Saturday Night Widows

by Becky Aikman

  “What should people who are traumatized do?” I asked.

  I scribbled on my pad as he answered. It used to be that trauma victims were encouraged to talk about the events that had triggered their condition, to get it out of their systems. But now researchers into post-traumatic stress were concluding that talking about trauma, or even thinking about it too much, can reinforce disturbing memories. “When you have the intrusive thoughts, the nightmares, the flashbacks,” he said, “push them aside.”

  “I thought I was supposed to talk it through. Getting it out there was supposed to help me come to terms with all this. That’s why I tried a support group,” I said.

  “Did it help?” he asked, giving me a knowing look. “Support groups aren’t for everybody. Sometimes if there are people in the group who are angry or upset, it can magnify negative emotions for everyone. You can come out angrier, more unhappy, than you went in. It’s good to spend time with people who understand you, but not necessarily good to be forced to discuss something that’s traumatizing you.”

  “Isn’t that what you do for a living? Get people to talk about what’s bothering them? Are you trying to put yourself out of business?”

  He looked more amused than solicitous. “I treat people who need therapy,” he said. “You are grieving normally.”

  I felt a burden lift, the burden of conforming to my sorry stereotype of a proper widow. A small smile appeared on his lips, mirroring mine. “You are not depressed,” he said. “You don’t have it in you.”

  chapter

  SIX

  turns out, I wasn’t such a misfit after all.

  But I didn’t take his word for it. My visit with Dr. Goldenberg gave me the first solid evidence that the script I was following didn’t have to play out like some creaky Victorian melodrama. In fact, when I started reading more about bereavement, I saw that many of our culture’s most misguided notions about it began during that hidebound era, when the widowed forty-two-year-old queen set the standard for acceptable widow behavior, living out the next thirty-nine years of her life in partial seclusion, swathed head-to-toe in black.

  Well, widow this, Victoria, I thought, feeling oh-so-twenty-first-century, when I found myself in a spare white room at Columbia University, punching buttons like a Jeopardy! contestant in front of a computer screen. I had turned up in the university’s Loss, Trauma, and Emotion Lab, epicenter of the latest research, where a team of experimental psychologists was challenging the once-entrenched canons of the field. It was my first step toward assembling my own highly unscientific Saturday night widows’ group. But first I wanted to gather a little highly scientific background information, to base the plan on something more substantial than my own defiant hunch. For three hours, I let a couple of doctoral students monitor my facial expressions; time my reactions to happy, sad, or disturbing photographs; challenge me with subliminal messages about Bernie; and generally mess with my head.

  I had come there to learn more about what science had to say about how people negotiate the difficult waters of grief and renewal, and I liked what I found. These scientists were conducting research based on evidence from real people like me, and they were concluding that most of the assumptions I’d been contending with up to now weren’t true. According to the researchers, losing a loved one is a normal transition in everyone’s life. Always has been. Therefore, most of us, they said, possess emotional resources and natural resilience that help us rejuvenate after such a loss, just as we remake ourselves after other setbacks in life. In fact, the process looks nothing like the long-term, debilitating sadness that many seem to expect. The process can even bring new insight and new joy.

  One of the experiments I performed, for example, was designed to determine whether I could manage my emotions well enough to lead a normal life or whether I had feelings of grief so severe that they interfered with my ability to function. In front of a computer screen, I focused on a series of photographs of people showing a wide range of emotions—fear, happiness, sadness, horror, surprise. After each picture appeared, a dot showed up on the left or right side of the screen, and I pressed a button to show where I had seen it. Apparently, my reaction times could be affected by the emotions I saw in the photographs. Subjects suffering from prolonged, dysfunctional grief are distracted by the sad photos to the point that it interferes with the assigned task.

  What I didn’t find out until later was that the screen was also flashing me messages, too fast for me to perceive consciously but long enough to register. Sometimes, the message might have been Bernie’s name, or sometimes his name coupled with words relating to loss, words like separation or death. People with unresolved grief apparently get thrown by these reminders of the people they’ve lost. People with more functional grief do not, or may sometimes even draw comfort from the names of lost loved ones.

  My head was reeling by the time the man in charge of these inquiries met me in the lab, and it didn’t improve my equilibrium when I saw what he was wearing: an untucked yellow short-sleeve shirt with an acid-trip pattern of random lines. George Bonanno, a spiky-haired professor of psychology at Columbia and the author of many of the most forward-thinking studies on human bereavement and trauma, wasn’t at all what I expected in a grief guru. He offered me a cup of tea as he led me into his office.

  “How did you wind up doing this?” I asked.

  Bonanno’s doctorate in psychology focused on experimental work, but when he was offered a job studying bereavement, he blanched. “I didn’t want to do it,” he said in a light, slightly raspy voice. “It seemed creepy—you know, gross, old people.”

  But the scientist in him was tantalized when he realized that no one had applied the sort of rigorous methodology to normal grief that had been employed in the study of other human behavior. “The bereavement literature was woefully out of date,” he said. “I wondered where they were getting all these ideas from. And the more I looked into it, the more it became clear that there was no evidence for them.”

  As a newcomer to the field, Bonanno had no preconceived notions to overcome, and he quickly concluded that most of the notions that were out there before were plain wrong, the Kübler-Ross five stages chief among them. What Dr. Goldenberg had told me was true. Kübler-Ross had posited her theory based on observations of people who were dying, not people who were grieving, and even she didn’t regard the stages as some sort of rigid, step-by-step program.

  Bonanno and others began to conduct the first painstaking studies of thousands of actual grieving people, following them over time, comparing some of them before and after their losses. Sometimes he’d quiz them while monitoring skin temperatures, breathing, heart rates, facial expressions, fidgeting, or reaction times, as the lab workers did in the experiment with me. He concentrated on people who had lost their spouses and were under age fifty-five, as I was, so he could exclude emotional issues that were unique to aging. His seemingly audacious findings scandalized traditionalists at first, but his scrupulous methodology gradually won them over.

  It was easy to buy into what Bonanno was saying, a consolation, even. What he and others were learning about living with loss sounded familiar: It was just what I’d been going through. And it ran counter to many common cultural assumptions, unsupported by facts, that I’d been buying into, assumptions that had been holding me back.

  First off, he told me, no one experiences grief in rigid stages. Early in the grieving process, people oscillate between sadness and normality, just as I had, and just as Dr. Goldenberg had told me people do. Over time, the swings become less frequent and less extreme. My ability to crack up with laughter in some of the darkest moments wasn’t shameful—it was natural, and helpful, too. Humor, Bonanno said, is one of the strongest predictors of an eventual return to emotional equilibrium.

  Second, there’s the misconception that grief is a paralyzing sadness, a despair so overwhelming that it’s difficult to return to a normal life, sometimes for many years—or forever. It’s what I’d c
ome to call the Queen Victoria syndrome. This misconception, in which grief is regarded as practically a form of mental illness, maybe requiring professional help, is widely held, said Bonanno, but it’s never been subject to systematic study. In fact, he has found, most people cope with losses fine on their own.

  In one large study, about half of widows or widowers showed little evidence of clinical depression six months after losing their spouses, and two-thirds were in the clear after eighteen months. Only sixteen percent of those in the study who were not depressed before became depressed after the loss. Experts have come to use the term complicated grief for the minority of people who suffer an unrelieved yearning that intrudes on everyday coping. For such people, a loss can be shattering, but they are not the norm.

  “Most people are resilient,” Bonanno said. “Almost everybody suffers—you can’t get away from that. But we’re wired to do this suffering naturally. It’s ridiculous to think otherwise. Because losses are inevitable.”

  He poured himself another cup of tea and nestled it in his hands, leaning forward. “Only ten thousand years ago, human beings were nomadic,” he said. “When you’re nomadic, you don’t have months to sit around and mope. The tribe moves on.”

  All the more reason, he said, to reject another long-established theory once embraced by psychologists, psychiatrists, grief counselors, and just about everybody who offered me advice after Bernie died. That theory holds that it’s necessary to dwell on the harsh and painful emotions surrounding a loved one’s demise, disgorging them through repeated talk. Therapists call this grief work, and it can be heavy lifting indeed. Anyone who didn’t perform this chore was considered to be in denial, vulnerable to some sort of booby-trapped delayed reaction years in the future. But new research, Bonanno said, shows that people who are well adjusted shortly after a loss are almost always fine years later. “Delayed grief just doesn’t exist.”

  This is especially true for people who suffer from trauma, a central focus of his research. The standard thinking used to be that it was helpful to “debrief” people after a traumatic experience, to encourage them to review disturbing events by repeating them aloud or writing them down. Had I followed this advice, I would have devoted myself to cataloging The Top Ten Traumatic Moments of Bernie’s illness, straining to recall every detail. In fact, the research shows—and it makes sense when you think about it—that keeping searing or frightening thoughts ever-present can lead into Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows territory and make it even harder to conjure up happier, more sustaining memories. Why obsess about Bernie waking in pain from cancer surgery when I could summon him reading the Sunday paper? The same logic applies to support groups—forced sharing of unpleasant memories with other wretched people can make somebody even more wretched. Good old-fashioned repression, it seems, is underrated.

  I told Bonanno about my support group fiasco, and he grimaced. “God, that sounds awful,” he said. “Support groups that are sadfests are the worst. But that’s not unusual. Because when we witness people who are encouraged to express sadness and anguish, we’re wired to have a comparable emotion.”

  “But the loss of a partner is devastating,” I said.

  “Yes, it’s a powerful experience. It dramatically shifts our perspective on life.” But we are all equipped with emotional tools to make that shift, he said. “Sadness, for example, helps us to turn our attention inward, which we must do to take stock.” And looking sad is a compelling signal to others that we need help, drawing them to our side in a crisis. It was the primary impetus, I suppose, behind all those fruit baskets and the compliments about my butt. Even anger, when appropriate, he added, can be functional, allowing the newly vulnerable to stand up for themselves in shifting social situations. As in, “Hey, stop looking at my ass.”

  Bonanno mentioned another common misconception—the idea that it’s helpful to indulge in a serious, long-term wallow after someone dies. “It is adaptive to spend some time processing your loss,” he said, “but to focus on your grief all the time is harmful.” People who can modulate their emotions, who can suppress their melancholy thoughts for a time in order to go to a movie or perform at work, for example, can return to normality sooner. And while friends will be supportive of sadness for a while, in time, someone who is an unrelieved sad sack will drive supporters away. It’s better to be able to experience some pleasure, even in the worst times.

  So what about me? How was I coping? I was burning to know what he’d learned from my hours in the lab, but Bonanno couldn’t say. The research was designed to draw conclusions about large groups, he told me, not to diagnose individuals. But there was something I wanted to know even more. “What are the principles that help people like me?”

  The good stuff, he said. Flexibility. Humor. Positive experiences. New experiences. Bonds with friends. “When people have lost someone, they want to feel connected to other people,” Bonanno said. “People want to share some kind of experience and adapt with each other.”

  “It sounds to me,” I said, “like this is the bottom line: if you want to help somebody overcome a loss, you should take her out and show her a good time.”

  Bonanno laughed. “Not a bad idea.” Then he said something that stuck with me: “Grief is a process of finding comfort. It doesn’t have to be painful all the time.”

  I’d been reading a lot of the new research before this meeting, using it to cook up my scheme for an unconventional widows’ group. I hadn’t planned to share this quixotic plan with Bonanno. Seriously, what would somebody with a wall of diplomas and a couple million dollars in government grants think of an amateur idea from me, somebody who couldn’t remember the beginning psych course she’d taken in college? But I took a flier and brought it up.

  “It wouldn’t be the least bit scientific,” I said. “It would be the blind leading the blind. Or at least the bereaved leading the bereaved.”

  “Nobody’s ever studied this,” he said, without a hint of academic snobbery. “It’s exciting. If the goal of the group is to sit around complaining, that’s not good. But if it’s to find other ways to share emotion, to build a connection to other people—that could be very positive.”

  BACK ON THE SUBWAY, I considered what I’d learned, itching to bust out into the real world to see if I could put the concepts into practice. I quickly cobbled together a strategy. I would assemble a group of women like myself, women like most of us, as science had now told me, determined to reclaim our lives. We would be guided by equal parts common sense and the principles I now understood for what truly helps those who have become uncoupled: friendship, fun, humor, the flexibility to strike out anew. We’d offer each other the companionship of a traditional support group without the gloom—doing, not talking.

  The first step would be to choose some widows ready to move beyond the sharp pain of early grief. According to what I’d read and heard, most grieving people aren’t ready to think about much aside from themselves for about the first six months, when they’re busy looking inward and taking stock. That’s why most support groups, beginning in the early weeks after a death, turn into the sadfests Bonanno was talking about. I decided to look for women who had been widowed anywhere from six months to two years, ready to leave behind the sadness while craving support for the inevitable changes ahead.

  I wish I could say that my selection process was more methodical, but I’m not kidding when I say that my project was unscientific. Young widows are rare, so I basically asked around, buttonholing people at work, at parties, practically strangers on the street. I met Tara first, through a real estate agent who had been showing her possible houses to buy. Marcia turned up through a widow who led formal support groups—Marcia had asked if she had heard of any for younger women. Colleagues from work referred me to Dawn and Denise. “You’ll like her,” said the woman who knew Dawn. “She’s a force of nature.” A friend of a friend who ran a travel company told me about Lesley, who had gone on a recent trip to India. My sample was more slapdash
even than random. But given the women’s various backgrounds, I decided, it added up to a kind of Everywoman, although one who’d had some lousy luck.

  Along the way, I encountered one widow I decided not to invite. Melissa’s problems seemed too tricky for the rest of us, her state too perilous for amateurs like me. When I went to meet her, she picked me up in her car at the train station in her town, and I felt unsettled as soon as I slid into the front seat. There was a photograph of her husband taped to the center of the steering wheel, where she could see it as she drove.

  “How long has your husband been gone?” I asked cautiously.

  “Four years,” she said. She was only forty-nine, a mother of three, but still she had a dull-eyed, fixed expression of sorrow, a sign of the complicated grief that I had heard about at the lab.

  As we entered her home, a banner over the door said, Welcome Home Daddy. Inside her kitchen, nearly every surface—walls, refrigerator door, ceiling beams—displayed more photos of her husband, and Melissa walked me through them. “This was before he was diagnosed,” she said. “This one was after the chemo. See? He put on weight.”

  Bonanno had warned me that an extraordinary number of photos of the deceased could indicate an inability to adapt, but this shook me nevertheless. Worst of all, no matter what I asked Melissa about herself, her past, or her plans, she turned the conversation back to the day her husband died, in all its piercing detail. Not surprisingly, most of her friends had fallen away.

  “At first there were triggers that would send me into a vortex, and I couldn’t get out for hours,” she said. “Now I can get myself out. But I still get enormous physical pangs.”

  She said she was seeing a therapist for help. I had no clue how to cope with her, not that she seemed to want me to. She seemed barely to register that I was there. Meeting her was a warning to me not to take grief lightly. It had the power to destroy.