How to Talk to a Widower

hear Russ’s voice calling me from the parking lot. “They’re looking for us,” I say.
    She nods and takes my hand as I help her off the breakwater, then carries her shoes as we walk across the sand toward the parking lot. I can see my father and Claire spinning around like Fred and Ginger in the glow of the sodium lights. “Dad was something else tonight, huh?”
    My mother nods, and loops her arm through mine. “Here’s what will happen. When we get home he’ll want to make love repeatedly, and then he’ll lie in bed holding me, telling me stories about you all when you were kids, or about when we were first dating, and I’ll stay up as long as I can, holding on to him, not wanting to miss a minute of it, wishing we could stay like that forever, but eventually I’ll fall asleep while he’s still talking. And when I wake up tomorrow morning, he’ll be urinating in the flowerbeds, or playing ball in his underwear, or building a tower of glass on the living room floor with my grandmother’s crystal, or God knows what. And I’ll hide under my covers crying and wondering when and if I’ll see him again.” She turns to face me, her eyes wide and knowing, and puts a cold hand on my cheek. “You lost your wife, Douglas. My heart breaks for you, it really does. But I lose my husband every day, all over again. And I don’t even get to mourn.”
    “Jesus, Mom,” I say, my voice cracking, but she’s already walking again. It’s a favorite technique of hers. She likes to stick and move. Stick and move.
    “Come on, Douglas,” she says brightly, pulling me forward. “Life’s a bitch, there’s no doubt about it. But on the bright side, at least one of us is going to get laid tonight.”
    In the parking lot my father comes over to my mother and throws his suit jacket and then his arm over her trembling shoulders. They say good night to the Sandlemans, who are still looking a little shell-shocked from the whole horror show and probably can’t wait to get into their car and start talking about us. Once they’re gone, the rest of us hug and shake hands as we say our good-byes, and to an outside observer, someone who doesn’t know us any better, we probably look exactly like a regular family.

14

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    How to Talk to a Widower
By Doug Parker

    T here are three things that people will say without fail when confronted with you, three things that you wish like hell they wouldn’t say, inane platitudes guaranteed to make your bowels clench and the blood in your ears pound with rage. And even though by now you’re braced for them, when you hear them you still find yourself struggling to quell the overpowering urge to bark obscenities and hurl large, breakable objects, to haul off and punch the well-wishers in their sympathetically creased faces, to feel the crack of bone under your fist, see the hot crimson spray of blood erupt like a geyser from their nostrils.
    “I’m sorry.”
    I know it’s the universal default, but the problem is, one’s first knee-jerk response when someone says “I’m sorry” is to say “It’s okay.” We are programmed from kindergarten, from the first time the inevitable snot-nosed kid knocks over our blocks, to forgive. And it’s not okay, it’s as far from okay as it can really get, but there you are, tricked by a sociolinguistic tic into affirming that it is. Not only that, but now you’ve switched roles, and you’re comforting instead of being comforted, which is fine, you’re sick of people fruitlessly trying to comfort you, you’re a man and you like to take your comfort in private; drinking too much and screaming at the television, punching brick walls, or crying in the shower, where your tears can be obliterated as soon as they emerge. But under no circumstances should you have to stand there and comfort someone else. You’ve just lost your wife, I think it’s safe to say you’ve got your own problems. So after that happens a few times, you train yourself to simply say thank you, and then you just feel ridiculous. Thank you for being sorry. What the hell does that even mean? It’s yet one more evidentiary exhibit of meaninglessness in what has become an almost completely meaningless existence.
    “
How are you doing?”
    Once again, your first impulse is a betrayal. Because your mouth wants to say “fine,” and they’re expecting you to say “fine,” hoping to God you’ll say “fine,” maybe with a sad, weary shrug, but “fine” nonetheless.