March 31, 2019

The widow as heroine

Read Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8
For everything, there is a season and a season for every matter under Heaven: a time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to break down and a time to build up; a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek and a time to lose; a time to keep and a time to cast away; a time to rend and a time to sew; a time to keep silence and a time to speak; a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.

The annual UMW women’s retreat is a remarkable gathering of women of all ages. I have not been able to attend for several years, but I carry with me the lessons I’ve gleaned from each year I have attended.

2013 was the last time I was at the retreat. Of the 22 women who attended the women's retreat that year, seven were widows. You know all of them because they are at church almost every Sunday. They are the helpers, the faithful ones whom we all count on in so many ways.

They have confronted the hardest moment in any woman’s life, the loss of a beloved.

They don’t know it, but I have watched them closely since that retreat. These women are living a life they did not choose. Although this was not their choice, they have embraced life with an energy and confidence that inspires me. I marvel at their dignity, at their grace. I marvel at their faith.

During the retreat, I confessed to one of them that, as I looked toward retirement, I was wondering who I would be when I stop being a writer and an editor. What identity would I have when I no longer have a professional persona that had identified me for 40+ years?

She said she understood. When she stopped being someone's mother and then someone's wife, who was she?

She said she learned that she had a whole lifetime of experience, that she had had many more experiences than being just a wife and mother. I could choose to be whomever I wanted to be. I could discard some of the experiences. I could decide that they would not be part of who I would be going forward, she said.

You can do the same thing, she told me. You get to choose what kind of life you want to live. You get to choose what kind of person you want to be. You get to make that choice every day.

I know that the change in my life is nothing compared to the change in her life. I will get to choose the time when I make changes. That’s not a choice that she and the others had.

I am profoundly grateful to be in the company of so many women who have the courage to live new lives as the old ones they loved fade away. They are my heroines. Every. Day.

Joan Richardson