Saturday Night Widows (9 page)

When I made an effort to drag myself to an office picnic or dinner with a college roommate, I recognized that no one knew how to behave in the presence of a young widow, and even more disconcerting, neither did I. Those who weren’t tongue-tied might blurt out something wildly inappropriate like, “Don’t worry, you’re young, you’re blonde—you’ll find another man.”

Everyone from close friends to total strangers started sizing up my desirability and feeling free to comment on it. “Your ass looks amazing in those jeans” became something I heard nearly as often as “I’m sorry for your loss.” Nobody, aside from Bernie, had noticed my ass in twenty years. Now it looked as if all the stuff from high
school—looks, popularity, condoms—might matter again. It was surreal to contemplate that my entire future happiness might rest on the contours of my behind.

Among my mostly married contemporaries, I felt like a freak. My friends wanted badly to be helpful, and they were. But we were out of sync. It wasn’t their fault that they were already overtaxed, with children, husbands, jobs. Did I mention husbands? My buddies tried to fit me in. At dinners with couples I’d known for years, it was heavy lifting holding up half the conversation without Bernie to carry some of the load. My repertoire of cancer anecdotes didn’t make for sparkling material, and I had nothing else going on. Still, I knew I needed to get out. On many, many Saturday nights home alone, I felt like the least popular kid in junior high school.

It was on one of those Saturday nights when I formed the resolution to join a widows’ support group. After nearly a year and a half of widowhood, I was ready to “move on” in the words of the grief literature; ready to think, maybe, someday, about dating again, taking some vacations on my own, finding some other unattached people to hang out with on the weekend. What I needed, I decided, were knowledgeable guides. I hoped the widows in the support group might help me sort it all out. Those fellow castaways to the land of the grieving might be the only people I knew who could speak my language, show me the customs. They might have discovered the tricks I didn’t know—how to change that lightbulb above the kitchen cabinet, or make small talk at that wedding where I was marooned at a table with the geriatric and infirm. How to keep making things happen, necessary things, when I could barely manage to make breakfast. After I got kicked out, I was more confused than ever, utterly flummoxed about what to try next.

I wasn’t very good at the role of decorous widow, so I fixed on what I was good at—being a reporter, in essence, finding out about stuff and then writing about it. Only now I wanted to find out what I needed to learn most for myself: How does a human being remake a life when it’s shattered by loss?

T
ALKING TO
D
R
. G
OLDENBERG
, the psychiatrist who helped Bernie during the last months of his life, was a logical first step. He was young, articulate, and well informed, and I knew he specialized in patients with cancer and HIV. He would be up on the latest thinking about people and death. And much as I dreaded meeting him in his East Side office and sitting in the same upholstered wing chair where Bernie had sat, hemmed in by the same bookshelves filled with the same soothing Asian art, more than anything I wanted to learn what Goldenberg knew about this perplexing state of bereavement that I now inhabited.

“You look about as I’d expect.” He greeted me with welcome candor, no doubt taking in my freefall weight loss, the sacks under my eyes.

“That’s refreshing,” I said, lowering myself gingerly into the armchair that had been Bernie’s and pulling a notebook out of my bag. “Everybody keeps telling me what a babe I am now.”

“People want you to feel better right away,” he said. He sat opposite me in an ergonomic chair and switched into his soft, professional psychiatrist voice. “Unfortunately, there’s no shortcut.” A therapeutic silence filled the room as he waited for me to continue.

“I don’t expect a shortcut,” I countered. I switched into my professional
voice, too. “I know I have to plug along this road on my own. But I don’t seem to be following any map. Like the five stages of grief—I can’t seem to get the hang of it.”

“There
are
no five stages of grief,” Goldenberg said sharply. “They’re a complete misconception. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross studied people who were dying, not people who were grieving. People who are grieving don’t necessarily follow any particular pattern.”

“You’re kidding me!” I said. “At my support group we had handouts! I thought we’d be tested on them later!”

“Somehow, the stages of grief have lodged in the popular consciousness.” Goldenberg shrugged. “Even many professionals buy into them.”

I nodded slowly. It made sense that these emotions might emerge in a person facing his own death. Denial—of course, Bernie had been incredulous at what was happening to him. Bargaining—yes, we tried everything to forestall the end. Anger—sure, it was tough to accept the unfairness of it. Depression—understandable. And acceptance—ideally, perhaps, a person would want to die at peace with his fate, although I can’t say that Bernie achieved that stage. Why should he?

The truth is, scientists had begun a serious study of grieving only in the last few years, Goldenberg said. “They say that the emotions of loss and sadness come in waves, and that the waves become less intense over time.”

“That explains why I’m weepy one minute and finding something funny the next.”

“Exactly.”

I told him about the nightmares and flashbacks. “Are those normal, too?”

“More than you’d think,” he said. “Many people worry about succumbing to depression after someone they love has died. But trauma is more common than depression among people who are bereaved. You probably suffer from some degree of post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Just what I need
, I thought. “But I haven’t exactly been waging war in Afghanistan.”

“No, but in some ways you and Bernie were in the trenches, bullets whizzing around you,” Goldenberg said.

The comparison was extreme, but it made sense, too. I thought briefly about the sorts of excruciating medical interventions Bernie had endured. The toll on those left behind can be traumatic, I knew too well. Visions of robot surgeons and failed rescues from drownings didn’t seem much worse than what I had witnessed in broad daylight before he died. I was reliving the horror now in my mind, again and again.

“Also, while you were at war, so to speak, you were surrounded by people who were living a normal life,” Goldenberg said. “You were living a double life, and that makes it difficult to adapt. You still are … everybody around you is continuing normally while you go through this traumatic experience of loss.”

“What should people who are traumatized do?” I asked.

I scribbled on my pad as he answered. It used to be that trauma victims were encouraged to talk about the events that had triggered their condition, to get it out of their systems. But now researchers into post-traumatic stress were concluding that talking about trauma, or even thinking about it too much, can reinforce disturbing memories. “When you have the intrusive thoughts, the nightmares, the flashbacks,” he said, “push them aside.”

“I thought I was supposed to talk it through. Getting it out there was supposed to help me come to terms with all this. That’s why I tried a support group,” I said.

“Did it help?” he asked, giving me a knowing look. “Support groups aren’t for everybody. Sometimes if there are people in the group who are angry or upset, it can magnify negative emotions for everyone. You can come out angrier, more unhappy, than you went in. It’s good to spend time with people who understand you, but not necessarily good to be forced to discuss something that’s traumatizing you.”

“Isn’t that what you do for a living? Get people to talk about what’s bothering them? Are you trying to put yourself out of business?”

He looked more amused than solicitous. “I treat people who need therapy,” he said. “You are grieving normally.”

I felt a burden lift, the burden of conforming to my sorry stereotype of a proper widow. A small smile appeared on his lips, mirroring mine. “You are not depressed,” he said. “You don’t have it in you.”

chapter
SIX

t
urns out, I wasn’t such a misfit after all.

But I didn’t take his word for it. My visit with Dr. Goldenberg gave me the first solid evidence that the script I was following didn’t have to play out like some creaky Victorian melodrama. In fact, when I started reading more about bereavement, I saw that many of our culture’s most misguided notions about it began during that hidebound era, when the widowed forty-two-year-old queen set the standard for acceptable widow behavior, living out the next thirty-nine years of her life in partial seclusion, swathed head-to-toe in black.

Well, widow this, Victoria
, I thought, feeling oh-so-twenty-first-century, when I found myself in a spare white room at Columbia University, punching buttons like a
Jeopardy!
contestant in front of a computer screen. I had turned up in the university’s Loss, Trauma, and Emotion Lab, epicenter of the latest research, where a team of experimental psychologists was challenging the once-entrenched canons of the field. It was my first step toward assembling my
own highly unscientific Saturday night widows’ group. But first I wanted to gather a little highly scientific background information, to base the plan on something more substantial than my own defiant hunch. For three hours, I let a couple of doctoral students monitor my facial expressions; time my reactions to happy, sad, or disturbing photographs; challenge me with subliminal messages about Bernie; and generally mess with my head.

I had come there to learn more about what science had to say about how people negotiate the difficult waters of grief and renewal, and I liked what I found. These scientists were conducting research based on evidence from real people like me, and they were concluding that most of the assumptions I’d been contending with up to now weren’t true. According to the researchers, losing a loved one is a normal transition in everyone’s life. Always has been. Therefore, most of us, they said, possess emotional resources and natural resilience that help us rejuvenate after such a loss, just as we remake ourselves after other setbacks in life. In fact, the process looks nothing like the long-term, debilitating sadness that many seem to expect. The process can even bring new insight and new joy.

One of the experiments I performed, for example, was designed to determine whether I could manage my emotions well enough to lead a normal life or whether I had feelings of grief so severe that they interfered with my ability to function. In front of a computer screen, I focused on a series of photographs of people showing a wide range of emotions—fear, happiness, sadness, horror, surprise. After each picture appeared, a dot showed up on the left or right side of the screen, and I pressed a button to show where I had seen it. Apparently, my reaction times could be affected by the emotions I saw in the photographs. Subjects suffering from prolonged,
dysfunctional grief are distracted by the sad photos to the point that it interferes with the assigned task.

What I didn’t find out until later was that the screen was also flashing me messages, too fast for me to perceive consciously but long enough to register. Sometimes, the message might have been Bernie’s name, or sometimes his name coupled with words relating to loss, words like
separation
or
death
. People with unresolved grief apparently get thrown by these reminders of the people they’ve lost. People with more functional grief do not, or may sometimes even draw comfort from the names of lost loved ones.

My head was reeling by the time the man in charge of these inquiries met me in the lab, and it didn’t improve my equilibrium when I saw what he was wearing: an untucked yellow short-sleeve shirt with an acid-trip pattern of random lines. George Bonanno, a spiky-haired professor of psychology at Columbia and the author of many of the most forward-thinking studies on human bereavement and trauma, wasn’t at all what I expected in a grief guru. He offered me a cup of tea as he led me into his office.