Life After Widowhood
A couple of days ago, I got an e-mail from an old university friend of my wife’s. We’d lost touch over twenty years ago and it cheered me up to get a communication from the past.
But it was this piece that made me laugh and feel that I have a future.
My father remarried at 81 to his 79-year-old widowed girlfriend. They had been neighbours and sweet on each other at school at 18 and 16 and we knew them both on and off when we came on leave from India as kids. So great celebrations, for they were both extrovert and they had 4 happy years talking all the time before they went. He died in 1996 and last year one of the banks in Belfast found an overlooked account, so I bought another oriental carpet to go with the one he gave me for my 21st in Kashmir.
I talked to her on the phone for an hour this morning and it was good to hear a voice from when times were for looking forward, rather than looking back. It also turned out that her parents had been married for fifty years.
So some people do find another life after widowhood.
Fair Treatment of Widows by the Banks
I didn’t have a particularly bad time when my wife died from the banks. But many others do!
I’ve just listened to the influential MP, John McFall, complaining that many widows have difficulty accessing money that will come to them. I didn’t, but the endless sending of death certificates to get information just makes the bereavement process worse.
It’s not just the banks but part of a much larger and very important area.
It is now over nearly two years since my wife died and I can now think rationally about what has happened since. And especially about some of the nauseous paperwork that has arisen! I should also say that I’ve not had it difficult, compared to some stories I have heard.
I was prompted to write to The Times about this and they published my letter on April the sixteenth, 2008, albeit with a few modifications.
Sir, I was widowed last year, and it is only now that I’m starting to get my life together. The response of the various government and local authority departments in handling all the paperwork involved has been very patchy.
Registrars: excellent, very sympathetic and efficient; Work and Pensions: bereavement allowance came through with a few hiccups, but not too difficult; Premium Bonds: system worked but could have been better; council tax: this was reduced automatically on signing a form by St Edmundsbury — totally painless; DVLA: its online systems worked well; winter fuel payment: found difficult to claim and missed it for last year.
The private sector wasn’t that much better, with some companies having people whose sole job appeared to be to deal with bereavement faring much better than those that didn’t. Some wanted death certificates, some accepted faxed copies and others took my word.
We need a lot more joined-up thinking in this important area, as, with nearly a million deaths in the UK every year, it would surely help the bereavement process for those left behind if every company, organisation, government department and authority were automatically notified. After all, if St Edmundsbury can do it here in supposedly sleepy Suffolk, then surely everyone else can.
They left out the piece where I praised The Carphone Warehouse, but severely criticised a large British company, who find it impossible to take my wife off their mailing list. The former showed how it should be done and the latter are a disgrace.
As I said in my letter, my local council met the Gold Standard and the Registrar effectively started the process of adjusting the Council Tax.
In tracing my wife’s credit cards, I ended up talking to a Fraud Manager at a well-known bank. We felt that it should be possible to have an automated system that would flag the cards of those that had died. Apparently, these cards are an area that is aggressively targeted by criminals.
He’d also had problems with some shares that had been held by his late mother. This is a common problem and was noted in some of the replies to my letter in The Times. Luckily, my wife didn’t hold any shares except for a few in a now-floated Building Society.
But I’ve since met several people, whose husbands or wives have died abroad and they’ve had problems with getting bodies home and others where the Death Certificate has been delayed because there was an inquest. If you haven’t got the Death Certificate, then the Banks won’t give you access to the bank accounts!
So I had it easy. But I know now, how I can make things even easier.
Feelings at a Wedding
This was the first wedding I’d been to since my wife died. Or perhaps should I say that it was the first wedding between young people, as I’d been to another involving one of my ex-business partners, who like me had been widowed. That was different, as it showed me a lot of hope for the future. It was also a nice touch, that the groom was having the same best man fifty years later.
But this one was a full wedding, with both a civil and a church ceremony. They do it that way in Holland.
As to the wedding itself, everything went well and except for a few small glitches, it seemed to go smoothly. But then what wedding goes absolutely perfectly. If they did Robert Altman’s film wouldn’t be so funny!
But it was the details that brought me to tears. Just words, but many times in the past at a wedding, my wife and I would smile at each other and repeat our vows and perhaps sometimes joke at some inappropriateness or funny memory. Not that I can seem to remember much of our marriage at all. Perhaps having only a couple of photos or videos doesn’t help. I’ve still got her wedding dress though and perhaps one day, it’ll fit a granddaughter.
Those memories made me sad and I was pleased that I’d hidden away at the back of the church.
Life After Widowhood
This tale from the Daily Mail proves that widows should not be left to their grandchildren, knitting, country dancing and endless coffee mornings.
The widow in the story was younger than I was when she was widowed, but stories of previous partners being part of the relationship is very common. Unfortunately, just as in this tale, children can resent the new husband or wife. But here, it all turned out well in the end.
But then your relationship to the new spouse is not a blood relationship, whereas your children have that to you and your previous partner. So in some strange way, it may be easier for you, than them!
So be careful.
Completing a Widowhood Survey
Yesterday I completed the survey for Lizzie Evans at Liverpool University.
It was fairly painless and therapeutic. So please do the survey!
Black Humour
I have just had a letter addressed to my late wife. I thought it was junk mail, but it was something to do with a system that she used to secure her credit cards.
It had the following on the envelope.
You’re only one step away from total peace of mind – Activate your benefits today!
They ought to be more careful what they put on envelopes.
The Irreverent Widow
I’ve just added a site called The Irreverent Widow to this blog.
Being widowed is a serious business and it needs a bit of humour and a lot of commonsense.
This is a typical comment.
In grief, as in dog walking, one must ask: “Is putting the poop in a plastic bag & tossing it really the wisest way to deal with it?”
Not sure. But we need a lot more robust thinking on death and widowhood.
I shall be reading more.
J In Wales
This is another blog on widowhood.
I liked this post on shearing sheep. What was it W. C. Fields said about children and animals?
Dignitas and the Care Tax
Two stories from yesterday, should be linked together.
We had the tragic tale of Sir Edward and Joan Downes going to Dignitas to commit suicide together, because of her terminal cancer.
We also had the government outlining proposals that when you retire, you’d have to pay £20,000 for compulsory insurance for your long term care.
I should say that I’ve helped care for someone in the last few weeks of their life and when the pain gets too bad to endure, all sorts of thoughts arise. But for me, as there is nothing afterwards, I would never countenance any premature end for myself. But others should be free to choose.
So if Aunt Sally or Uncle Fred have to retire early because of some long term illness, would the family push them off to Switzerland because they don’t want to pay the £20,000?
The Care Tax is insane!
Something needs to be done and people need to be encouraged to provide for their long term care, but anything compulsory needs to be consigned to the bin.
How I Met My Wife
My wife and I were together for forty years before she died in 2007. I say together, as we were effectively living together for a year before we married in 1968.
How we met was unusual, but before I say how, it is worth adding a little bit of interesting history to this note. At the time, along with many of the other students at Liverpool University, I filled in the forms from Operation Match, which was one of the first computer dating agencies.
Two Harvard students — Jeff Tarr and Vaughan Morrill — came up with the idea for Operation Match, a computer dating service, in the mid-1960’s. But they had some help from a Cornell dropout named Douglas Ginsburg.
Did it work? No! I got some names, but I don’t think I ever even met any of them.
In my second year at the University, I shared one of the world’s worst flats with three other students in Princes Avenue in Liverpool 8. Upstairs lived Mike Davidson, who was the Entertainments Secretary of the Students Union. He was trying to get more students to go to Guild Ball and had the idea of running his own Operation Match.
When I heard of this, I asked if I could have first pick!
And that is how I met my wife.
Interestingly, Douglas Ginsburg seems to have dropped in and is now a senior judge in the United States.
The Anonymous Widower 