Among the many popular misconceptions about grief and its trajectory, one that particularly rankles widowed people is the assumption that if you’ve found a new love relationship, you’ve “moved on” from your grief. How very tidy.
How very ridiculous. In conversations with hundreds of widows and widowers, I’ve discovered that I’m hardly unique in feeling that those of us who have buried a beloved spouse never stop grieving for our loss. As time passes and life admits new possibilities and opportunities, the intensity of the pain diminishes, becoming more tolerable and less central to the course of most days. But the love doesn’t go away. And count on it, as where there’s love, there’s pain.
That was clear even on the day in 2013 when I married for a second time. In the minutes before the small ceremony, I suddenly found myself fighting back tears I couldn’t identify as my daughter, Becky, and I walked down a long corridor toward the room where I would exchange vows with my new love, Bob. “You have to stop thinking about Daddy,” Becky said.
Was that it? I wondered. Then, there I was, standing face to face with Bob, and I realized, yes, that’s it, exactly. As my tears started to flow, Bob began blinking back his own. Like me, he’d lost his cherished spouse to cancer. Like me, he was keenly aware that the two of us wouldn’t be here, surrounded by our three grown children, if our first spouses were still alive. All of this we’d discussed in the months leading up to our wedding, a day that we both knew would be one more, albeit bittersweet, goodbye.
Yet I couldn’t have predicted how painful that parting would feel in a moment of such joy. Nor could I have predicted the pain I would feel when the proprietor of the historic inn where we spent our wedding night greeted us with a boisterous, “The newlyweds have arrived!” In that moment, I grasped that from this day forward, people would no longer regard me as Joe’s widow; to the world at large, I was now Bob’s wife.
And so I am. But I am also Joe’s wife. Which makes me a bigamist.
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| 👍Ruth Gwily |
Sure, I was a bride. But I was also a married woman whose love of her husband hadn’t stopped at graveside — and wasn’t going to stop at the altar, either. Bob feels the same way about his first wife, Leslie, which may explain why the two of us failed to feel like newlyweds after our exchange of vows. I’d been married 24 years; he, 37. The idea and mystery of marriage hardly felt new to either of us. Forming this new union did not erase what each of us already had. While death had disarranged our respective feelings of permanence, our sense of commitment to and love for our late spouses remained intact.
Together now five years, two of them married, neither Bob nor I has “moved on” from those feelings that bind us to our late spouses. Neither of us wants to. Neither of us expects it of the other. While most friends rarely mention Joe or Leslie (unclear if that’s because we’re remarried or because people fear such mentions will upset us), we discuss our late spouses with each other all the time. Our home has a rich display of photos from each of our first marriages. We want our grown children to feel at “home” when they visit. How would that be possible absent memories of their other parents?
Most of the time, I am the wife of Bob, a role that is quite different from being the wife of Joe. It’s not just that they’re — obviously — two very different people. Where my marriage to Joe involved navigating the challenges of building careers, a family and assets, my marriage to Bob offers different challenges: how to create satisfying post-career endeavors; how to make ourselves available to our children without getting in their way; how to enjoy our hard-earned equity while at the same time leaving solid cushions for our kids. When I think future, I think travel, writing and coaching, grandchildren (hopefully), Bob’s wife (definitely).
Yet not a day goes by that I do not feel I am also Joe’s wife. Usually, the feeling is triggered by something connected to Becky, who will soon be 21, and a college graduate a year after that. I hunger to discuss what adult life will mean for her — but the dialogue I long for is not with Bob. It’s Joe’s counsel I think about when I wonder how to navigate the “she’s an adult now except when she’s not” business. It’s Joe’s reassurance I crave when she announces she’s making a 22-hour drive — solo. It’s Joe’s cautioning voice I hear when I feel unsought parental advice playing on my tongue.
Joe is also very much alive to me in ways unconnected to Becky. I see his pleased smile every time I don a piece of jewelry that he gave me. I hear his booming laugh when I write a humorous line. I smell his sweat when I lower myself to the bedroom carpet to ease an aching muscle and imagine him next to me, stretching after a long bike ride. I feel his hand in mine when I suddenly remember us on this very city street, hurrying to make a theater curtain. I taste his lips when the chilly weather summons memories of our first outdoor kiss.
I savor every such moment and want to “move on” from none of it. Each time I am smacked by a vivid memory of Joe, it reminds me that though he is gone, our love endures.
Recently, without explanation or preamble, I asked Bob, “Are you a bigamist?”
“Absolutely,” he said.
Small wonder I love this second husband of mine as much as I do.
Jill Smolowe is a grief and divorce coach and the author of the memoir “Four Funerals and a Wedding: Resilience in a Time of Grief"
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