On Widowing, Just In Case

It pays to be prepared, as Inside Catholic lays out. Excerpts:

The last thing I wanted to do on a Saturday morning was discuss my husband’s death with 20 women. Not that he had died; neither had theirs. But, encouraged by him, I signed up for a workshop on what to do if suddenly widowed. Leading this sobering examination was a woman whose fate had been exactly that.

Faced with making responsible decisions and meeting challenges in the throes of unexpected grief, she determined to assemble vital material to ease the path of women who would follow her. The terrible truth is that so many do; the average age of widows in the United States is 56, one-third of women are widowed under the age of 50, and, on average, wives outlive husbands by ten to 15 years.

These are demoralizing data, not to mention the larger issue they suggest, for a demographic including myself: that time has come to put one’s affairs in order. The perception of one’s age seems curiously out of synch with the calendar.

Mindful of this, I instructed my healthy, active spouse that he is not to depart the planet ahead of me. Statistics are persuasive, however, and promises can’t always be kept. So, dragging my heels, off I went to the seminar...