Single Married Widowed Divorced

Birds of a Feather

 by Carolyn Alfvin Bucior

The average bird owner owns 2.1 birds, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. For mental and physical stimulation, birds need interaction with other birds, or at least constant interaction with humans. They ache if deprived of social contact and downright suffer emotionally when a mate dies. Birds in the parrot family, which includes parakeets, cockatiels and cockatoos, are perhaps the most social of all birds.

This story of companionship starts with the shy and reclusive Louie, a parakeet living at Brady Street Futons. Louie’s life wasn’t awesome or harsh. But life was cool. He could leave his cage and fly around the store if he chose to, which he didn’t. He was fed, occasionally cooed at by customers. Perhaps Louie would have been content living out his days alone in the futon store. But that wasn’t to be.

Enter Rocky. The friendly, outgoing cockatiel was down on his luck, having recently crashed into a house in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee neighborhood after his escape from who knows where. Luck shined upon the bright yellow bird. He picked himself up to discover the house belonged to the sister of Kurt Bauer, who owned Louie and Brady Street Futons. Bauer brought Rocky to the store and introduced him to the parakeet. Something in Louie lit up. Could his world of one expand to a world of two? It could and it did. Louie’s daily life changed and with it his personality. “Rocky helped Louie come out of his shell,” says Bauer. “They were so tight.”

Exit Louie. With death comes grief, and when Louie died of cancer, Rocky’s tail feathers sagged. “He was needy,” explains Bauer. “He was lonely. He got loud.”

Enter Jimbo. A customer gave the reticent gray cockatiel to Bauer, who excitedly introduced him to the grieving Rocky. But it was not love, or even civility, at first sight. Rocky basically said, “Howdy, pretty boy!” Jimbo basically said, “Put a cracker in it.”

“Rocky just really wanted to be his pal. But Jimbo didn’t want a lot to do with him,” Bauer recalls. Seven months later, the two have sorted out their differences. They’ve even found common ground. They perch in the cage together. When Bauer enters the room, they both take flight and land on his head. The adventurous, party-colored, Type-A Rocky leads. The reticent, business suit-colored Type-B Jimbo follows. They’re not birds of a feather. But they stick together.

END

Is it Better to Remarry or Just Live Together?

Finding love later in life may be unexpected and exciting, but should it lead to marriage?

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Fly Rod: Imagining my Father

by Bill Horstman

“Fly Rod” touches how a parent's death alters the life not only of the remaining spouse but also of their children. In a sense, the entire family is widowed. And the effects of such a loss are lifelong, 55 years and counting in my case, past the immediate grief and recreation of a life, what's often called "getting over" a loss or "getting on" with life. People do "get on." But there is a scar.

-- BH

This story begins with a book. Which led to a fly rod. I’d like to say it ends with a trout. But it’s November in Wisconsin and the trout have gone deep and still in their pools, and I’ve gone deep and still in my armchair. Not likely we’ll meet until spring.

The book is “Casting a Spell: the Bamboo Fly Rod and the American Pursuit of Perfection” by George Black. What the book began is a memory of my father and of a fly-fishing rod that he made 60 years ago.

My father was an engineer and a craftsman and a fisherman. He was born on a southern Indiana farm in the last year of the 19th century, the oldest surviving child of seven. He was named Elmer, a popular name in that time and place but now in long disuse. As a boy, he fished with makeshift rods and cane poles on Hough Creek, which wended along the border of his family’s farm, and on the nearby White River into which Hough Creek emptied and still empties. Catfish, crappies, bluegills, and bass.

He was good at making useful things from the materials at hand, mostly wood. Barn stalls for the cows. Kitchen chairs. Bed frames and dressers for his three younger brothers and one sister. Rifle stocks. And poles for fishing. One piece poles eight to ten feet long with a sturdy spine to flip fat bass onshore, poles that tapered to a tip that twitched at the slightest nibble of fish-lips on night crawler.

My father graduated from Brownstown high school in 1918 as class valedictorian. America had entered the Great War and nativistic, anti-German sentiment was strong. Strong enough in Indiana, where the soon-to-be Governor belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, that my father -- the grandson of German immigrants who attended a German-speaking Lutheran church - was denied the scholarship that traditionally was awarded to the high school valedictorian.

But he’d saved enough on his own to attend Purdue University. He enlisted in the U.S. Army R.O.T.C. and graduated in 1923 with a degree in mechanical engineering. Still making things. More complicated things – engines, machine components, steam turbines – things from steel. But the natural world and its materials still held him.

He had a workshop in the basement of our 1940s Wisconsin home that was tool heaven: a lathe, jig saw, table saw, router, chisels, calipers, a soldering iron, blowtorch, ball peen and claw hammers, drills, a level, an angle, planes and punches, screws and nails -- and wood. Lots of wood. Walnut. Maple. Oak. Ash. Hickory and Butternut.

He made graceful, curving chairs with cane seats for each of his three children. He made an armoire, a dresser, and a bed with pears and apples carved on the headboard for his wife. And for himself, he made fishing rods. Bait casting rods. And fly-rods of split bamboo.

He made the fly fishing rod of this story in 1946, home from a year-long Army tour rebuilding power plants in post-war Germany. He was forty-seven and I was two. He would live five more years. Although he’s been gone since 1951, I’m looking at his fishing rod right now. It was in a storage locker, nearly forgotten among the flotsam of my parents’ lives.

The shaft of this fly rod is made of Tonkin cane, a bamboo from China. Before Mao’s revolutionary forces gained control of mainland China in 1949, Tonkin cane was exported to the United States and other western countries and used to make fly rods that were prized by fishermen for their unmatched combination of strength and suppleness.

My father’s fly rod is in three sections joined by nickel silver ferrules. It tapers elegantly from one-half inch diameter where it abuts the cork grip to one-sixteenth inch at the tip. Four snake guides remain, wrapped to the shaft by red silk sealed in varnish. One guide and the steel tip-top are gone, their absence marked by silk shreds and small patches of bare bamboo. Pits left by hooks mark the cork grip. On the shaft, an inch from the handle, in precise script, beneath age-ambered varnish, the India ink states: Aug 1946.

What is a man of sixty three to do with such a discovery? What is the narrative that connects this chance convergence of a book, an artifact, and a memory?

I’d like to think that finding the fly rod, now able to appreciate its material and artistry, is more than just a catalyst for remembering my father and reworking a childhood grief. But is it only that? A private story.

A public story might tell how the fly rod was rebuilt, how the grown son stood midstream in waders and landed a brookie, how the rod became a living touchstone between father and son. But I’m not the craftsman or the fisherman that my father was. I can neither reconstruct the fly rod nor use it with his skill. No story there.

And, of course, no narrative can restore the fly rod’s maker to life or erase the scar from his death. Not a gospel story. Not a secular “death where is thy sting?” as told to the readers of Field & Stream. Anyway, I like my scar. It covers an old wound well and shows that I can heal. My scar shows, too, as much as his fly rod, that my father lived.

Perhaps that’s the tale worth telling again. People are born. They make things: a fly rod, an engine, a family, a memory, a wound, words. People die. Their creations continue. Not forever, but for a while. It’s a simple, everyday story and an old one. I think everyone can tell it.

Here’s my version: “This story begins with a book. Which led to a fly rod. I’d like to say it ends with a trout. But it’s November in Wisconsin and the trout have gone deep and still in their pools.”

Selective Pacifism

By Sally Tolan
Excerpted from "Bloodroot"

Walking, I see strange writing on the wall.
Though legible, I cannot read a word
and wonder why I seem to hear a call
and why that makes me think of birds
of war, why decades after Vietnam,
I lie in shame that we waited to oppose
the sacrificial spraying, bombing, napalm,
sold by theories based on dominoes.

No son of mine bore grenades in his pack
or sweated fear outside a Vietcong tunnel.
No son of mine was sent home in a sack.
I was not trapped in grief’s tight funnel.
I had my work, what could I do?
And now, what should I think of Kosovo?

1998

Poet and writer Sally Tolan has been single, married, widowed, married again, and divorced. Her family includes six children, their spouses, and ten grandchildren. She taught writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee for years, edited newsletters and three children's books, and wrote articles and a book on John Muir for middle school readers. “Bloodroot,” published 2007, is her first volume of poetry.

Sally will read from “Bloodroot” at the Harry W. Schwartz Bookshop in Shorewood, WI, on June 20, 2007 at 7 p.m.

The Cottage

By Sally Tolan

To Larry Tolan 1925-1974

Excerpted from "Bloodroot"

You’d remember – the back door
lock still sticks sometimes. I enter
through the low-ceilinged kitchen,
past gleaming pine boards, into the
living room with its high shadows,
silence, log walls, its musty, ashy smell,
windows to the lake and sky.

And you are there, and the children
in their childhood, and I as young wife
and mother. Your parents. Friends.
Through the porch screen day lilies
soft orange against the green arbor vitae,
choke cherry, beach grass.

You’d notice changes here – the once-brown
house now sandy gray, the outdoor shower,
the apple tree, new tool shed, graying
Adirondack chairs, the rusty sea wall.

But there’s still Old Mich –
sometimes lapping, sometimes roaring in.
The beach still shrinks and grows
by season or by cycle. We still
build castles, dig holes and cover
children to their necks in sand,
still splash in shallow water,
swim out, ride in on waves.

We take turns sitting in your easy chair,
eat supper on the porch, watch sunsets
reflected in the eastern sky, and like you,
wait for the magic moment when lake
and sky merge – horizonless.

1998

Poet and writer Sally Tolan has been single, married, widowed, married again, and divorced. Her family includes six children, their spouses, and ten grandchildren. She taught writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee for years, edited newsletters and three children's books, and wrote articles and a book on John Muir for middle school readers. “Bloodroot,” published 2007, is her first volume of poetry.

Sally will read from “Bloodroot” at the Harry W. Schwartz Bookshop in Shorewood, WI, June 20, 2007, at 7 p.m.

Guest Blogger June Stoddard: Irrational Lust, Alone

The painting of David looks at me; sensitive almond shaped brown eyes. I turn over, alone in our California king sized bed, and the photo silkscreen of him gives me a cockeyed look, hair cowlicked up, eyes at half mast; bedroom eyes.

“I miss you.”

I pull the floppy Teddy Bear close and shove a pillow between my legs.

My eyes and I whisper “Spoon?”

Friends ask, “ Has he come to you? Do you see him?”

My back tingles with sensation.

Is it David?
************************************************************************
The air is fresh and cool as I walk the girls to school.

That rhymed.

“The air is fresh and cool as I walk the girls to school.” I hear David laughing.

“Good rhyme, Mommy.” Jessica says, looking at me, and smiles.

The ground against my feet, crows cawing, cars zooming by, my leaden sleepless body assailed by sensations. I feel dizzy, who am I now? I hold tight to Jessica and Chloe’s hand, it’s hard for us to all fit on the sidewalk.

“A cradle of beauty!” says Chloe, looking at a spider web jeweled with dew. We wonder at it, and then go on. I hear David in her, speaking through her, my cartwheel clown.

They see me coming and part, mothers and fathers. I feel their eyes, their mouths not knowing what to say. Susan gives me her daily hug; her gentle hands pull me close, soft blue fabric against my cheek, the tears flow.

Chloe turns the knob, the knob on my chest, the radio of Beach Boys music she hums, to get my tears to stop.

“East Coast girls are hip, I really dig those clothes they wear,” I laugh and try to wipe the tears away.

The bell rings. Jessica shoots off to class. Chloe holds my hand tight nudging me on. We enter building 500 and go straight in to Ms. Lovett’s class. They’re all in class; Chloe pulls me to her seat holding my hand. I start to leave.

“Mommy, don’t go.” Chloe says.

“Class is starting.”

“Hug?”

I give her a big hug, and start to go, she follows me. I look in her eyes to say ‘Mommy is okay’. She slowly walks to her desk, no one watches, they all know.

Alone. I walk out. A man is sitting at the front steps; his body heat ignites mine as I brush past. My senses alert like a bloodhound retriever. I miss my mate, where is my mate. I search the milling crowd of parents for one alone like me, a male. David’s pungent smell in memory, his rough-touch fading, I seek connection, body tingling with anticipation. I escape the school and walk, walk away. I can’t be feeling these things; I’m afraid, afraid of myself.

June Stoddard is currently a freelance writer, headhunter, ex-actress, and mother of twins living in Santa Monica. These moments in time were caught in the weeks after her husband, David Chappe, died of cancer May 13, 2002.

Guest Blogger Lary Bloom: The Art of Dying, Part 2 of 2

At 3:00 p.m. there was a shift change in the Palliative Care unit – new nurses came onto the floor. The one assigned to our room, Helen, introduced herself to Liz, who was only occasionally conscious by then because we were still giving her a morphine derivative to ease the pain from the procedure.

Helen asked Liz, “Are you comfortable?” Even in her haze Liz knew the right answer. I had taught her the answer over many years – over many attempts to convince her of the wisdom, if not the wit, of the late Henny Youngman. Helen asked again, “Are you comfortable?” Liz replied, “I make a decent living.”

Helen smiled, even as I saw tears in her eyes. An hour later, something had changed. Liz’s breathing had gotten heavier and more difficult, her skin clammy and cold. Dianne asked Helen if she thought she could go home for the night to Granby. Helen took a moment and said to Dianne, “If I were you, I’d stay.” In the language of the Palliative Care unit, this meant that death was imminent.

I have been almost all my life a skeptical Jew. I go to Torah study every Saturday morning at Congregation Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek in my town and am a member who participates in many ways. But I’ve had trouble with the concept of God, particularly in regard to human suffering. The feelings are complicated, too much so for a paragraph here. Still, it seemed clear enough that I was beginning to change my thinking – I was beginning to see the natural order of things. For one thing, Helen was taking care of us. Helen, who whose name was the same as my late mother’s.

Helen wasn’t the only angel. There was a whole community of angels in our lives. Hundreds of them. People who supported us. And there was the brilliant and compassionate oncologist, Patricia DeFusco, who tended Liz for nearly twelve years and who considered her to be a challenging patient (questioning everything), one who was fascinated by her disease and wanted to know all there was to know so she could make the right decisions.

After an exhausting day at her Wethersfield treatment center, Pat DeFusco arrived at the hospital at 8:20, just as the final decision had to be made. Liz was breathing heavily, and there was a gurgle in her throat – trouble beathing, just what she (and we) feared. We simply had to give her more morphine, to ease the breathing. But it would also lower her blood pressure. It would, in short, kill her.

Helen administered the final dose. Pat DeFusco went out into the hallway so that Dianne and I could be alone with Liz. Her breathing changed again. Finally, it was becoming much less labored, more natural and painless. But it was becoming very slow. Each breath seemed as if it could be her last. She hadn’t moved her arms for several hours, but now Liz moved them – toward me, as if to embrace me. Then she put them back down. And she was gone.

I was consoled by the idea that she had done this in the way she imagined, in the way she insisted – turning a lingering death sentence into something of an ordinary inconvenience, and in the end giving the cancer that killed her very little, if any, gratification. I wanted to shout, “Well done, my dear.” And “Brava!” But like Dianne, I simply sat there and squeezed a hand. Pat DeFusco came back into the room and confirmed what we knew.

And then the doctor stood back and said, “Can you believe it? Look at her. She’s still beautiful.”

Lary Bloom’s work spans an array of writing genres – nonfiction and fiction, plays, and magazine pieces. His newest book, "Lary Bloom's Connecticut Notebook," was released in September 20005 by Globe Pequot Press, and his one act-play, "Paradise Village," was staged in October 2005 at EST (Ensemble Studio Theater) in New York. As a longtime magazine editor, he discovered and nurtured several new talents, including Wally Lamb, Dave Barry, Madeleine Blais, Susan M. Dodd, Edna Buchanan, and Carl Hiaasen.

As a memoir editor and consultant, Lary helped bring to fruition many popular narratives, among them the New York Times Best Seller, "My Old Man and the Sea," by David Hays and Daniel Hays. He is the author of the classic text, "The Writer Within," used in his seminars at Trinity College, and in many other classrooms. His column in "Connecticut" magazine won two consecutive national awards. He was lyricist for the musical "A Woman of a Certain Age."

Lary lives in Chester, Connecticut. To learn more about Lary Bloom: www.larybloom.net

Guest Blogger Lary Bloom: The Art of Dying, Part 1 of 2

Excerpted from "Lary Bloom’s Connecticut Notebook"

For her funeral, my wife, Liz, left me a note on a yellow sheet of paper. The things she wanted. Included in that note was the instruction to me not to speak during the service. “Please resist, Lary.” When the time came, I of course honored her wish, except to briefly point out to the nearly 400 in attendance that she had offered this instruction, and to read a favorite poem of hers by Billy Collins. She had no instructions, however, about anything I might say after the funeral. And so I felt that, in tribute to her and the way she did what she did, I would take readers to her very private last hours. (Originally published August 2003)

The nurse, whose face was a picture of comfort, asked, “Did anyone give you a tour?” I shook my head, but I would eventually inspect the place on my own – wandering back to things I’d never seen in a hospital, including an enormous living room with a Steinway grand, shelves of books, a six-cornered tank of tropical fish, original art, a kitchen, a suite for overnight guests, a view of a meditation garden. This is part of what Hartford Hospital calls its Palliative Care unit – palliative, a gentle name, a name meant to ease, to provide consolation, as death approaches.

My wife, Liz, was just down the hallway in room 406. She was there to recover from a relatively simple procedure the day before to relieve acute symptoms of a terminal case of cancer. Our plan was to go back home to Chester, where she would resume the peaceful process of dying amid her abundant and beautiful azaleas, irises, and lilies. There seemed to be a couple of weeks left, according to Liz and her oncologist, and that’s where she preferred to do this.

Early in the day, she had felt reasonably well. She talked about routine matters; What friends we owed dinner to, how to finish a complicated grant for Center City Churches in Hartford, and a feature story that she owed the Main Street News in Essex. We also talked about her illness, though we heeded her self-imposed Fifteen-Minute Rule: a quarter of an hour of cancer grousing per day, period.

This fifteen-minute session was packed with a few key points. She had made the right decision a few months earlier. No more treatments. They weren’t working anyway, after so many years. She would take charge of her own body, make her own rules, and take full advantage of the time left. She would see her grandchildren, travel, work (just four days earlier she’d spent a half a day at Center City’s office), and go out to lunch (the calendar was packed), just as she had always done. She would do this though she had clearly become fatigued, and on occasion short of breath.

Liz was worried about breathing – something akin to drowning, lungs unable to function because of fluid. She was also concerned about how family and friends would remember her; she didn’t want the image to be one of an emaciated cancer patient.

At sixty years old, she had tied up the ends of her life. She had made lists about this and that, including what kind of funeral she preferred (although a Christian, Liz asked to have the service at our Chester Synagogue). She had dinner with her former husband to talk about their daughters and the grandchildren, and to say goodbye. And she had paid the gardener to not only tend over the summer what she had lovingly built over fifteen years, but to check occasionally to see that the wisteria wouldn’t get out of hand and strangle me. Liz had also worked hard on her own spiritual life, advised by the Reverend Dr. Duncan Newcomer of United Church of Chester. The two had talked every week about life and death and about nourishing the soul. Later, Dr. Newcomer would say, “I never met anyone who prepared herself so well, so fully, for what God was preparing for her as Liz Gwillim.”

Was I prepared? Not as well – not after twenty years of being with her. Nor was Dianne Bourbeau, Liz’s daughter, who was at the hospital during the critical hours and who regularly updated her sister Devon Donahue, in North Carolina, who was frantically trying to arrange with airlines to get to Hartford. And yet knew what Liz craved: a peaceful and dignified death. All her life she had been a picture of dignity and grace. She also had a beautiful smile.

I wrote a lyric about, in part, that smile. “In the Aftertime of Days,” a song about what lasts, was the finale of A Woman of a Certain Age. Liz had been the driving force behind that musical, pushing me (the lyricist), Steve Metcalf (the composer), and Colin McEnroe (the script editor). For a while it had seemed as if she wouldn’t live to see opening night – an unthinkable scenario. But Liz rallied – and was, miraculously, a beaming presence in the Ivoryton Playhouse audience. She heard the song inspired by her An excerpt, from the bridge:

Every time I close my eyes I see the smile upon your face,
A smile that lights all time and all space.
What a gift you gave to me as all the years passed swiftly by.
Forgive my silent heart, my faint reply.

EXCERPT FROM PART 2

Helen asked Liz, “Are you comfortable?” Even in her haze Liz knew the right answer. I had taught her the answer over many years – over many attempts to convince her of the wisdom, if not the wit, of the late Henny Youngman. Helen asked again, “Are you comfortable?” Liz replied, “I make a decent living.”

Guest Blogger Mary Olen: Grieving, Constipated Widow. Enjoys Kleenex with Aloe...

One fall day in 1996, Mary Olen (pictured at left) started her day with a teenage son and a husband. By nightfall, she would be a widow.

Mary, our guest blogger this week, tells her story below, in play format and taking the name of Beth. The scene is from the play "Single Married Widowed Divorced."

Act One

Scene Seven

LIGHTS UP ON BETH SITTING AT THE TABLE, READING A NEWSPAPER AS IF IN A COFFEESHOP. SHE FACES MOSTLY UPSTAGE, A LAPTOP IN FRONT OF HER. CHRIS ENTERS AS A WAITRESS, SERVES COFFEE, EXITS.

BETH

Oh my god, look at this one. (She reads from a paper) Petite natural blonde, ready for fun and adventure. (She looks at the audience, aghast at what she’s reading.) I’m a glass-is-half-full kind of person. I love life and want to share my spirit. Oh brother! … Let’s see…Men seeking women. I like bowling… I like spring… I like wiener dogs…My woman should have a robust sexual appetite…

(She sips coffee.)

BETH

I never thought I’d be here, but here I am.

(She sets down the paper and stands in a tight light. Other lights fade.)

BETH

Two years ago, on a typical April morning in Milwaukee -- it was snowing -- Jack kissed me goodbye in the driveway. “I hope the weather’s not too bad to fly,” I say. “Piece of cake,” he replies. “Say goodbye to Michael for me.”

(She walks a bit across the stage, light on her.)

BETH

At 3 p.m. I look out the window at work and see it’s still snowing. (We hear a phone ring) Hello? Oh hi honey. OK. (Pauses, listening) Do they know when it will clear? (Pauses) Will you be home in time for Michael’s parent-teacher conference at 6? All right, we’ll wait at home till 5:30 and if you aren’t back by then just meet us at school. Be careful…

(She walks a bit across the stage.)

BETH

At 5:30 no Jack. We go to the parent-teacher conference and get back home at 7:30. No Jack. No message. He’s been late before. Unforeseen delays are part of the pilot business. But he always calls. At 8:00 I’m staring at a half-eaten pork chop, tapping my fork on the plate and feeling sick. I phone a pilot friend (She holds fake phone to ear) and leave a message, asking him what I should do, who I can call. As I return the phone to its cradle, the doorbell rings. (The doorbell rings and she is startled, terrified) And I know. I know it so much that when I open the door and see the young man in a suit, holding his official badge in his shaking hand, I look him in the eye and say, “I know why you’re here.”

(She reseats herself back at the table. Tight light off, regular lights on.)

BETH

So two years later, here I am, writing a personals ad. (She begins to type on her laptop) Single, white woman, on a new road in life, interested in…Interests. What a strange word. The only thing I’m interested in is survival. (To audience as she leans back in chair) A few weeks after Jack died, I read about a study that said within one year after a spouse dies, the living spouse has a much higher risk of getting sick and even dying than the non-widowed population. I’m jealous. Extremely jealous of all the women who still have their husbands. (She returns to typing, agitated) Single, white woman, late 40s, at fucking crossroads in life. Interested in survival. Extremely jealous of married women.

(We hear a computer sound as she hits delete and slams top of laptop. She stands. She’s a bit angrier as she crosses the stage and flops on the couch. The lights dim and a tight light is on her.)

BETH

Were it just me, that first year I’d have eaten nothing but Campbell’s soup, popcorn, and sympathy lasagnas. I’d have sat on the couch, watching sit-com after sit-com, and turning it off when ER came on. (She sits up on couch. Picks up a set of dumbbells and starts lifting) But I have a son to raise, and I don’t want to be a statistic -- sick or dead within the first year -- so I launch a personal health crusade. I work out. (She continues this for a moment then puts down dumbbells, and from her purse dumps out several bottles of vitamins) I take vitamin C, a woman’s multivitamin and melatonin to help me sleep. Every morning, I drop an herbal remedy on my tongue. And it works. After one year of survival I haven’t developed so much as a cold. I’m simply a better, healthier, superior . . widow.

(She stands up and takes a bow. Then begins to walk slowly back to table.)

BETH

Year two, not so good. I don’t feel smug anymore. I feel overwhelmed. A black cloud settles over my life, beginning with my appliances. I fancy this is Jack’s way of reminding me how useful he was, fixing almost anything that broke in our 100-year-old house. But now a funereal procession of failed appliances goes out the door. The dishwasher. The toilet. The water heater.

(Tight light is off as she sits back at table and starts typing with renewed energy.)

BETH

OK, so now I know what I need. (Purposefully, clinically) White widow, late 40s. Interested in survival of self and home appliances. Looking for plumber or general handyman. (To audience) That would have been easy but it wasn’t just the appliances that were going south. The warranty on my body expired. I developed irritable bowel syndrome, which constipated me to the point of wearing only skirts with elastic waistbands. I always thought calling a bowel irritable personalized it. Oh, my bowel? He’s a decent guy, just a little irritable today. Next, I developed a one-sided rash and blisters that dry and scab. I had shingles, which my Merck Manual calls “an infection that produces a severely painful skin eruption and fluid-filled blisters.” It’s caused by the herpes virus -- the one that causes chicken pox, not the other one.

(Like a strobe, the lights alternate between a tight light on Beth to regular lighting as she stands up and screams.)

BETH

Grieving, constipated widow! Irritable but decent bowel! Enjoys high doses of antiviral drugs, cool, wet compresses, Kleenex with aloe! And popcorn!

(She slams the cover of the laptop down and walks across stage. She’s mad.)

BETH

So now I’m a damn statistic, sitting in the doctor’s office. (She sits down on the couch -- hands folded, head looking toward an imaginary doctor as if she’s talking to the doctor) I know my body’s stressed! (Anger collapses to grief. She starts to cry) I’m tired. I’m so goddam tired. It’s been two years of surviving through so much grief, so much change, and so many broken appliances.” (Cries then pauses, collecting herself. Talks to the audience.) And so I spend my second year of widowhood: in the void, tired and alone. It’s been two years of eating because I have to. Two years of surviving because my son needed me -- to keep my job, to buy food, to watch The Simpsons with him. Two years of launching him into the world, completing the process Jack and I began 17 years ago-- together. And his dependence on me keeps me alive. I am surviving but I’m still . . .so . . .goddam . . .tired. (She looks back in the direction of the imaginary doctor) What? Yes I have been through a lot in the last two years. What do my friends say? (Half-smiles, walks to table, sits behind computer and opens it.) They say I should start dating, start a new life.

BETH

(Typing) Exhausted widow. Past the shock stage. Working through denial. Edging into anger. Looking for a few good laughs. (She hits send and we hear a zing noise)

Blackout

THE PODCAST
Mary Olen, a nurse and therapist, is The Retired Therapist on the Single Married Widowed Divorced podcast. We call her to help us make sense of marital status issues – fair division of household labor with our spouses, why women clean when home alone, if there’s just one true soul mate for each of us, and more. Wise, kind and funny, we just love her. Listen in, why don’t you?

THE PLAY
Mary’s scene is part of the play “Single Married Widowed Divorced.” (Click here to write for information about producing this play.)