What I Learned in My Second Year as a Widow

Observing a grief.

“I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.” — C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed¹

My husband died in April, 2023. One year later, I published an essay, “What I Learned in My First Year as a Widow,” on my fledgling Substack. (You can read it here.) I never intended to write a sequel at the end of Year Two. Would I survive that long? Loneliness, despair, sorrow, rage: any of my new familiars could summon a heart attack or car crash. They might push me off the ladder I’d been foolish enough to climb in order to clean a gutter. Ice patches, hedge trimmers, power tools. Home invasions. Murder hornets. To be widowed was to be stalked by all of these, along with broken appliances and leaky faucets.

Yet here I am, alive. And so is Mini, my 22-year-old cat. Against all odds, we are alive, together.

---

I’d hoped for a softer Year Two. Grief was a prison. But if I rearranged the furniture and painted the walls, it might be a grief-rehab center. The saturated slashes of emotion that had characterized Year One could be covered in the pale, soothing hues of mood stabilizers and the occasional sleep aid. Lamictal and Lunesta, sisters of pharmaceutical mercy, I need my provider to fill your scrip.

Your husband died? Oh yes, I have it in my notes, he says. Let’s keep the same dosage.

I fill out the nine-question depression inventory, and pass. It’s really only the sleep issues that concern me. Otherwise, I’m fine. He believes me.

Bless you, Sisters.

---

Year Two ends with a return.

I thumb through Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking as I did in the days following his death and at the one-year mark. It’s the standard widow text for a reason: it’s precise, real, the prose sharp enough to cut diamonds. That’s not what I need right now.

I reach for A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis’ examination of his state of mind following the death of his wife. Reading the book now, I find new subtleties within the text. Crisp, elegant sentences unfold like altar linens. Others weave self-consciousness and irony from rough threads of anguish:

“An odd byproduct of my loss is that I’m aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet,” he writes.

At our neighborhood Saturday-morning coffee gatherings, I have little to contribute besides good listening skills. My neighbors travel to Venice, the south of France, India, Ireland, places I’ve never been. I haven’t hiked the Appalachian Trail or rebuilt a vintage Mercedes or started a solar energy business. My neighbors lead fascinating lives. I sometimes bring cookies.

Yes. A Grief Observed is the book I need.

---

The hardest part of being a widow is eating alone.

Humans are social creatures, as anyone who has ever been an adolescent can attest. Separation from others brings all forms of suffering, from diaper rash to dementia. It is fear of the latter that keeps me awake at night. Insomnia presents a greater risk of Alzheimer’s than eating Amy’s frozen dinners three nights a week, hunched over the sink to keep bread crumbs from flying.

Forty-three years of marriage followed by two years alone with my aging cat. The only human occupant of a space designed for four, I’m afflicted by — what? Square footage disorder? Main floor: kitchen, living room, piano room, sunroom, study. Upstairs: my (formerly our) bedroom and the bathroom are the spaces I inhabit. I keep many of my books on a wall of shelves in my daughter’s old room, still furnished with her white iron daybed. Guest room? Library? Not being a realtor, I have no clue. My son’s old room is an electronics graveyard. I avoid the basement, except to do laundry, grab something from the pantry, or change the litterbox.

I live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

---

“How are things?” people ask. I’m never sure how to respond. My brain cycles through increasingly peculiar answers:

1. Now that’s an interesting question!

2. When I said “interesting” I didn’t mean it in the Minnesota* sense. Really.

3. I can’t decide which I like better: Amy’s broccoli and cheddar bake, or the three cheese and kale bowl.

4. Those blue flowers in my lawn are a joyful display of spring an invasive species? Worse than busybodies jumping worms? You don’t say! Thank you for lecturing me at length sharing your expertise by yard-shaming speaking out against the harm they do to our native species.

* “Interesting.” Inflection, tone, or nuance: nothing fully accounts for the disorienting effect this word can have on a native Minnesotan. It’s pejorative in a way that can’t be called out. Like “different,” — another hit-and-run adjective — it speaks from the shadow side of Minnesota Nice. As I search for a more upbeat term to lighten this discussion, I can only think of “super-cute,” which seems inappropriate.

---

The blue flowers I’ve always known as scilla are now demonized as an invading horde, “Siberian squill.” A crime against language; these harbingers of spring deserve their place in the dictionary, next to scintillating.

My husband hated them. They take over the lawn, he’d say. To which I’d respond, Just mow them. And he did. They’d emerge the following spring in greater numbers. I cheered those urban guerrillas.

I compare my sorry property to the lush green spaces extending uninterrupted in both directions. I sweep the sidewalks, check for mail, go back indoors. It’s my way of reminding the world and myself that in spite of appearances, I still exist.

---

My brother lives in Salt Lake City. Every Christmas, he sends me a Scenic Utah calendar to hang on the side of my refrigerator. My daughter stops by and changes the page from January to April.

“Thanks, hon. Those canyons all look alike, don’t they? Anyway, that’s what apps are for.”

Turning a calendar page: in a past life, this was a more ritual than work. Now, these spectacular rock formations are no longer portals to heaven. Every April begins with thirty pristine squares and the promise of events to fill them. All of the squares are empty.

It’s the last day of April. One-third of the year, gone.

My husband has been dead for two years. The world has moved on. No one, not even his sister, called or texted their condolences.

I don’t know how to be in the world anymore.

---

The second anniversary of his death falls between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. The Lutheran in me is frayed, and the Episcopalian I tried to mend her with is stiff. Zen is excruciating. When it comes to religion, I am homeless.

What do people mean when they say, ‘I am not afraid of God because I know He is good.’ Have they never even been to a dentist? ~ C.S. Lewis

---

On that liminal grayed-out Saturday, my neighbor has made two plates of deviled eggs.

“For me?” I say. I could eat them all: two dozen slippery white ovals, with their tender bellies of yolks, mustard, sweet relish, and mayonnaise. My husband detested hard-boiled eggs. Whenever his mother made potato salad, she set aside an egg-free bowl for him. Refusing to be his mother, I made one bowl and let him push the chopped bits aside. When his Stage 4 lung cancer hit, I relented. His gratitude still pierces me.

The young couple from next door arrive with their St. Bernard. Cleo just passed her first birthday. No longer a puppy, she comes straight at me, pushes her face into my belly, flops against my feet. Cleo, at one hundred and twenty pounds, weighs more than I do. I brace myself in my chair; she doesn’t knock me over.

At the hospital, as chemo poisons dripped into my husband, therapy dogs pressed their bodies against me. At the hospice, they divided their calming ministrations between the dying and their wounded companions. Sometimes the patient was not the one most in need.

---

I thought I could describe a state, make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a map but a process. ~ C.S. Lewis

The second year is harder than the first. ~ every widow I know

---

“What are we having?” my son texts. Having? Oh. Easter dinner. Tomorrow. I’ve invited my family.

I look around the kitchen. I could serve them pasta, or set out a charcuterie board of pre-sliced cheddar, olives, and nine crackers. Or I could brave Lund’s.

“Chef’s surprise,” I text back, imagining a flurry of messages to his wife and sister. The Do you think it’s okay to order pizza? conversation. After fifteen minutes, he texts back.

“Great!” A thumbs-up emoji.

Lund’s is manageable. But the only affordable ham is small: three-and-half pounds, nothing like those I bought when I cooked Easter dinner for two dozen. I grab a beef sirloin as backup. Cucumbers, scallions, for a favorite salad; heirloom potatoes and rosemary, to roast. Cut-up fruit. Lactose-free milk, yogurt, and four cans of Friskies: household staples.

The cashier is wearing a black brocade suit over a black shirt. I remember when everyone dressed up for Easter. The dresses I sewed for my daughter. He looks sharp.

“Ready for Easter?” I say.

“Oh, I would be. If only I could afford eggs. I make a killer oeufs en meurette.”

One sack of groceries: eighty dollars. Enough to put in your eye, as my mother would say. I carry it to my car and head to Haskell’s. Wine: three bottles of red, two of white. Rye whiskey and vodka from the craft distillery in Wisconsin we sometimes visited on Sunday afternoons. For the drive, the tour, and the pours. And the toast: “Here’s to looking up your wife’s nightie!”

The bill is enough to put in both eyes.

---

Before leaving the house, I clear out the refrigerator. Tossing half the produce was, two years ago, the new normal. But it’s no longer new, and it will never be normal to use up a small bag of shallots before they sprout. Or to be forced to drink gin-and-tonics night after night, before the limes shrink and harden into dark green golfballs.

Bananas turn black and liquefy before I can add them into eggs, butter, sour cream before it goes bad, and tiny chocolate chips to make his signature banana bread. How hard it is to assemble the mise-en-place with all ingredients in the same time zone. Not that it matters. His recipe is either in a locked spreadsheet on his computer, or he took it with him. Hoping to tease it out of thin air, I’ve bought and tossed out dozens of bananas. During nights when the house squeezes in on me, draining my chest of everything but pain, I binge on tiny chocolate chips.

Dinner for one.

---

“Mom. You still have his toothbrush?”

I don’t have to answer that.

---

If you hear splashing in the toilet at night you open the lid carefully, and if it is what you think it is you scream and put something heavy on top. Your weighted blanket. You flush. Again. You hear splashing.

Your hands shake as you pull up YouTube on your phone. YouTube says what is in your toilet is capable of swimming up to 1.24 km without taking a breath. The pictures. No, this one’s not that big. Not chihuahua-sized like the photo. Small. But big enough.

Following instructions, you run downstairs. Grab the Dawn. Pull up the toilet lid, squeeze the bottle, close the lid, flush. Flush flush flush flush flush. YouTube says the detergent sticks to their fur, they’re not water-repellent anymore, they go somewhere else to meet their fate.

Flush.

Silence.

You go back to bed. Proud: did it yourself, no man required. Still, you leave the weighted blanked on the toilet lid. You want a drink, but settle for a Lunesta. And go back to sleep.

In the morning, hearing nothing, you take off the weighted blanket, open the lid and OH MY GOD it’s still there, fur dry because it somehow hung on to that divot in the porcelain right below the lip. You scream. FLUSH FLUSH FLUSH. Open up the lid and squeeze in half the remaining Dawn, put the weighted blanket back on the lid. Hyperventilate. Leave the house.

For a week, you use the toilet in the basement

Don’t ask me how I know this.

---

Tonight: farfalle with bacon, peas, burst grape tomatoes, in a brown butter and Parmesan sauce. Black pepper. Red pepper flakes. I would have made broccoli but couldn’t get to it before the florets turned yellow.

I sit on the floor in front of the coffee table. Listen to a New York Times podcast about an immigrant man and a place in El Salvador and what it means for the future of democracy —

I leave a plate for him in the fridge, in case he gets hungry.

He’s never hungry. Tomorrow: leftover farfalle. Dinner for one.

---

For days, tiny bubbles float to the surface. I think of the Arizona, releasing oil eight decades after Pearl Harbor was attacked.

“Mom. Why is your weighted blanket on the toilet?”

I don’t have to answer that.

---

Daughter, son, daughter-in-law. Me. The habit of setting a fifth place for my husband is fading. I reach back in my brain to Psych 101. The word that describes the ending of a habitual behavior? Extinction.

We clink our glasses of Viognier. His favorite.

“To Dad,” we say. Silently, I add: Here’s to looking up your wife’s nightie!

I thought the ham would be too small. But there are leftovers. I send them home with the kids. An empty refrigerator is sometimes a relief.

I will end with another quote from Lewis:

We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least.

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1. All quotes by C. S. Lewis are from A GRIEF OBSERVED. Copyright 1961 by N.W. Clark, restored 1996. Published by HarperCollins.