I’m Sorry About Your Husband

Ever since Mark died, I rarely go to the grocery store that is five minutes from my house. In the beginning there were too many people I would run into who were worried about me and I didn’t want to start crying about my life over 10# bags of potatoes. In contrast, there were also people I’d run into that knew me well, who worked extra hard at avoiding me, and could never say a simple, “I’m sorry about your husband.” Sometimes it was uncomfortable and hurtful, other times it angered me, but ultimately it was something that was fixable if I chose to shop further away and that is what I’ve done ever since.

Recently some friends were telling me about someone we knew whose husband died. He’d been ill for awhile and because our only connection were kids that were the same age, I had no idea because I hadn’t seen her in years. Whenever I hear that someone has lost their partner it pains me greatly. I know how hard it is, and whether expected or not, the death of a spouse upends every part of one’s life.

Last week I ran into this woman at a clothing store. She didn’t recall who I was and I told her that my oldest and her son were in the same grade together in elementary school. She had a blank look on her face so I told her my name and my daughter’s name and she said, “Oh yes, now I remember.” I understood as I know that utter confusion about basic stuff after your husband dies, sometimes I still have it. As a precursor to acknowledging the changes in her life, I said that I saw that her house had sold because I drive past it in the way to work. She looked at me and said, “No, actually we’re in the same house we’ve always been in.” I apologized and said I thought she lived on such-and-such a street and she told me where she lived and I wondered how I didn’t know that because I thought she lived in the same house for years.

All the while we were talking I kept telling myself, “Just say you’re sorry about her husband. You can’t keep talking about this dumb stuff and not acknowledge that her husband died.” But for the life of me I could not get the words out of my mouth and I thought about those times in the grocery store when people I knew avoided me so they wouldn’t have to say anything. I often labeled them as cowards and to my disappointment I was behaving the exact same way. We talked about the cost of housing in our area, and as she was talking I noticed she was wearing her wedding ring like I had for nearly a year after Mark died. I achingly remembered how hard that was to take off.

She then started talking about her and her husband walking in their neighborhood. Walking in your neighborhood? I know I was off my rocker for a long time after Mark died but I never thought about walking my dead husband around the neighborhood. And while she was talking I was trying to visualize getting the urn off the mantel and saying, “Time for our daily walk, honey!!!”, then tucking it under my arm and chatting up the fall colors to a jar of ashes.

Meanwhile, the Cap’n of the Neuron Firing Squad started pulling alarms and was screaming, “ABORT!!! ABORT!!!” and I was telling him to STOP YELLING AT ME because I needed to concentrate on the timing of my expression of condolences and he was saying, “NO!!! NO!!! NO!!! YOU. NEED. TO. SHUT. YOUR. MOUTH.” While these two conversations were happening simultaneously (which happens all day every day), I took a long look at this woman again and realized she wasn’t at all who I thought she was. Not only that, we had never been friendly towards each other and that was confirmed when she commented on a shirt and said she would never wear something like that and I had just bought it.

While the unsaid often hangs awkwardly in the air like an unmoving cloud, what hangs even more awkwardly is when you’re about to offer to have coffee with the wrong person to talk about dead husbands when hers is very much alive. Thanks to Covid, I was wearing a mask that hid the shock on my face as I narrowly escaped barreling headfirst into a hot mess of my own making.

And that shirt I bought? Of course she wouldn’t have gotten it. It had cougar widow vibe written all over it.