Let's talk about widows and widowers.

In My Humble Opinion
1

My dad died this past October. It was sudden, and Mom is handling that admirably. Mourning, missing, but not overwhelmed in any aspect. Mom was always the social one of the two. She’s several large but distinct groups of friends and colleagues. They have been there for her this autumn, and as before Dad died, she spends days or evenings at meetings and social events.

I realized that she has a good-sized circle of widow friends. Well…dear friends over the course of her lifetime ( mom makes friends and keeps em forever ), who have lost husbands. They seem to draw upon each other, having lived through a common bonding terrible loss. They don’t withdraw, they mourn in a healthy way and find ways to flourish- no matter how the empty place may hurt.

What of the Dads? I am guessing the statistics still say women outlive men more of the time. Regardless, what of the men who lose their spouses? I have a circle of friends, I would hope I’d still have such if I were to outlive my wife. How do widowers do with this? Do folks find a real distinct difference? Are they more alone more of the time? Do they lean on their children more for a support system? Do they remarry more quickly or not?

A lot of the women I know have lived alone and enjoyed it. I don’t know any men who have enjoyed living alone for extended periods of time. Is this unique, or do most of us find that Dad, or Granddad spend more of their time alone- or lonely but living in a group situation like an assisted living place- than Mom or Grandmom?

Without trying to make generalizations at all, because they’re useless, why is it that this is what I have seen in adults I’ve known? What do others see in the older generations, and are there Dopers out there who are widows or widowers who are willing to share their experiences?

Cartooniverse

2

Purely off what I’ve heard, I believe happily married men who lose their wives are more likely to remarry. I don’t think men do well on their own, especially if they’ve been married for decades. YMMV, of course.

We lost my FIL about two years ago, and while my MIL has stopped wearing her wedding rings and does go out a lot with friends and her seniors club, she’s not ready to date, even though we have all told her to go ahead. Some men have expressed interest, but she’s not ready.

3

I can’t speak for widowers, but I can relate the experience of my grandfather, who decided, a week after my grandmother died in 1994, that “I’m not going to stop living like I’ve seen so many of my [male] friends do”.

He spruced himself up, got himself involved in lots of stuff, and lived a full and happy life until he died ringing the church bells, aged 91, last summer. He had lots of external interests, and a long line of widows visiting him, all of whom clearly wanted to jump his bones - “Er… I’ve just dropped round because I made one too many cakes”. Yeah, right.

What he said, though, indicates that he’d seen a lot of widowers go the way you have described. They just gave up.

4

ivylass is right I lost mrslanelee in June 2004 and didn’t leave the swamp for a few months. The loneliness became unbearable. I had never been a social animal since I quit drinking in 1987 and I had met mrslanelee at an AA meeting. We were together for nearly 18 years. Last year I met KD. She had lost her husband in an auto accident in 1999. Someone introduced us. She was my blind date for Valentine’s Day last year. She hasn’t gone home yet. We won’t marry, we would rather shack up and sin. So what, there won’t be any children. We have each signed POA’s to conduct one and other’s affairs should the world go FUBAR again.

5

One other thing and I’m not sure how you will feel about this. Single men over 40 are somewhat in the minority. With an older widower around older women become somewhat…assertive. :rolleyes:

6

I know this goes against statistics, but my dad (mid-70s) has had a group of friends he worked with 50 years ago. For some reason they’ve all stayed in touch and got together once a year for dinner and laughs. There are about seven of them.

Every one of them is a widower. I believe my dad is the newcomer in the group (mom died in '98). I know we always hear that the men go first, but these guys are the exception.

Anyway, since becoming widowers, they meet more often. Maybe quarterly now. They enjoy each other’s company and appear to live fairly busy lives. My dad doesn’t date, but he goes out to lunch with my uncle’s ex wife and an old friend’s widow every couple months for lunch. He spends time with the nephews and my sister and I. He’s also got a casual friendship with a couple guys he mall walks with (that’s all they do together). As devastated as he was by my mom’s death, he’s definitely still among the living.

7

More anecdotal evidence here.

When my mother died, dad was devastated. But he had unmarried elderly women hitting on him aaaaallllll the time after that. Once the worst of the grieving had been accomplished, he went on to have an active social life including everything from hospital volunteer work to ballroom dancing.

However, without Mom to rein him in, he got a bit foolish. He did not manage his money well, for example, and was actually a soft touch for spending money. He had “credit protection” on all his credit cards, obviously having answered affirmatively to too many credit card offers. When he had gone through all of the accumulated savings and sold all the stock portfolios and cashed in his life insurance policies, he borrowed money on his home through a reverse mortgage. Had he lived another year, he probably would have gone through the entire equity on the house, too.

He never did learn to prepare actual meals, although he did learn to bake two different cakes, and to make Mud Slides. He mostly ate out, convinced that the waitresses at the local diners really really liked him because they fussed over him. Tips had nothing to do with it. As a change, he often bought lobsters at the supermarket and had them steamed for him to eat with melted butter.

He got worse and worse with his driving but refused to give it up. At that point, had our mom been alive, she would have insisted that he do so. She would likely have followed our suggestion about an assisted living or continuing care community. He gradually became somewhat disheveled, and developed a slight incontinence problem that he didn’t seem to notice. Shirts were a bit yellowed and were worn much too long between washing. He was obviously losing touch, but was not so far gone that he could have been ruled incompetent to handle his own affairs. My sister and I (and/or one of our daughters) would go clean his house when we could, but he lived over an hour and a half away and would not consider moving closer.

Then came the time when he was complaining that his foot hurt all the time, worse and worse. We finally convinced him to have it seen by a doctor. No wonder it hurt – he had gangrene. There was little or no circulation in his foot. How one could fail to notice that one’s own foot was rotting away, or fail to realize that something must be done about that, is beyond my comprehension. Medical intervention was obtained, but things went from bad to worse and he succumbed later that year. Whether, had Mom been alive, he would have had an earlier and possibly more successful intervention, is unknown.

Bottom line is that he did well socially, not so well in practical matters like taking care of himself. The women he socialized with were glad to have him pay for meals and take them dancing but were not especially interested in helping him with his personal needs (other than, perhaps, the occasional romp in the hay).

After his death, when we went to clean out his house, we were a bit skeeved out to find a rather large collection of quite explicit porn video tapes. :eek: And Viagra.

8

My (paternal) grandpa was really social, too. He was very involved in working for the hospital, with the local senior center, and in his church. A years or so after my grandma died he got a nice lady friend. He ended up moving in with her (in a separate bedroom). They went all kinds of places together, in fact he died in 2002 while on a bus trip in Arizona with Ann.

I don’t think my grandparents were especially close but I do know he looked after her and tried to administer CPR when she had the heart attack that killed her. She didn’t leave the house, or in fact, her chair in front of the TV very often; he did most if not all of the cooking and whatnot. I feel that he mourned appropriately and I’m glad he didn’t spend the remainder of his life alone. Unfortunately I’m in the family minority on that one. :rolleyes:

9

My tale of two granfathers:

My mother’s parents were madly in love. The kind of people who have been married for 40 years and would still neck on a park bench. They were also friends from childhood. My grandmother was disabled from her mid thirties and granddad took care of her. She, in return, gently pushed him into taking care of himself, quitting smoking, eating well, etc. At grandmom’s funeral, he turned to my mother and said that he didn’t remember life without my grandmother, and didn’t want to find out. He spent the next six months sitting in his living room, chain smoking, drinking, eating fast food, and yelling at any family member who tried to talk to him, until he died. It was like passive agressive suicide.

On the other side, there’s my paternal grandfather. His wife had alzeimers, and he spent a decade taking care of someone who half the time didn’t know who he was. He was depressed, grumpy, and generally difficult to be around. Twelve years ago, she died of cancer. Grandpa was reborn. He began making friends and joining activities. During WWII he was a stage manager for the USO tour, so he decided to join a local community theatre. He’s got a “lady friend”. He learned how to use computers, and has become kind of a techo-junkie. He’d dropped out of college in his senior year because my grandmother got pregnant and he needed to get a job; after nearly 50 years as a butcher, he went back to school, determined to get his degree. He and my dad went on a two week tour of Italy together. It’s remarkable. It’s like he’s making up for all the years he missed. He’s 92, healthy as a horse, still shaving with a friggin’ straight razor.

It’s so completely individual. To my mom’s dad, being alone was the end of the world, and to my dad’s dad it was freedom.

10

My Mom died after a year and a half of cancer when she was 53. Afterwords I had to teach him how to use the washing machine and he ate out a lot. I’m not sure what her and Dad talked about, but the really quiet guy suddenly became quite the social butterfly. He realized he couldn’t be alone.

At first it was weird, I felt like the a parent of a teenager. Asking who he was going out with when. :stuck_out_tongue: One of my funniest moments was making him go back and change before a date. “Look Dad, it’s a beautiful tailored teal green blazer but you can’t wear your favorite mint green shirt under it. One or the other at a time m’kay” After about three years he married a lovely widowed lady.

On the other hand,

My friends’ grandfather was married 52 years before the Grandma died. 5 years or so later he still goes to the diner at 5:00am (he was a farmer) to have coffee and pie with all the other crotchety old guys. He’s a nice guy but repeats himeself a lot. He’s kinda lonely but keeps chugging along.