Wisdom From the Arch

I fell in love with St. Louis. It is a clean, pretty city, very easy to travel in. After living in the Chicago area all my life, the traffic there was nothing! Lots of pretty plants, flowers and parks. I felt safe.

While visiting the Arch, we spent some time in the gift store looking at the books. I was captivated by the large number of diary accounts from women who'd gone West. Part of me knows I'd have made a lousy pioneer. Think about how rustic life was back then. I can't get through a day without showering. Back then they only washed up once a week if that. And how would I live without some makeup? Good thing I'm living now though of course modern life brings on a different set of difficulties.

I love the whole symbolism of the Arch. That it is a tribute to those who went Westward despite the dangers and passed through St. Louis as the gateway to a new life. The shape of the Arch is derived from the bridge that was built over the river because St. Louis was missing out on much needed trade to Chicago because they were cut off from trade routes. The designer of the bridge had never built one before and used arches in the construction. Even today, bridges follow his structural design.

Even way back then, men and women advertised for mates in the personals. But I saw that most advertising were widows, usually with a child or two. They were willing to travel Westward for another chance at marriage. This just confirms my belief that there is something inside us that seeks companionship on an imtimate level.

One of the diary accounts I was leafing through ended with this: the authour was at the end of her life somewhere on the West coast. She had lived as a rancher admitting that her life at times had been very hard. But she added, a life without challenges didn't seem to her to be as full when compared to an easier life when everything always went well.

Bear Scout Oath

I have joined the blogging A to Z challenge where each day you compose a post starting with the letters of the alphabet and today's is "B." This continues through the month of April with Sundays off. I thought it would be a fun thing to do. But back to the bears.

In an effort to pare down my life, I've been selling or giving away a lot of my books. The ones from the boys when they were younger has been kind of hard. They aren't readers but that didn't stop me from filling the book shelves with Scholastic paperbacks, picture books of dinosaurs, animals, the human body, as well as sport figure autobiographies. So many of these books were untouched. At the time they were purchased my husband was ill and there wasn't much time for reading before bed.

So now as I empty the shelves (or try to), I read these books before going to the used book store to sell them. I suppose this is a weird grief reaction but I cannot let them go to waste. It is almost some kind of defiant statement by me saying I won't let the three years of my husband's fatal illness end up robbing me of the books I was supposed to read to the boys. Even though now I'm reading them myself.

But you can learn a lot from books for the younger set. I especially enjoyed The Hardy Boys series because it was dated and brought me a sense of nostalgia. Did you know that the series started being written way back in the 1930s? Mrs. Hardy always makes a chocolate cake for the boys to eat at lunch - that is a hoot!

"The Berenstain Bear Scouts and the Sinister Smoke Ring," sets out The Bear Scout Oath which is as follows:

"A Bear Scout...

1. Is as honest as the day is long.
2. Admits when he or she is wrong.
3. Respects the creatures of creation.
4. Views TV in moderation.
5. Is never cruel, rude, or mean.
6. Plays the game fair and clean.
7. Does his best at school [life].
8. Following the golden rule, always respects the rights of others, including even sisters' and brothers'."

As I read this oath, I figured it was pretty applicable to me now as an adult - really for all of us. If we all made an effort to follow these guidelines, a lot of the conflict we feel, cause and participate in wouldn't exist.

Grace Be With Us

Words and books have always been my salvation, especially in times of trouble. I read the following words from Jennifer Weiner's book, "Certain Girls," which I finished last night. One of the book's characters, Joy, has to write a speech for her bat mitzvah. She scraps what she has prepared and wings it. This is taken from her speech but I've left out some of the parts to make it more applicable to the meaning I want to convey here.

"I'm supposed to tell you about what I've learned this year... but really, the truth is , what I learned this year is that life is hard. Good people die for no reason. Little kids get sick. The people who are supposed to love you end up leaving. When you don't get what you want, you take what's left and make the best of it. Even when I did the wrong thing or made the wrong choice, my family stood with me. Bad things happen. Stuff doesn't work out. Everyone has sorrow. Everyone has obligations. You lean on the people who love you. You do the best you can, and you keep going."

I pulled out my battered and highlighted "The Five Things We Cannot Change" by Dave Richo and reread words that had profound meaning for me as I struggled during the time of my divorce and moving from my house. His wisdom is "... we notice that we sometimes have to bear more than we can handle, and we may fold under the pressure. Our purpose in life is not to remain upright at all times but to collapse with grace when that is what has to happen. Thus the fact that we are given more than we can bear at times is not a flaw in life or in us..."

Richo is a proponent of loving-kindness and he ends the chapter (Pain is Part of Life) with this:

"As I say yes to the fact of suffering, may I accept the dark side of life and find a way through it, and may I then become an escort of compassion to those who also suffer."

These words were a gift to me from two vastly different people, authors and books. I offer them out now to others in hope that they may offer healing, compassion, strength and grace to us all. My oldest is composing a new musical piece for his final in music composition that his band director wants the band to play at the spring concert. He has titled it "Grace Be With Us." Those words and feelings of a 17-year-old seem to say it all.

You Can Run But Can't Hide

This summer I made a promise to refrain from reading any books about grief. I blog enough about grief, I needed to take a break from saturating myself with the topic during my down time. I also believe that we get what we think about. Maybe if I stopped blogging so much about grief, I'd be happier? Anyway, without extra funds for spending money I made a promise that I'd make do by reading the stock pile of books currently on my shelves. Throughout the year I'll pick up used books at tag sales, the resale shop or when they're on sale at the library. I have my own mini library of unread books to choose from so it wasn't that much of a sacrifice for me.

Now here's the weird part. Almost all the books I chose to read this summer ended up dealing with grief/death. A lot of the books I selected gave no clue that they dealt with the topic. There was nothing on the jacket overviews depicting that the main character was a widow or that half the characters would end up dying in the end. After I read a number of books on this topic, I said, "What the heck" and picked out a few I knew in advance dealt with death in some way.

Here are some excerpts from the books that were especially moving to me.

- "Sometimes suffering is just suffering," she told Gus. "It doesn't make you stronger. It doesn't build character. It only hurts."

From "Comfort Food" by Kate Jacobs author of "The Friday Night Knitting Club." This was a wonderful read and very insightful, well-written. But no where within the back description is mention that the main character Gus, a famous t.v. chef is widowed!

- "The rules of happiness are as strict as the rules of sorrow; indeed, perhaps more strict. The two states have diferent densities, I've come to think. The lives of happy people are dense with their own doings - crowded, active, thick - urban, I would almost say.
But the sorrowing are nomads, on a plain with few landmarks and no boundaries; sorrow's horizons are vague and its demands few. Jeanie and I had not become strangers; it was just that she lived in the city and I lived on the plain."

From "Some Can Whistle" by Larry McMurtry ("Lonesome Dove," "Terms of Endearment," "The Last Picture Show"). I chose a book by McMurtry because quite often they are humorous and light. Now in the back description there is mention of "a murderous young man" but I guess I didn't take it literally. Those characters not gunned down ended up all dying of cancer throughout the book. I love McMurtry's humor but got overwhelmed by the amount of death depicted. I have to say the paragraph above just gives me chills in its accuracy and beauty. Anyway, the book's plot is the unsuspecting tale of a middle-aged t.v. writer who is reunited with the daughter he never knew. It is a sequel to "All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers," which was never mentioned in the reviews for "Some Can Whistle," which I felt was strange since half the characters who died off were part of the first book.

- "Do you still try to, you know, contact Trish?" He shook his head. "I still talk to her and have pictures of her everywhere but I know she's gone and, for whatever reason, I'm still here. Same goes for you. I don't know if you'll ever contact Aidan but, the way I see it is, you're still alive. You've got a life to live."

From "Anybody Out There?" by Maian Keyes, an Irish author I never heard of. This book is a mystery so I won't disclose the plot except to say that it was surprisingly freshing and kept me guessing. Well worth the 50 cents I plucked down for it!

- "Lonliness is a strange thing. It's like a yellow rubber raincoat you wear twenty-four hours a day. It's hot and heavy and awkward and you can't get comfortable when you try to sleep in it, or take a shower in it, or shop for groceries in it, or watch TV or go through the drive-in window of a fast-food restaurant to get onion rings. You can't even take it off long enough to run it through your Kenmore washer and dryer - so after a while it gets a stink to it. You think you'r hiding undermeath that bright yellow raincoat, that nobody can see you sweating bullets, your clothes pasted to your skin, which is coming loose from your bones. You think if you put the hood up and hury from place to place no one will notice how alone you are, how lost, how afraid.
It would take a friend like Mayfred to say, "Okay, girl, time's up, get that raggedy raincoat off. You look like a fool going around in that thing hot as it is. Not a drop of rain falling. I don't want to look at you wearing that nasty thing anymore."

From "Verbena" by Nanci Kincaid. Excellent portrayl of a widowed mom who remarries WITHOUT the standard happily ever after ending. That description of loneliness took my breath away.

Also read by Sue Miller, "The Senator's Wife" and "For Love." The first book deals with loss through betrayal and the second, destruction due to betrayal and a horrible fatal accident. Both were very good. "The Doctor's Wife" by Elizabeth Brundage is an intriguing mystery involving murder and a destructive affair. "Alias Grace" by Margaret Atwood is an amazing work set in the past involving muder as well that will keep the reader engrossed beginning to end. I loved "Big Stone Gap" by Adriana Trigiani which deals with a 35-year-old woman's loss of her mother and the secrets about her father/family.

I've just finished the fourth book in Debbie Macomber's Cedar Cove, Washington series. The books are quick reads and I like this series because a number of the key characters were widowed and knitting is incorporated into the stories as well. In this book (of which there are now 10), the two middle-aged single women remarry (one widowed, one divorced) as does one of the older widowed characters at age 77. While I love the happy ending we all are searching for, it seemed a little unrealistic to me that all of these women found men so easily, men ready, willing and able to remarry without anything worrisome with their characters or personalities. Now these characters live in a small town outside of Seattle. None of these women had to register for dating services or have to go through a bunch of losers before coming lucky. I know romantic fiction geared toward women isn't entirely realistic but gee, I think making it look so easy can make those of us in the trenches wonder what we're doing wrong or what's wrong with us because the dating scene isn't that easy! It was kind of like these men just dropped out of the sky - I know in my case, that the dating road has been filled with detours and potholes!

Love and Pie in the Sky

Just finished the book "Shelter Me" by Juliette Fay and have very conflicted feelings about it. As with most books about widowhood, either fiction or nonfiction, this one is about a young widow's FIRST YEAR following the freak accident death of her husband. Janie has a preschool son and baby daughter to solo parent. Here is the novel's main plot - Janie's husband had planned for a front porch to be built on their cape cod home as a gift to her. The building contractor shows up four months after her husband's death with the "surprise," unaware that Janie's husband had died. She decides to go ahead with the project and ends up falling in love with the builder AS WELL as her hot, sexy, troubled priest who has been making weekly grief house calls.

The crush on the priest doesn't go anywhere but the relationship with the builder progresses and by the end of the book, which looms on the one-year anniversary, Janie and the builder are a couple. Happy ending for everyone! And all tied up within that one-year grieving period.

But the fact of the matter is that I don't think Janie was really working through her grief, pain and loss. How could she when her emotions were tied up romantically with the priest and the contractor? Grief work takes such huge amounts of emotional energy. But so does falling in love and starting a relationship. Based on my own experience, I don't think the two are mutually compatible. So this part of the book wasn't believable to me. It would have been far more believable if it had occurred in the second year following the death of Janie's husband.

Did this author do any research or speak with real widows before and during the time she was writing this novel? Come to think of it, I wish there were more widows out there telling their stories about how they fell in love again. I want to hear it from a reliable source, not a fictionalized account by a woman still happily married who has not had to face the circumstances surrounding her main character.

I finished the book feeling more upset than revitalized and hopeful. Just another account depicting how we should have the pieces picked up and our lives restored (even our love lives) within that magical one-year period. During the first year I was so busy caring for my sons and trying to figure out how to navigate in a new world, there wasn't any time for even contemplating a new relationship much less starting one. That doesn't mean I wasn't lonely or missing sex/physical contact. I just had a whole heck of a lot on my plate that took priority over me dating or getting back out there.

I guess I need to remember that this is a work of fiction. But I remain serious about the request for more of the widowed community to get out there and share their stories of love and romance, including the successes and failures. I don't want pie in the sky but reality. I do want hope - but hope that is attainable because no hunky building contractor will be making house calls any time soon. And if there have been widows/ers who've found love again quickly, more power to you. But lets hear those stories too!

Big Brother and "Oh, Brother!"

I receive monthly email newsletters and sale/coupon notices from Barnes and Noble and Borders. It always kind of freaks me out when I get one that says, "Since you previously purchased a book by this author, we want to inform you of the one that is currently being released..." That these chains have maintained a record of my purchases that is then matched to new releases makes me feel a bit like someone is watching me over my shoulder - a "Big Brother" kind of thing.

The latest message I got like this had to do with the new release by Debbie Macomber, "Hannah's List." I started reading this author a few years ago because she had a series about a knitting shop. She writes what could be termed "romantic fiction for women," not my usual style. But I love reading any kind of fiction that involves my knitting hobby. So I read and enjoy her when I need a beach read kind of fix.

The plot of "Hannah's List" evidently involves a dying wife's list to her husband of three choices of women she has chosen for him to pursue after her death. Debbie Macomber frequently portrays widows in her books, which is a very good thing. But I think she has pushed the envelope here.

For one thing, men and women think, act and process differently. Women, as caregivers and nurturers are constantly putting the needs of others before them. I can see a poor, dying woman worried about her husband's future fate much more likely than a man doing so. My husband was totally wrapped up in himself and his illness - trying to garner whatever strength he had left to survive. I can assure you that he was not thinking much of me in the present or future. But I wouldn't have expected him to. All I wanted him was alive for however long he could manage to stay alive. And if that took retreating into himself to shore up strength, he could do so without any resentment from me.

What bothers me about this plot, which I probably shouldn't even be commenting on until I read it if I do, is that it implies that people are replaceable. And all of us who have had to face loss know the error in that belief. I also suspect that years don't go by before this guy is supposed to start going through the list - that the duration of the grieving period is portrayed within a year's time frame or less. This might mislead people into believing that grief is quickly surmounted and it is off to the next conquest and new life. For many of us, the length of recovery time is far longer - and sadly, I have come to the conclusion that most of us out there in grief land will have pieces of our hearts missing until the day we die - those missing pieces don't grow back. We just learn how to live with the pain and loss that does lessen in its sharp intensity but never completely disappears.

I will save anymore commentary until I know more about this book firsthand. So I'll reserve additional criticism. I suspect Debbie Macomber's main intent was to provide encouragement and hope to the grieving - that life does go on and can go on productively. So that is not a bad thing - I just wish authors were more realistic in how they portray grief and loss. Since romantic fiction is usually unrealistic in general, I wish this book was about a husband who'd come up with a list of eligible men his surviving wife could pursue with his blessing after his death! Now that would be a good read!