“Chit,” pleads a familiar voice, “where can I get an annulment?”
It is an overseas call from Celia, a friend from way back. “I should not have married him! I should have listened to my mother!”
If only the voice did not clearly betray anguish, the line was sure to get laughs, especially if delivered by Betty White, unequaled in mining absurdity for comedy.
Celia is 76 years old and was married for 53 years to a man now too dead to defend himself or make amends.
“I’m suffering 24/7!” Another Betty White winner.
But Celia is doubtless suffering. Rummaging through her husband’s things, she turns up such overwhelming evidence of his cheating heart, she can’t help but entertain the suspicion that her married life may have all been a sham.
Devastated and lost, she reaches out to girlfriends back home for help to deal with her anger and grief. I’m afraid I myself couldn’t be much help, with Betty White constantly intruding.
Another widow admits living a separate, albeit contented, life with her husband of 60 years. They had such an unusually open relationship, she didn’t feel any discomfort at all teasing him in his terminal days to “please naman,” get rid, before his time came, of all evidence of his philandering, which she had always suspected locked away in his cabinet’s forbidden top drawer.
“Already done,” he winked, surprising her and provoking her to ask further.
“No,” he replied, “no children outside.”
Doubting privately
Alone in the separate bedroom she had begun to occupy even before his illness set in, she deals with her loss and doubts privately. Little did her closest friends know him, and she wonders how much she herself didn’t know.
In another case, that of a famous socialite, discovery has proved invigorating. Diagnosed with cancer, she miraculously sprang back to health after her prognosis had prompted her husband to confess to having another family. She made sure she lived long enough to fix the family estate for her children’s protection.
She survived him, in fact. He died of his own cancer.
Another widow just couldn’t get over the fact that her husband’s paramour in an affair long ended dared attend his wake and sign the guestbook.
“Why do they do that?” she is asking still.
It seems unfair, indeed, that the sins of dead spouses live after them to torment their widows and infect and possibly eventually kill all her good memories. In Celia’s case, in fact, it’s as if her husband never left or stopped cheating.
I like to believe the unearthing of evidence posthumously and not sooner is more merciful. A close friend said it so well. When she again met her children’s nanny, back from retirement from many years working abroad, she thought she should update her about her breakup with her philandering husband.
The nanny wasn’t surprised at all: “Ay, ’nyora, two years pa lang alam na namin ’yon.”
She thanked her for not telling; it gave her nine happy years with him, instead of two.
Then, there are dead husbands who were—are—heaven-sent. Gigi, a widow of one, celebrates his birthday and death anniversary with classmates and friends who knew him well, sharing her sweet sorrow.
Always
Close to his 10th death anniversary, I asked how often she thought of him. Her quick, happy reply: “Always!”
At my age, every other girlfriend is a widow, which tells me that survivors should maybe prepare for it, except for the cougars among us. Separated wives are widowed themselves, thus unspared the legal and personal implications of the eventuality. At any rate, only then, confess a number of them, do they really feel a sense of complete liberation.
Not a few though have shown the magnanimity to be with their estranged husbands in their final hour. He is, after all, father to her children. It’s understandably less complicated for estranged spouses who have not remarried.
Chona, a widow herself, now consoles a newly widowed younger sister, Maryanne, whose husband succumbed to a ruptured aneurysm that had never been suspected, and she wonders whether she had had it worse or better.
Her husband had gone slowly, passing the point she’d have preferred to miss for the great pain it brought her; on the other hand, he had the time to say his farewell.
Anyway, in widowhood, Chona sees their marital love finding natural altruistic expression in her work. Like her late husband, she is a doctor.
She sends a message from Amanpulo: “a jewel of a resort.” But she’s not on holiday; she’s on a medical mission, hopping from island to island in the Palawan group.
“I saw 150 children today,” she texts. She’ll see “more of them in the next two days.”
“Healing children in impoverished island barangays forgotten by the world—it feels good,” she says, her widow’s heart lifting for the moment.
Tita Techie, 88, widowed for 33 years, tells me a widow’s heart never really heals.
“You never forget,” she says, but assures me, “You can live with it.”