“I had this feeling after Linda passed that there was something missing. Well, that’s dumb, Yes, she was, but that’s not what I mean. I had a feeling that I was not all there, dis-oriented, losing it, not all the pieces in place.”

This is Oscar, seventy-seven, single now for six years. He talked about what he remembered as a part of his first grief, his first feelings of singleness – how the absence of another affected his sense of self, and what he did to, in fact, unlearn feelings that he felt were unhelpful.

“Oh, I knew that my world had been changed in a big way – we all know something about the changes, from watching others and from what friends share with us. And I had heard enough about the grieving process, what Kubler-Ross says about it, and how I was living it, and could check myself off on the list of stages, though I didn’t follow them in a neat order – I don’t think anyone does, do you? But that’s only part of it.  I’m talking about a persistent feeling I had of a weird kind.  Something different.

The feeling came and went; stronger some times than others; sort of like when I remember that I’ve forgotten something important and can’t remember what it was.

But I couldn’t put my finger on what it was that bothered me and I became a bit worried that I didn’t know what to do about it. So, I just made up of an explanation. I just invented something. I do that kind of thing quite often – just invent a starting point and use it to see how it works for solving a problem or organizing something. It’s a bit messy sometimes but it gets me going, off the dead center.

I said to myself, maybe with being married all those years I’ve, sort of, come to see myself as a couple, that’s my picture of myself. After all I’ve been married for forty-seven years defined as much by Linda as myself.  There she was, completing my world, defining me and the way I saw myself. That was my imagined explanation of what was going on and was causing my worry: my picture of me no longer fitted the new reality, and I knew it, and didn’t know what to do.

But with that in mind I said to myself: ‘Paint a new picture.” Funny, No?       picture of myself.

It’s hard to explain. The feeling that there is someone part of your life even though you’re not together at that moment. I felt that way even with Linda, when we were still together, and now that she’s gone – for six years, I still remember that. Even though we were often apart there was always the sense of her, a sense of another. That’s what I decided my subconscious was telling me, that I was still that way, somehow. But the tension came because  at the time, like I said, I had plenty of reality around me to tell me I was a single.

And I think now that when I gave myself an explanation I began to feel better about the whole thing. At one level of talking to myself I said things like, ‘As a single in this group ….’ Or, ‘Now that I’m single again I could….’ Or, ‘Singles at my age are doing this….’ Ignored the ‘married’ or the ‘widower’ bit as much as I could. The new picture gave me starting points and generated great things, some activities I’d not thought about before, and certainly new friendships.

I mean the feeling didn’t bother me so much, wasn’t so mysterious, and it slowly went away. The picture just faded away, and I’ve come to think of myself as single. Sort of Biblical – ‘As a man thinketh. . . .’ In fact, I went to a Meet-Up group of ‘Widows and Widowers’ and felt odd about the name. I’ve come to think of myself as a single more than the coupleness that’s implied in ‘widower.’

In fact, I haven’t thought about it much until now that I’m telling you, with the passage of time, so now, when I talk about that it’s just a memory that I’ve called up for the occasion. Maybe it’s a useful example to share, it’s one way I learned to become single, to slowly lose the old picture, the uncertainty I had, and have a current picture of my self, the ‘now’ me.”