Talking Smack to Death

Never too Late to Speak of Love

Our husbands died within days of each other. We’ve known each other since the 1990s, and yesterday we met and commiserated over our losses. She looks great—I marveled at her beautiful silver earrings. For all our history, we’ve bonded more over widowhood than anything else.

This special club invites all sorts of comparisons. But behind every difference, every exhale, an underlying prayer seeps into the air. Oh Lord. Have mercy. As my friend and I chatted, I could feel a dying Christ filling the space between us. Father forgive them rang in my head as we each related the difficult last days of our spouses.

My friend and I are not exactly alone. All over the world, men and women lose their partners. Some land softly, having had foresight, planning and good luck to carry on their chosen lifestyle. Others face a cruel headwind of dried-up finances, uncertain futures and faith tests. You can always find someone who’s worse off than you are.

But grief, sorrow and pain don’t care where you are on the suffering hierarchy. Your pain is your pain. Whether your loved one died last week or decades ago, the “rate your pain from one to ten” can never explain the depth of your loss.

My friend wrote a novel about her suffering. I frequently use this space to assuage my hurt. More than anything, we’re seeing the deep need to share our stories.

When my adoptive dad died in the late 80s, I needed to talk about it, but I had few takers. Nobody wanted to ask me about him. Even friends avoided eye contact if I said I missed him. Death was so final, so discomfiting. Best to keep looking straight ahead to the future, the only place where your own death can’t get you.

I hurt when I sensed this avoidance after Adoptive Dad’s demise. And now, when every cell in me screams in agony, that feeling of falling down, down, down shadows me wherever I go.

Although my friend and I have known each other for a long time, we’re not the sort of friends you can call when your world falls apart or your refrigerator just died. She lives in a different town and keeps busy writing her approximately seven million published books. I write my little stories and go around putting out the fires my rescue personality demands. On a success scale, her light blinds my little candle.

And yet.

We only visited for a couple hours before she needed to drive back over the mountain to her home. Most of the time we spent talking about how our spouses lived their final days, how the difficulty grade became so steep at the end that our noses bled. And we both looked at our feet when we got to the lonely part.

That’s when God showed up.

She spoke softly about the love she’d shared with her husband, how they never fell out of love. I admitted that several times in our 47-year marriage I got to the brink of divorce but ultimately recognized that my spouse loved me completely. That recognition changed me from a fault-finding shrew to a woman who sees love everywhere she looks.

For that last ten plus years together, I made a point of calling my husband “love,” in response to his ubiquitous “sweetheart.” And I began to practice letting love flow out of my eyes, let me hear him pleading for love, deliberately noting every touch, even memorizing his smell.

When you reframe your life to see love first instead of last, Jesus dances a jig. If you can let go of your bitter self-righteousness (I’m an expert in this), love rises like a river at flood stage. Each time you allow forgiveness to supersede accusation and hurt, resentment flutters off like a drunken butterfly.

Best of all, love has invited God to hang out with me at all hours of the day or night. Whether it’s the coincidence of seeing a beloved son’s profile in a cloud formation or just serendipity of two older women swapping widow stories, the Presence insists on sitting between me and whatever I’m doing.

That One barges in with wisdom you never asked for and lovingkindness you were desperate to receive. Mercy, justice, trying to walk humbly even though your hips are going out, this is the balm every person who’s lost someone wants, needs, begs for.

My friend and I hugged, and I said travel mercies as she headed home. I stood at my door and told myself to remember this moment, this meeting, this love with pretty silver earrings. When she drove off, my sorrow was still there. But so was the undeniable presence, preparing us to walk through death and back into the light of love.