WIDOWERS ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL

Let me play Rod Serling for a moment and take you into The Twilight Zone.

Imagine that you are alone every day with no companionship but a radio. Most of your “human” contact is through text messages and an occasional audio conversation on the computer or your smartphone. When the telephone rings, you hope for a momen that it might be a friend or family member, but it is nearly always a robo-call, which you grumpily refuse to answer. On those rare occasions when the caller really is a friend or family member, you talk and talk until you fear becoming a bore. And you always thank the person for listening to you.

Evenings are the worst, that time when you would have relaxed with your wife in pleasant conversation. Then there is the painful act of climbing into bed alone. That’s when the weight of loneliness weighs the heaviest. You sleep fitfully, careful to remain on “your” side of the bed, waking occasionally with the fleeting sense that she is still there. Then the weight descends again.

I have read the posts of widowed folks who spend time with children and grandchildren, and I can’t help but envy them. No one can replace the companionship of a wife, but companionship with anyone who loves you helps relieve the pain. But my days are in The Twilight Zone of utter alone-ness. I survive only by the grace of God. But I feel the effect of it on my body. It's involuntary.

That God has a purpose in my suffering , I have no doubt. God has a purpose for all He allows into our lives. I have become a more prolific writer since my widowhood, and what I have written has helped and encouraged others. For that I am grateful. In the past my articles were published in national magazines, and yet I have found more satisfaction in sharing my thoughts and insights pro bono with people who are dear to me.

Yet there must be a larger purpose for what I am going through. Being a better writer is hardly worth the pain of my utter loneliness. I know that God’s ultimate relief for my “crook in the lot” is to take me to heaven. That happens frequently in the case of widowers.

Yesterday I talked with Linda’s best friend who shared a whole list of husbands and wives who had died within a short time of each other. I asked, “Did the wife die first?” She thought a moment, and in every case she could recall, the wife died first and the man followed shortly thereafter. That’s the statistical pattern with widowers. Both my father and my father-in-law lived only a month or less after their wives died. Widowers are less likely to live out their normal life expectancy than are widows.

Spiritual pep-talks don’t change the environmental condition—the condition of being alone—and that has an immediate effect on a man’s health. If the heat is too much for a person’s body, knowing that the Lord loves him will not spare him from heat stroke! He needs a change of environment—quickly! Perhaps a better analogy is hypothermia! That’s what it feels like to have no human warmth, either physically or emotionally.

“It is not good that the man should be alone,” God said. And widowers are not all created equal.