TRAFFIC CONDITIONS

"Traffic Conditions"

When I had finished the manuscript of my book "The Widow Lessons," I reached out to other widows, in order to include additional voices in the book.  I didn't include all of them in the book, mostly for reasons of space.  One such story is from a woman who lost all of her lifelong friends as she culled them out of her life like so many sick cows in a barn.  Her criteria was "anyone with a platitude or a prayer," she said.  "I wanted pain, and only pain.  I was angry.  My tongue was acid." 

An example:  A dear friend said that she would help this widow "buck up and get over it." 
"What did you say?" I asked.
"I told her I was going to take my son's baseball bat and bust both her legs in multiple locations, and then I was going to tell her to walk it off."  Then, she banished this woman from her life, forever.

Each widow has to decide what to do with remarks people make that strike a sharp chord.  I can't "fault" this widow for what she said -- basically telling her friend how dumb-as-a-rock her remark had been. "You just hurt me, and now I want to hurt you back," is basically where she was at. 

I came across a website that has pages dedicated to comebacks a widow can/should make to these kinds of remarks.  I personally might use some but not all of them.  It's an individual sensibility thing.  I generally tend to say "thank you."  I guess I figure I have no idea what the other person is going through....it just so happens that my status as a widow is what is prompting sympathy, or encouragement, or awkward silences.  But what is the remarker going through?  I dunno.  Nobody ever knows what anyone is going through, if you get right down to it.

Reports of Awkward Remarks

The Norman Rockwell painting above hangs in my home (ok, a print).  I's called "Traffic Conditions."  I love it for a lot of reasons, but my favorite character is in the upper window above the guitar shaped sign.  This is presumably the guitar teacher.  This person doesn't appear to have a student at the moment.  Maybe there are other problems, too.  At the least, I know what it must be like to listen to horrendous butchering of a musical instrument I love and have mastered.  I think this Rockwell character needs as much mercy as the truck driver,   My point is that everybody suffers, and not everybody knows what to say.  I want to have mercy on people because I will never know about the pain behind. Maybe it is actual, total stupidity behind the remark -- that probably warrants a little mercy, too.

Just because you have lost the love of your life doesn't mean you need to be tolerant or nice or merciful to people who make thoughtless or ignorant remarks about what you should do/feel/think.  I want to be clear on that point.   If you are a widow, my experience is that you may want to think about how you will handle dumb-as-rocks remarks.  Because, here they come.  They don't stop after seven, ten, twenty years either.  "Why don't you date?"  "You must be so lonely."  .........

Speaking of Mark Twain: