“How can we sing a song in a foreign land?”
This extract from Psalm 137 is a cry that most widows would well understand. Most of them feel that they have wandered into a foreign land. Familiar things have disappeared, familiar habits are gone and the familiar partner is no longer there.
As the wife of a travel agent, I did sometimes have to travel alone. I didn’t like it one bit and my husband never looked so good as when he appeared at a destination. Little did I know those anxious moments and loneliness would be a precursor to what things would be like when he was gone.
But people are kind and most understand that for a long while you cannot sing in this foreign land … sometimes you can barely breathe.
Everything has changed … even my language has changed … it is hard to remember to say “I” when I have said “we” for so many years.
Even the TV programming has changed. The sports networks no longer are interesting without the cheering going on from his side of the room. I never got too involved but he set up an atmosphere of excitement and joy by his participation. At that matter I had most of the sports networks removed after he died, then noticed one day that the “Golf Channel”(his favorite) had inadvertently been retained. When I first saw it pop onto the screen I cried. I could almost hear him hollering in the background “what a shot!”
I tried to sing with a group at the seniors’ residence that fall, but all the Remembrance Day songs were love songs and many of them very sad. For a while I couldn’t even sing in the church choir. I just got too emotionally involved in the words.
But things have changed a bit through the last year. I now sing at both places and can handle it … the rest of the adjustments are taking a while longer but slowly the landscape of widowhood is becoming a bit more familiar and I am beginning to sing in this foreign land.
Printed in New Hope, November 2010
