As a Widow, the Holiday are Rough—Here's What We Need More Than Your Pannetone

Hoo boy, Mister Death could certainly take a holiday now that he scooped up so many of our “blue-eyed boys” during pandemic, amiright? I’m saying this to offer my lived experience, gentle ladies, as a widow-before-my-time, which honestly makes me feel like a throwback to another era.

I was in my late 40s when my husband got sick, and in my early 50s when he died a few years ago. If this had all happened in the 1940s, there would have been a great war, floral lapel pins and a social contract stipulating that, sometimes, a generation of men poof just disappears for our freedom. Instead, I got a solo flight middle-age front row seat to pain and suffering, and my husband got sealed into a wall facing a Hollywood sunset. Our son, a week before his thirteenth birthday, became half-an-orphan.

We widows aren’t the cultural pillars we once were. Set free, unmoored on the tablescape of coupled place cards, we’re not even given a script to throw away. Being a widow is a super creative act, but all that creativity does wear on a person after a while. It’s sad dating chit-chat, and grief isn’t sexy, not really. Plus, it’s next to impossible to count on your BFF’s spouse kicking off in synchrony with yours, so that the two surviving women can have a late-in-life Gap Year together. (I recall my friend’s husband, also suffering from cancer, dying a year before mine. After his memorial, she asked if I wanted to join her on vacay in France. I inwardly blanched at her fancifulness, but now years later, I deeply understand the desire to cosplay Emily in Paris.)

And good God Christmas. No one warns you about Christmas. I mean a lifetime of people Facebook-posting pictures of their beloved fathers, mothers, aunts and elders in remembrance on the holidays didn’t prepare me for the nausea of remembering someone I loved dying. My late husband Chuck was a polarizing figure in our community with a gravel voice and gruff manner that did its best to hide a hardworking and wounded heart—and he loved Christmas. Like a toddler, he reveled in the decorations, family gatherings, the Santa stockings including one for the pets. Heavens, I can barely watch the Thanksgiving dog show without hearing him roar about some handsome mastiff or loping hound.

Here’s what I’ve learned to do, the only thing that really staves off the chill of death: I call someone else who’s dealing with loss, and ask them how they are.

So how to handle the season now that he’s gone? Well, like any good little bookstore-browsing-lady, I immediately surveyed the cottage industry of self-help sorrow manuals. Big Grief™️ is really raking it in these days—podcasts, meditations and so, so many books. And it helped, sort of. But also, what’s there to say that you don’t know in your heart already? Cry when you have to, lay in when you must and after a while, turn away from wherever your loved one went and come back and join us in the living.

Such bootstraps intuition can only go so far, particularly when I’m faced, which I am annually, with the holidays. With my blue-eyed boy’s most favorite of days that he’s never again going to wake up to.

Here’s what I’ve learned to do, the only thing that really staves off the chill of death: I call someone else who’s dealing with loss, and ask them how they are. I’m sure there’s some neural network explanation, but I’m not here to argue that. I’ll just relate that the joy I get on hearing my friend talk about her beloved late husband Kevin, watching her face light up with his memory (as lachrymose as it may sound) is exactly the Cindy Who spark that really brings Chuck back.

It works, the other way, too. To all of you who haven’t yet traveled to death-loss-love island: try it on those of us who have. Call a friend who’s grieving, and say you were just thinking of them. Ask them how they are doing and listen to their answer. Pick them up for a coffee date and ask them what they liked to do with their person around the holidays. Use his name. I consulted the contemporary oracle Reddit for that last bit, from the saying that everyone dies twice: first when their body dies and second the last time that someone utters their name. Keep your widow’s person alive by leaning into the potentially awkward (but more likely transcendent) connection between her and her loved one.

I did this myself when a picture I’d forgotten we’d taken—a snowman-flecked photobooth strip of Chuck and our son—fell out of the family ornament box. I wanted to hide it, because the swell of wet eyes and dizziness of grief wasn’t comfortable at first. But I made myself show it to my son, so we could have a moment with his dad. It’s hanging on the tree now, so we can all talk him and tell the outrageous but assuredly true stories about him. And yes, we say his name.