After careful consideration, and with a tremendous amount of thought and introspection, I have decided that some of my feelings about the effects of the loss of my beloved husband have been misguided. Don’t get me wrong. There isn’t a day when I don’t feel the pain of having lost him. There isn’t a day when I don’t feel that we were cheated out of growing old together, that we were denied new adventures and new experiences, or that we didn’t get a chance to find out who the best Jeopardy champion REALLY was in the house! (I’m pretty sure we were equally brilliant at the storage of seemingly endless, incredible yet often useless, amounts of information in our brains 🥇😉).
A Wife’s Perspective
Losing my soulmate of forty years was, and continues to be, devastating. I was with him from the day we met for the rest of his life – yet my life has to go on forever without him. And somehow I am surviving. There are days I am fully functional, and others where I would just as soon stay in bed with the covers over my head and just ignore the silence in the house without his voice, his laughter, or even the quiet breaths of his sleeping face beside me. We spent years knowing we didn’t need to speak to communicate…we finished each other’s sentences…we were separate yet united.
Perhaps because we were individuals throughout our togetherness is why I am somehow managing to deal with his absence. Although we were together for WAY more than half my life, and even though I feel to this day that we were together from childhood, the fact is that I wasn’t married straight out of my parents’ house…I didn’t marry my childhood sweetheart…I was living on my own, independent and self-sufficient when we met and just under forty when we finally married. I know how to pay bills and manage legal matters, I can negotiate a mortgage, haggle for the best price on a car, compare insurance prices and (thanks to him) find what I am looking for at Lowe’s, usually without assistance 🔨.
A Mother’s Perspective
When I lost my father over 30 years ago, I witnessed my mother fall apart. She did not consider the effect of his death on their children, and just mourned her husband’s passing, not also that of a father and grandfather. That period of mourning extended to her rather selfish insistence on maintaining every one of his possessions to the point where, when confronted by me telling her that she was making the eventual dealing with his things the duty of her children after she was gone, she simply said “I don’t care”.
I am not talking about “things” here. I am talking about how I feel about my children’s loss of their father. Especially for my older daughter, he was, without exaggeration, the “go-to” parent. Another mom might have been annoyed or even jealous of their relationship…but I so cherished their bond that I was secure that each of us had a place in each other’s lives and it gave me joy to see them together. My mourning of his loss is way more profound than my losing my spouse. My children lost their father. That is a deep hole that I cannot fill. I can try to think of “what would Daddy say”, or “how would Dad advise you”, but the bottom line is that I can only remind them of his pride, his support and his deep and devoted love and confidence in their abilities. There is no way to duplicate the look on his face when he walked my older daughter down the aisle. Or the intense love he felt when he held her infant son for the first time…or for the last time. So we simply have to remember…and project.
Maybe someday I will find companionship with another person who will never replace my soulmate but may fill some of the voids of my loneliness. But no one can ever fill a Dad’s shoes.
So this is dedicated to the children out there who have lost that parent – that loving and devoted parent who worshiped every first step, who put up with every falter or call to a Principal’s office, who watched with trepidation as that child drove off alone for the first time and then waited for the call that they had arrived safely at their destination. These are the parents who bandaged scraped knees, took off the training wheels, beamed with pride, screamed in anger and above all who loved unconditionally and with such deep devotion as my children’s father did. The children suffer as much as, and sometimes even more than, the spouse in so many ways. After all, we are the grown-ups and they are always the children…and unlike my mother — I care.
