By Natasha Josefowitz, Ph.D.
LA JOLLA, California — In trying to deal with my grief after my husband died, I turned to books on grief and interviewed people who had lost a spouse or partner. It helped me to understand the emotions I felt and whether they were shared by others. I looked at the different ways men and women dealt with the loss, what worked, what didn’t, and how people managed their lives when left alone. Hopefully, this would give me and others a roadmap of what to expect. Everyone grieves differently. There is no right or wrong way, but there are patterns that can be recognized and managed better.
In interviewing widows and widowers, I found one uniformly spoken complaint: loneliness. Not surprisingly, they missed the companionship of their spouses or partners. If there is no one to share your thoughts and reactions with—to talk to about the movie, to discuss a newspaper article with, or to tell who you met for a meal—that event loses continuity. It can never be referred to again because no one else knows it happened.
Not only is there no one who knows where you have gone or what you have done or seen, no one cares. I understand why people tweet or use Facebook—they are searching for someone to share the minutia of their daily activities. It is a quest for someone to know and care about one’s comings and goings. In other words, to find a witness to one’s life.
Although I have many good friends, most are part of a couple and therefore less available. This seems to be pervasive among the people I talked to. Some women had best friends they could talk to on a daily basis and a few had children that were available to share each other’s mundane daily activities such as what they ate for dinner or watched on TV that seemed to help. Some of the men also had best friends, but none called on a regular basis, and so they were not privy to each other’s lives.
The fact that no one cares about the minutiae of daily events as lived by the widowed person is not something that was mentioned by the people I interviewed or the literature—only the abject loneliness. I extrapolated the lack of interest and caring as a major component of what one misses in widowhood from my own experiences. No one is the center of my life, nor am I the center of anyone’s life. There is no one whose daily comings and goings matter to me. I want to care deeply for another person and be involved in that person’s life. Even small children have dolls or stuffed animals they carry around. They are objects for the child to take care of, not objects that take care of the child. These children are creating a symbolic representation upon which to practice the basic human social need to love and to care for someone. I wish to love someone again, not just be loved.
So what is the solution? Another person equally alone who would also like to fill the empty hours with a human voice, a person who wants to know what you did today. Someone you can be vulnerable with, who knows your secrets, who cares for your happiness and can be counted on in bad times—usually someone you have known for a while, someone who has participated in the events of your past. Sometimes, if you are fortunate enough, you can make surprisingly fast connections that are truly meaningful.
Not everyone I talked to needed this kind of intimate connection, but many did and expressed it as loneliness. However, not everyone has this need for companionship. In addition, I met several self-sufficient people content to be on their own, but the majority, especially after a recent loss, were suffering from the lack of available give and take that is the essence of emotionally intimate relationships.
If one cannot have the one friend who is always there, a witness to one’s life, the solution is to have several friends who together fulfill one’s needs. I have friends I go to movies with, some I eat with on a regular basis, some I talk about politics and books with, some have met my children, a few remember my husband. What is most important in widowhood is friends—for it is only friends who can guard against that pervasive and painful feeling of loneliness.
© Natasha Josefowitz. This article appeared initially in the La Jolla Village News. You may comment to natasha.josefowitz@sdjewishworld.com. Any comments in the space below should include the writer’s full name and city and state of residence, or city and country for non-U.S. residents.