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bereft, mourning 51 Some Kind of Widow Bonnie Lovell After my divorce, I often traveled to Mexico. At the border, on the tourist card’s marital-status box, I never checked “Divorciada.” I always checked “Soltera”—single. Once, an immigration officer, filling out the form for me, misunderstood and checked “Viuda”—widow. He smiled sympathetically. I didn’t try to explain. It would be easier if I were a widow, I thought. I had never wanted to be divorced, even after I knew it was inevitable. I imagined saying, “I’m a widow.” But I wasn’t a widow; I was a divorcée, divorced, divorciada. And now that my ex-husband has died, my second thought—after Make it not true!—was I’m a widow. I remembered a scene. Where had I heard it? “Seinfeld”? Somebody—Elaine?—was ranting about a divorced acquaintance who was going around after her ex-husband died calling herself a widow. Elaine was enraged. “She’s not a widow!” And I’m not really a widow. There’s no word for what I am, no box to check to describe the nuances of my marital status, the limbo to which Jim’s death condemned me: Once married, now divorced, with a dead ex-husband . Some kind of widow. Just as no word exists to describe what I am, no one knows how to react when I say my ex-husband died. A quick, “Oh, I’m sorry,” followed by a pause, a frown of concern and rapid change of subject. Yet I am in mourning. I need someone to listen to me wail, keen, curse the unfairness of fate. I need for my grief to be heard. It’s true: we divorced. But, once, we loved each other; we were happy. We hated each other; we were miserable. We loved and hated each other, often in the same hour or minute. Sometimes, I confess, I wished he would die. Death would be so much simpler than divorce, I thought. But when he did leave me, briefly, before our final breakup, and drove to L.A., I couldn’t sleep for fear he’d meet a bad end, wreck the car, die. I didn’t want him to die. 52 the widows’ handbook And now, long divorced, I counted on his friendship. I wanted him there, reliable, safe, at the other end of the line for our comfortable chats. I wanted always to hear his familiar voice, his chuckle. But now he’s dead. While Jim was alive, even though there was no chance we would remarry, the book wasn’t closed. As long as he was alive, I could cling to the irrational belief that our story might turn out differently. I wanted a happy ending. Now time has run out. We will never have another chance to make it right; there’s no other possible ending: We married. We divorced. He died. I will never have a lifelong marriage. So I’m mourning not just my ex-husband’s death but also the death of our marriage and the hopes and dreams embroidered around it. When I help scatter Jim’s ashes in the East Texas Piney Woods, I will finally let go of all that—of my youth, of lost dreams, of our past. The wind will do its work and carry them all away. ...

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