Welcome back to “Ancient Wisdom,” our Sunday series in which writers over 70 tell us how they are aging gracefully. Last week, Mimi Swartz wrote about her love-hate relationship with plastic surgery. This week, Elinor Lipman, 74, recalls her late husband—and her life as a widow.
My husband, Bob, died in 2009, 40 days after turning 60. It wasn’t sudden; he’d lost a three-year fight with two fatal and heartbreaking diseases, frontotemporal dementia and ALS.
I’d been in a support group for caretakers, all women. When two of us lost husbands a few weeks apart, the group leader, a therapist, asked for a show of hands: Should the widows keep coming? The vote was unanimous, all yeses, and it was apparent to me why: Caretaking is an agonizing job, and here were two trusted members, posthumously looking less used up.
“Grie-lief” fit the new phase. Bob was never easygoing or accommodating. He was a doctor and a perfectionist, yet I never knew anyone less impressed with himself for being a doctor. Ours weren’t the smoothest 34 years of marriage, but what do I know about other couples’ decades together? I appreciated most things about him. He was handsome, smart, witty, clever, and creative. (Once, when I needed a faux Oprah’s Book Club title for a parody I was writing, in seconds he came up with Bootstrap Creek.)
Then he’d lost his words, and eventually was down to two phrases: “Do the thing” and “I’m a happy guy.” A friend had advised me, based on her mother’s last few months, “Don’t have any regrets,” by which she meant: Don’t be impatient and annoyed. Always be nice. It was excellent advice. Thankfully, the last words I spoke to him were “I love you.”