Free Saturday Night Widows by Becky Aikman Page A

appropriate, still able to wedge into my relatively slinky jeans. I felt as miscast as I did in my rural high school when I played Yente in an all-WASP production of
Fiddler on the Roof
. Applying the word
widow
to
me
seemed … unseemly. Rude.
    I cast about for possible young-widow role models. There was the dour Queen Victoria, preserving Prince Albert’s things as if he might pop back in for tea at a moment’s notice. Or the other extreme, Scarlett O’Hara, branded an unfeeling slut for dancing at a ball after her husband died. I decided I should aspire to the impossible grace of Jackie Kennedy while trying to avoid the pitfalls of Jackie Onassis.
    Signals from my friends were as mixed as my own jumbled emotions. Some seemed to expect me to live out my life as Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows. Others promoted casual sex as if it were the new wonder drug from Merck. Should I jump a grief counselor or take up knitting? Cat around or get a cat?
    When I made an effort to drag myself to an office picnic or dinner with a college roommate, I recognized that no one knew how to behave in the presence of a young widow, and even more disconcerting, neither did I. Those who weren’t tongue-tied might blurt out something wildly inappropriate like, “Don’t worry, you’re young, you’re blonde—you’ll find another man.”
    Everyone from close friends to total strangers started sizing up my desirability and feeling free to comment on it. “Your ass looks amazing in those jeans” became something I heard nearly as often as “I’m sorry for your loss.” Nobody, aside from Bernie, had noticed my ass in twenty years. Now it looked as if all the stuff from highschool—looks, popularity, condoms—might matter again. It was surreal to contemplate that my entire future happiness might rest on the contours of my behind.
    Among my mostly married contemporaries, I felt like a freak. My friends wanted badly to be helpful, and they were. But we were out of sync. It wasn’t their fault that they were already overtaxed, with children, husbands, jobs. Did I mention husbands? My buddies tried to fit me in. At dinners with couples I’d known for years, it was heavy lifting holding up half the conversation without Bernie to carry some of the load. My repertoire of cancer anecdotes didn’t make for sparkling material, and I had nothing else going on. Still, I knew I needed to get out. On many, many Saturday nights home alone, I felt like the least popular kid in junior high school.
    It was on one of those Saturday nights when I formed the resolution to join a widows’ support group. After nearly a year and a half of widowhood, I was ready to “move on” in the words of the grief literature; ready to think, maybe, someday, about dating again, taking some vacations on my own, finding some other unattached people to hang out with on the weekend. What I needed, I decided, were knowledgeable guides. I hoped the widows in the support group might help me sort it all out. Those fellow castaways to the land of the grieving might be the only people I knew who could speak my language, show me the customs. They might have discovered the tricks I didn’t know—how to change that lightbulb above the kitchen cabinet, or make small talk at that wedding where I was marooned at a table with the geriatric and infirm. How to keep making things happen, necessary things, when I could barely manage to make breakfast. After I got kicked out, I was more confused than ever, utterly flummoxed about what to try next.
    I wasn’t very good at the role of decorous widow, so I fixed on what I was good at—being a reporter, in essence, finding out about stuff and then writing about it. Only now I wanted to find out what I needed to learn most for myself: How does a human being remake a life when it’s shattered by loss?

    T ALKING TO D R . G OLDENBERG
, the psychiatrist who helped Bernie during the last months of his life, was a logical first step. He was young,