Another friend has been widowed, joining the majority in our circle, and her addition again provokes a sense of injustice. Why does widowhood too often strike in relationships where the would-be widow has not yet become ready to be liberated?
To be sure, there are those of us who have taken matters in our own hands, bolting our first marriages, thus becoming self-made widows. All the same, I wouldn’t take the grave responsibility of prescribing my way— it’s just too unpredictable, like marriage itself. I know not a few who are actually not too happy to have done as we have.
Then there are those effectively widowed by being left by their husbands and, in a sub-group by themselves, those widowed by the death of their estranged husbands.
However widowed, those freed from a luckless marriage tend to jump into another one. I know of one who did just that after the death of her long-estranged husband. Lucky to have taken a second husband in a more civilized world, she got out as fast as she got in by divorce.
She’s now quite content, enjoying her freedom as well as all the assets her perfectly legal and suddenly dead husband could not take with him—among other things, insurance money, real estate, and cash.
She may yet find what she really wants for herself at this stage of her life. Meanwhile, she has been traveling with family and friends.
A younger widow I also know remarried another older man, perhaps believing a husband older and wiser is what works for her. She now looks resigned dutifully, though not necessarily unhappily. Still, she advises widows to think harder.
Admittedly lonely in widowhood, another friend took a second husband; now she wants more and more time and space for herself alone.
Another widow, well-preserved and interesting like her, the sort that’s a shoo-in, you might say, for remarriage, finds her second marriage “more fulfilling, if not as much fun as the first.” She said she realized, in comparison, how immature she was the first time around.
An old classmate does not look like a good candidate at all for a second turn. She lost her husband just when she thought the danger of losing him was over—after his heart-bypass surgery that momentarily looked successful. He died taking a stress test, while she waited outside reading the papers, looking forward to their usual golf game together on the same day.
Life-size picture
I’ve never known anyone so in love with her husband and as devoted to his parents as to her own: They all died living with her. Tanned, trim and lively, she would seem a popular prospect for remarriage—until, we like to tease her, the prospector learns she keeps her husband’s life-size picture in their bedroom.
Actually, most of the widows in my circle don’t look like the remarrying kind; they just have too many good memories and lovely children to summon them constantly. How can, for instance, Gilda replace an Elo, or Gigi her beloved Doding, or Nening her Tony, or my cousin Ninit her first and only Manolo?
I asked Tita Techie, 86, and a widow for more than half her life now, “When do you forget, Tita?” She looked at me pensively, “Ay, you never do.”
Every widow copes somehow, and no one does it better, it seems to me, than the artist, Phyllis, whose own Toti was everybody’s Toti, too—everybody’s boogie partner. Indeed, she doesn’t seem ever lonely. Contentment, she says, she finds in the solitude of her art.
In her calendar of paintings for 2012, she writes: “People ask me why I hardly ever include their figures in my paintings. My answer is this: My loved ones are present in each painting if you know where to look for them. Strolling along pencil lines and swimming in pigments, resting in the shade of solid walls and soaring among swirling clouds, limned by light behind each window’s curlicued grill, you will find not their faces but rather their spirit and quiet energy.”
When I bumped into her in an art exhibit shortly after she became a widow, several years now, we took what time we could, as we always do, to catch up with each other’s lives. At some point, we became aware even then of the growing number of widows among our peers, and began naming and counting. Suddenly her face lit up.
“We could form a club,” she said.
“Of widows?” I asked, feeling left out.
“Nah,” she said, “the Last Wives Club!”
Oh, I love that!