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    Fresh Widows: a Conversation
    Fresh Widows: a Conversation
    Fresh Widows: a Conversation
    Ebook84 pages86 hours

    Fresh Widows: a Conversation

    By Sue Bastian

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    Reviews and Praise

    Two women discover the healing power of friendship while writing their way through an intense range of emotions the first year after the death of their husbands. Their engaging flow of conversation is like a call-and-response musical dialogue, first dirge, then elegy, then the voices of life returning.

    KIRKUS REVIEWS FRESH WIDOWS

    An exchange of letters and emails between two widows in the year following the loss of their husbands. Introduced by a mutual friend shortly after their husbands’ deaths, Bastian and Metzger find solace in the friendship they develop through their epistolary exchange. The authors’ connection is not simply based upon the commonality of their losses but also because they are able to be vulnerable and brutally honest with one another as they struggle to come to terms with their grief. There is no pretense or agenda behind this memoir, just a mournful call-and-response in which each woman shares her newfound difficulties in navigating the world alone. Simple acts like attending dinner parties and booking trips have suddenly become jarring reminders of what they have lost. The authors are bright, humble and courageous as they expose their innermost thoughts and feelings on dealing with pain, loneliness and survival. Their words will resonate with a range of readers, whether they have lost a spouse or another loved one. The writing eloquently captures the vital importance of human connection, most poignantly demonstrated when recounting a poem ago about “the longing for the ordinary touching that I miss so much, the kind that happens in the kitchen when your husband needs you to move a bit away from the sink so he can get in and fill the water glasses for dinner—just that little nudge on the hip that moves you over, that utter familiarity.” The authors are both so honest with themselves and one another that readers will be challenged to do the same.
    A beautifully written memoir so raw, naked and vulnerable, it almost feels like readers were never meant to get their hands on it.

    "The nimble and intelligent prose of Fresh Widows drew me in from the first line. I read it through to the last page in one unbroken spell."
    - Nancy Peel, Writer, Barbados

    "There is no right way to grieve. Mary and Sue witness to this truth in their Fresh Widows conversation. It is a powerful read."
    - Lauren Miller, best-selling author of Hearing His Whisper, Colorado

    "Fresh Widows takes the reader on a mesmerizing journey that is sad, witty, unsettling, yet filled with hope. This book should be read not only by widows and widowers, but by everyone."
    - Bruce M. Forester, MD FACP Psychiatrist and Mystery Writer, NYC

    "Fresh Widows resonated with me who never buried a husband. I was reminded of feelings following my divorce...the attempt to keep something precious alive...the loneliness...the having to rethink my identity...the having to learn to survive on my own."
    - Lena Rotenberg, Teacher, Washington DC

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSue Bastian
    Release dateJul 10, 2011
    ISBN9780578042046
    Fresh Widows: a Conversation

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      Book preview

      Fresh Widows - Sue Bastian

      PREFACE – Jane Hart

      When I introduced Mary and Sue, it was with some trepidation. My mother, who had been widowed early, would have hated being teamed up with another woman who was suffering the same horrible fate. The last thing I wanted to do was add to their distress. Still, I couldn’t help feeling that Mary and Sue had much in common besides the obvious fact that they had just lost their husbands. They are both super-intelligent, droll, irreverent, blonde, WASP women who live in the same town, work with computers, and have children who are Dartmouth College alumni. And they are both friends I care deeply about.

      I decided to risk it. The rest is history!

      This book provides a compelling road map for the journey that no woman is ever really prepared for. But while my mother—and so many of her generation— often suffered in isolation, Mary and Sue discovered that friendship could be an incredible resource. Indeed, these two women created something bigger than the sum of their two wonderful parts, so to speak: something big and real and strong enough to help them both not only to make sense of their pain, but also to find real hope for the future.

      Sue and Mary, I love and salute you both—and I hope that everybody reads your extraordinary book.

      INTRODUCTION - Sue and Mary

      Fresh Widows: A Conversation shows what it feels like to be stalked by grief and how the adventure of coming to know a new and trusted friend can give purpose to a lonely day and signal hope for tomorrow. That is what happened to us.

      During those first dark days we read and read and read. But the books we found did not help with the sleepless nights and they did not erase the longing for a return visit. Sharing grief with our adult children was not one of our choices and neither of us played golf or bridge. So we began to talk and then to write. We had begun our own private Writing From the Heart Club. We never stopped. What we hid from our families we revealed to each other and to ourselves. A flurry of letters and emails at all hours of the day and night moved back and forth, piled up, and eventually became the book that you are now holding.

      We chose the title Fresh Widows because it was ambiguous enough to signify the rawness of our experience, our sometimes cheeky take on things, and our perspective of writing within the situation while we were going through it. In a more indirect way, it suggested, at least to us, the time-honored therapy of strong feisty women holding one another together through the hardest of times.

      Yet, Fresh Widows is not a self-help book. Neither is it a tale of woe. If we have any advice, it comes from what helped us. Find a friend to talk to from the heart or write alone in response to the themes nearest to you— Fear, Loneliness, Doing it All Yourself — whatever is most on your mind. Just write and talk the way we did when we discovered how good it feels to speak the truth.

      MEETING MARY - Sue

      They say that when a woman loses her husband she doesn’t smile inside for a year. They tell you about stages of grief. This is the second stage … this is the third. The next one is easier, they say. And yet not one of the eighty-eight books in the Barnes & Noble self-help section says, Go find a new friend; go on a journey of discovery with someone who doesn’t know you. Go find a soul mate and you will get well.

      Old friends are a consolation, the best comfort. A new man is forbidden—unthinkable even. But a new friend brings the wonder of revelations large and small.

      We both like fried-egg sandwiches.

      We both love Patsy Cline.

      We both do the same kind of work.

      We both lost our husbands.

      We don’t have to explain everything.

      I have a self for tomorrow. I have a new friend.

      Her name is Mary.

      I have someone to make happy again.

      MEETING SUE - Mary

      The first time we met we ate bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches in my kitchen. Sue was a stranger to me. Our mutual friend, Jane, wanted us to meet, and she gave me Sue’s number. I called, not knowing that her husband had died a week before mine, onth ago. I only knew that I was a widow and had time to make the call, and that Jane is a pretty good judge of people.

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