Re: Lenny’s Column, “A Sunday Funeral”

Editor,

Recently Lenny Ackerman authored a Mess column addressing loss and adjusting to the deaths that unfortunately increase over time as we age. I too have faced that experience in that I have a few years on Mr. Ackerman, his graduate school being law and mine being thanatology. So far my husband and two of our sons have predeceased me. Being ancient is definitely not easy but it does convey more learning as learning and living seem to be paired. I thought the recent column a very powerful one, meaningful and welcome especially since death is so strong a taboo in our society. Awareness begs such treatment, in my opinion, thought and discussion rather than avoidance.

With the hope that Mr. Ackerman will accept this addition to the subject, I thought I would add a point that I have observed as a major block for navigating loss for many widows and widowers, that of living alone for perhaps the first time in their lives. In my case, we had been married for 57 years after the wedding reception staged in my family’s back yard. That was common back then, from your parental house immediately to living with your spouse,with certain expected societal roles accepted and lived.

If couples fell into many of those dedicated “jobs” it meant that they had little experience or practice, if any, at those done by their spouse. I have met widows who had to learn how to drive and then to get a driver’s license for the first time, to write their first check and widowers who had little idea how to shop let alone to cook or run the vacuum. Add those or similar challenges to the loss and the result can well be overwhelming.

Especially if their marriage has been long and good, the survivor is very apt to remarry or cohabitate within a year or two since unable to live alone. Quite a few will simply stop living within that same time frame one way or another. Unfortunately the offspring of the remarried are apt to go into orbit at the remarriage believing it disloyal to their deceased parent with their protests constituting additional distress for everyone involved. Of course, once into their eighties, the odds favor the men to find a companion since there remains only one man to every eight women.

So you see, it ain’t easy, navigating through the days we ancients have left. The literature says we are not as much afraid of dying as we are of how we will die. ‘Where’ for me got some thought. I had planned on dying on the Downieville tennis court after having won a hard fought point. Now I have targeted the golf course here which is just across the way from the eleven tennis courts by my pad. In the meantime, my family is plotting a birthday party for my 90th, a gathering that I’ve labeled- “Awake for my Wake.”

Mary P. Johnsen, M.A.

Death Educator/Therapist, ret

Fairfield