Six Women Dine at Scottsdale Restaurant

This headline would hardly raise eyebrows or make the news. Six women meeting on a Friday evening at an upscale Scottsdale caf should have been filmed for a documentary or at least portrayed on a reality show, instead of the unbelievable plots and characters in our current television and movie fanfare. These women are real people with factual stories that hardly ever are told and more often never understood by others who havent experienced what they havethe aftermath of widowhood.

I dont usually meet-up with widows from my support group, mainly because of distractions Id rather focus on than the ever-present feeling of loss. Id much rather pretend my loss never occurred, or at least concentrate on other modalities in life that take my mind far away from the reality of losing my best friendmy husband, Michael.

The dinner was scheduled for 6:30 p.m. I was late, as usual, but the group expected that and understood my procrastinations. I dont like to partake in these types of events. Id rather hide from them, as one would dodge any pain that hurts like hell and brings back memories of what was and what might have been. Though the daily discomfort of grief isnt completely visible in ones psyche, its always underlying somewhere; in a photo, in a memory, on a piece of paper, in the feel of a pair of shorts, in the lyrics of a song, a newspaper article, on the radio as a sick joke about cancer, in your pets eyes, in a master bedroom, on the empty leather recliner in a room that isnt used any longer, and behind closed doors in a garage workroom filled with tools hanging neatly on hooks, organized perfectly for a man who loved to tinker with spare parts and who prided himself on fixing the unfixable. A room off the garage with spirals of wire, old padlocks with rusty keys that sometimes fit and sometimes dont; old glass baby jars, filled with nails and screws of all sizes, a wall calendar from 2010, everything neatly stacked on dusty shelves, including straw and swede top hats, French berets, along with colorful baseball caps with meaningful and logos hanging on hooks as if some kind of work of art.

These thoughts are the aftermath of an insightful dinner with six women drawn to each other because of a common bonda sudden and tragic ending to their marriage; to their previous comfortable life with a loving spouse. Of the six, two of us lost our husbands to esophageal cancer, one to lung cancer, another lost her husband to a surgical mishap, another to an aneurysm, and one lives with the haunting memory of finding her husband after he shot himself by putting a barrel of a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger.

We take turns sharing stories about the man we loved. Stories about the cruelness of others, like the friend that stated, Her husband must have been so unhappy in his marriage that he ended it by shooting himself.

We talked about our children having to lead their lives and not stay in a cesspool of grief gasping for air alongside their mothers. We discussed how most of our children are beginning their lives; having babies and looking forward to the future. We must not let them suffer, one of the women said. We have to let them live their life without our grief spilling over onto them. We must set them free and let them return to their lives and look forward, not backward, to the future.

One of the women turned to another and said, I heard you were dating.

Yes, Ive been dating men for a while. Its nice to go out. I know my late husband would approve, she said as if having to defend her opinion.

I could never date, two of the women chimed in as if they were singing a duet. Another woman said, I think my husband would be offended if I saw other men. He would think I didnt care about him any longer.

But the faces of these women seemed to want to hear about the dating experience after losing a husband and the challenges involved with a new intimacy. What did it feel like when you went on your first date, another woman asked. What about the first kiss, what was that like.

The dating women smiled and said, It was awkward at first. Holding hands felt odd and was difficult for me. The first time I kissed another man it was magical, like when I was a teenager. As time went on, I became comfortable with men that seemed to understand my grief; the patient ones, the ones who werent bitter about their own divorce or jealous of a dead man.

I suppose, she continued slowly and stopped for a moment. She looked at across the table at five pairs of eyes awaiting her response. She needed to phrase her answer with a great deal of thought. I am not the same person I was when I was married. Like all of you, we are now struggling to comprehend a life absent of the partnership that had sustained and defined us for years. Dating allows me to find out about my new self, who I am now and what I need in the future. One needs to take it slow and not make any rash decisions for at least a year or maybe two. Our lives and our needs are evolving.

The six women dining held their utensils in their hand as if frozen with thought. Their mouths were no longer chewing food. They looked pensive as though they were thinking about men, sex, intimacy, and their lost loves. They finished the meal by sharing their derangement of denial, their anguish of loss, their nightmares of death duty and the solace of their friendships with each other.

As they stood outside saying their goodbyes they paired up for hugs, as women tend to do, but they also allowed their tears to escape, as they blotted the damp skin around their eyes with their fingertips. They werent embarrassed to cry in front of one anotherthey had done this many times before.