Just Another Widow

It Must Have Been Moonglow
by Phyllis Greene

In December 1998, after fifty-six years of marriage, Phyllis Greene went from being part of the lifelong unit of Phyllisand Bob to being just plain Phyllis. As a way of coping with her feelings, she began keeping a journal. She realized her own reflections could speak to the thousands of women like her, each one with very different yet in some ways very similar day-to-day experiences. It Must Have Been Moonglow chronicles the emotional roller-coaster of her experience in a collection of brief essays — like diary entries — that capture the sadness, the humor, and the triumphs all widows encounter. She writes with wit and insight about negotiating the logistics of an evening out with a group of single older women, none of whom drive very well; about handling the check when going to dinner with a couple; about grocery shopping for one; and about the miracle of friendships on the Internet and the blessings of family.

With a new final section featuring readers' letters describing their own experiences of widowhood, It Must Have Been Moonglow is an intimate, candid, and engaging book — not about grief but about inspiration and strength.

Chapter 1

This afternoon, Mt. Carmel Hospice called for my six-month "checkup." How am I doing? they wanted to know. "Well," I said. "I am doing well." Am I telling the truth, I wondered; what is "well"? What sorrowing widow can ever really do well, I think. What standard does hospice use? With all their experience, they must have some definition of good and bad, well and unwell, heartsick and heartbroken. Of one thing I am sure: What is well one day is sick at heart the next, what is laughter one hour may be tears the next. In an effort to chart my own road to acceptance (I think it is there, somewhere ahead), I began to keep a journal on December 31, three weeks after my husband's death. Now as I look back, I wonder if I have walked a mile or one hundred, if I am out in front or lagging way behind, is there a "norm," and might it help me, and others who may read this, to share my journey as I go? I would welcome the company.

Circles on the Third Floor

I avoided widowhood for fifty-six years. Bob and I tried really hard to make it longer than that, and he could have given up or given out any of the last ten, but he didn't. When he finally couldn't walk, or even move by himself; when I had to feed him and clean him; when he half-dreamed his own funeral and the "plaque" they would read, and the "people from Cleveland" who would come; when we could assure him that all the circles on the third floor were clean (although we have no third floor), then he and I and our internist knew it was finally time. The death certificate says the causes were cardiac arrest, arteriosclerotic heart disease, diabetes mellitus Type I. What it was was that everything just deteriorated, ravaged by diabetes and age and the fact that his father, too, had died at eighty-three. So, in December 1998, I joined that unhappy band of women that has been growing like a geriatric sorority, and I became just another widow.

Looking back, all the way back to my teen years, I find so many different Phyllises as the years passed. I can see her, and almost feel her, but it is hard to get the true picture of what she was like as she moved forward (she hopes forward) through the physical changes and the cultural changes and the scientific and medical changes, through the feminist movement and the political upheavals. The one constant: for the last fifty-six years she has been Bob's wife.

All marriages have moments of great joy and great pain, the relationship changes over every decade, every day, and who I am now, who any of us are at the end of a marriage compared to who we were at the beginning is hard, even impossible, to get a handle on. I was a war bride, and while my husband was overseas I worked at a good and stimulating job as a fashion advertising copywriter for a department store. It was all new for me. I think there was a career, out in that exciting world, that we now call PR or media relations or marketing. But in 1945 I wanted none of that. I wanted a home in the suburbs and I wanted a baby. And then another and then another. We fit the statistical pattern perfectly: the house, the mortgage, the backyard barbecue, and my Major home from the war. A normal life, a conventional storybook, until suddenly it's time to write the last chapter.

What we always said to one another, especially as we came down the final stretch, was that we had had a helluva ride. This memory of our life that we ran over and over in our minds and conversations in the last year or two was the nourishment that gave us the strength to accept that it couldn't go on forever.

His Tan Poplin Suit and Red Stripe Tie

It is Paul Harvey who says "And now for the rest of the story," which is a good lead for breaking news. My story, actually, has no "rest," it just goes on and on. The rest of the story will evolve day by day, as long as I live.

I go through the necessary motions. I laugh some. I do shed some tears. I am learning to accept that this is the way it is, that there is almost nothing I can do except keep the faith, and walk through the storm with my head held high, and whistle while I work, and speak only soft answers to turn away wrath-and check my Bartlett's Book of Quotations for more clichés. For every widow there is a timetable, and "recovery" comes to each one on a different schedule and in a different way.

Just as recovering alcoholics are never free from the desire for a drink, so, too, am I, a recovering griever, never free of my desire for the life I had before. There just aren't any twelve steps that help. Nevertheless, with determination and reliance on the love and goodwill of friends and family, there are tolerable days and a window still on life's joys.

It seems incredible that months have passed and it is the bad memories of the last year of my marriage that are still so much clearer in my mind than the good memories of those many years that came before.

When I can reclaim those years, when the children were young and we lived in our lovely, traditional home, where we ate breakfast in a sunny breakfast room and ate dinner together every night, when Bob came home from work each evening to find his family awaiting his arrival, then I will know I am at least moving down that recovery road.

There is one picture in my mind of Bob that I return to over and over again. We are going out to dinner; his mother is here visiting us. We have driven to the top of the little hill and out of the driveway. Bob notices that he has forgotten to turn the pool sweep off, and so he goes down to turn the switch. As he comes back up the hill, in his tan poplin suit and his repp stripe tie and his blue button-down shirt, tan and healthy, with his great smile, I know that once and forever God is in his heaven and all is right with the world, my never-changing mantra.

When I say "Bob," and that is the picture that flashes into my mind and heart, then, perhaps, I can say that I am recovered.

Copyright © 2001 by Phyllis Greene. Excerpted by permission of Villard, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Phyllis Greene is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Wellesley College. She has had a lifelong involvement in her community, having served as chairman of the board of trustees of Franklin University as well as chairman of the Columbus Metropolitan Airport and Aviation Commission. She is the mother of Bob Greene, the syndicated columnist and author; D. G. Fulford, author and journalist; and Tim Greene, a real estate executive. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.