[Baltimore Sun] Why do we define the widowed by their loss? | GUEST COMMENTARY
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In January, a longtime friend’s dear husband died. We’d met in the early ’80s when I strolled my baby daughter down our suburban street. She, too, had a toddler, a boy, and in no time, both families gathered in our backyards for playdates, barbecues and laughter. The kids went to preschool together, two shy tots who’d enter class holding hands for comfort. The teachers dubbed them “the couple.”
Last month, my husband and I attended the memorial service for our lovely friend’s husband. Their son, my daughter’s preschool buddy, is now in his 40s, though his expression and gentle eyes still hold the traces of the sweet boy I once knew. I could picture his face and my daughter’s covered in blue icing, which had topped the imaginatively designed cupcakes his mother had prepared for his third birthday.
“I’m a widow now,” my friend said to me, adding, “It’s an awful term.” Her words stuck. I’d never before considered what the word widow felt like to widowed spouses.
How awful, indeed, to be defined by the loss of your spouse. Just when you’re suffering one of the most personal and devastating losses in life, you’re assigned a new undesirable label: widow or widower. A label that announces your loss and demotes you to a lesser status in many eyes. Imagine wearing a billboard on your chest, announcing, “My spouse died.”
Curious, I looked up the history of the word. To my surprise and horror, I learned that the archaic term for widow is “relict.” Relict means “someone left over,” according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, and derives from the Latin word “relictus,” which means “left behind.” Imagine if today’s widows defined themselves as being left behind!
Sadly, many widowed people feel forgotten, even discarded. Nights dining out with other couples fall away. Fixing cars, plowing snow, shopping for groceries and managing finances, once shared by two, now fall to the remaining spouse. Health emergencies pose the loneliest challenges.
Alone for the first time in years, often decades for long-term married couples, widows and widowers often feel bereft. A widowed patient whose wife had died six months earlier once told me, “I crave her presence every morning, especially at breakfast when we’d sit together, sip our coffees, read the newspaper, and comment on the latest terrible or ludicrous news. Sometimes, we’d just be still and watch the crimson cardinal alight on the birdfeeder outside or window. Quiet but together.”
Currently, in the U.S., there are 11.5 million widows and 3.7 million widowers, according to the U.S. Census Bureau — 6% of the population. Men typically die at earlier ages than women, and when they lose their spouses, they remarry more often than widowed women do. Black Americans lose their spouses at younger ages than white Americans: 24% of Black Americans are widowed by ages 65 to 74, compared to 15% of white Americans.
How about conjuring a new term for widows and widowers, one that doesn’t broadcast their marginalized status and doesn’t define them by their loss? Or imply they’re destitute, as can the Hindu word vidhwa and the Hebrew word almanah? With life expectancy for average Americans steadily rising, one can foresee years, often decades, of time no longer married.
If we let empathy drive our language, we can find words that cradle widowed women and men with care and respect. Or, perhaps better yet, we don’t have to label them at all. We can simply recognize that loss is a part of life and see them for who they are: a person.
Patricia Steckler (pattisteckler@gmail.com) is a retired psychologist, who was in private practice for 40 years.
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