked. David said, I go to the old places and put new experiences into them.

Georgia does this, too. The fifty-seven-year-old manager of a mid-western bookstore, she’d been in a gay relationship.

Iris and I met when she kept coming in to browse through the poetry section, Georgia says. One day I asked her what book she was so engrossed in. She held up Emily Dickinson’s Collected Poems. Since Dickinson’s one of my favorite poets, we started talking about her. Then we made a date to meet for coffee.

Iris, who was divorced, had never been in a gay relationship. But she and Georgia lived together for seventeen years. Yet when Iris died of lung cancer, Georgia didn’t get the sympathy usually accorded the widowed. A woman told me, ‘It’s not as if you lost a husband,’ Georgia says bitterly. As if my grief wasn’t real. (I hear similar complaints about disenfranchised grief from those who’d been in straight relationships, if they weren’t legally married.)

One evening when her loneliness was overwhelming, Georgia found herself heading for their favorite restaurant. I thought maybe I was letting myself in for too many memories. But I deliberately sat at ‘our’ table, had a glass of wine, and spent the time reliving so much that had been good. She found the experience surprisingly comforting. "Now