Since the dawn of time,
and even before that, we’ve been asking ourselves the same old question. Is it
worse to be widowed or divorced?
Let’s look at divorcées first, and of course a lot depends on the
circumstances. For those enduring divorce, it matters what side of the divorce
fence you find yourself sitting on. If the divorce was your idea and you just feel compelled to leave your lazy,
good-for-nothing spouse who won’t take you hunting/shopping, then the age-old
question doesn’t even apply to you. Especially if you happen to have a third
party waiting in the wings who totally “gets” you because you have so much in
common, like NFL football/Downton Abbey.
But what if the divorce
wasn’t your idea? What if you foolishly thought you’d be married to this person
forever? The person who’s now hastily packing bags, saying good-bye to the dog,
and canceling life insurance policies? The one who can’t back out of the
driveway fast enough? In this case, you might prefer being widowed. Yes, lying,
cheating spouses who fall off cliffs or accidentally pour drain cleaner over
their cereal can’t hurt. Well . . . it can. But it will
hurt the deceased a lot more than you.
Now, our hearts go out
to those who lose a much-loved partner to death. Such a loss is painful and
unbearably sad, and no matter how many times people tell you they understand,
they just don’t. But the widowed will have a circle of folks rallying around
them insisting they must grieve in their own time, absolutely no rush, and life
will eventually get better. The divorced people who’ve been wronged will
probably get the same advice, but for a much shorter time period, and it will
be peppered with instructions to get over
it, move on, get out there.
Whichever heart-wrenching
situation you find yourself burdened with, it will be life-altering, and recovery
can be agonizingly slow. The widowed and those divorced against their every
wish and effort will both feel pain and loneliness. But the good news is that
life will eventually return to some kind of normalcy for the suddenly single,
no matter how they got there.
Perhaps the difference
is that the widowed can look back on a lifetime of good memories and remember
the husband or wife with love. The divorced, after cutting the spouse’s clothes
into tiny pieces and removing his/her face from five thousand photographs, can
hopefully come to the conclusion one day that too much time was wasted missing
the departed one.
And as for the spouse
speeding out of the driveway, let’s hope that at the very least, he/she gets a
ticket for bad behavior.
In our latest novel, DRESSING MYSELF, our heroine faces much of the above, but the conclusion of her story
might surprise you.
