Independent Perspective News - Life does go on, and for many it's surprisingly sweet

By Benedict Carey, Times Staff Writer

Some people follow their spouses right through to the next world, dying mere hours or days after their beloved. It is sometimes suggested that the cause of death was a broken heart.

But while many people view widowhood as the start of a prolonged period of grieving and suffering, socials scientists are finding that, more often than not, just the opposite is true. Men and women who lose a spouse not only survive the loss but usually resume satisfying lives, researchers find.

"You do feel like you're dying yourself, at first," said Helen Kane, 83, of Downey, who lost her husband, Austin, four years ago to cancer. "It kind of comes as a surprise when you don't."

In studies during the last few years, researchers have found that many widows and widowers show no signs of mental anguish or need for counseling. Some recently widowed men and women actually report being more satisfied with their lives than peers whose spouses are alive. And now social scientists are beginning to understand exactly how so many of them discover a renewed sense of self-assurance, after losing their spouses.

"We focused for so long on the negatives of widowhood that we weren't able to acknowledge that there might be something good to say about it," said Deborah Carr, a sociologist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., who presented the new research on life satisfaction at a recent aging conference.

"It is amazing to me that in some cases married women reported lower satisfaction with their lives than those who'd lost a spouse just six months before," Carr said.

The new findings on widowhood spring from an analysis of in-depth interviews with 1,532 Detroit-area seniors conducted in the 1980s and 1990s, as part of a University of Michigan project called Changing Lives of Older Couples, or CLOC. During the investigation, 319 of the participants were widowed. For the first time, researchers had enough information to compare people's lives before and after a spouse's death, rather than relying on memories. Analyzing the interviews and surveys, they find that personality traits and marital relations can help predict one's experience of widowhood, and provide clues to how people manage its aftermath of loss and uncertainty.

For even when it's long expected, after all, the death of a spouse is an emotional earthquake that psychologists rate as one of life's most distressing events. Kane said she was "in real, physical, aching pain for about a year" after her husband died.

When Jim Shoop's wife died seven years ago, his days became "all blackness." As you grow older, said the 80-year-old Downey resident, "you find that your spouse is much closer to you than ever before, when both of you were working and raising kids. You're always together with this person, and then one day they're gone."

About a quarter of the Michigan widows and widowers reported serious depression after their spouses died. But George Bonanno, a psychologist at Columbia University in New York who studies grief and recovery, recently compared the interview responses more closely and found that nearly half of these people were depressed before their spouses died. "Losing a spouse undoubtedly exacerbates the depression in many cases," Bonanno said, "but it didn't cause it in these people."

Among those who did experience depression just after being widowed, Bonanno found high levels of a specific personality trait: an anxious neediness. In surveys taken before their spouses died, these husbands and wives tended to agree with statements such as, "I imagine the worst if a loved one doesn't arrive on time," and "People sometimes don't realize how easily they can hurt me." While such people are in the minority, they tend to be highly sensitive to being betrayed and have a preoccupation or fear of being abandoned, Bonanno said, adding that these people often require counseling.

By far the most common experience of grieving is what psychologists call the resilient pattern, an acceptance of death that gives way to recovery of energy and interest in beginning a new life. Sometimes this process can drag on for a year or more, complicated by squabbles over an estate, or lack thereof. But most often it happens within the first year after the death.

After her husband of 34 years, Judah, died of a viral infection last September, Alice Graubart, 57, a Chicago social worker, had nightmares almost every night. "I was reliving the circumstances of his death a lot — the hospital scenes, the way he looked. It was awful," she said. After three months, however, the anguish finally broke, the nightmares faded and a sense of normality returned. "It's a new normal," she said. "He's not here, but I feel like myself again."

One reason older adults recover more quickly is they've had more life experience, psychiatrists say. By age 60, most have had at least one parent, friend or family member die; they've had scares about high blood pressure, high cholesterol, polyps or cysts and lived through the midlife reckoning with their own mortality. "After a certain age, widowhood is not unexpected, it's almost a developmental milestone of late life, neither surprising nor abnormal," said Dr. Gary Kennedy, past president of the American Assn. for Geriatric Psychiatry. "This is not to say that it can't be devastating. But provided the person had a good marriage, there's a lot to be built upon."

Yet it's doing for oneself that helps people climb out of their misery, according to Carr, the Rutgers sociologist. In a new study of dependence and widowhood based on the Michigan data, Carr found that men who relied on their wives for tasks such as cooking, laundry and housework tend to report high levels of satisfaction when widowed. Some widowers find another woman to help look after them; but others find surprising pleasure in the small chores of daily living once done by their spouses. After coming to terms with the death of his wife, Claire, 14 years ago, Wilbur Yonan, 78, of Long Beach, discovered grocery shopping. "It's something I like to do now. I get a charge out of it, though I'm not sure most widowed men feel that way," said Yonan, who's now remarried.

Women who relied on their husbands for emotional support likewise reported high levels of life satisfaction in widowhood, the research suggests. Many of these women were in stifling relationships to start with, explains Carr, and probably were lacking in self-confidence while married. After losing a spouse, they find strength in simply living and providing for themselves, something they'd thought unimaginable before.

But there's more to the adjustment than simply escaping the manipulations of a demanding spouse. In almost any long marriage, Carr argues, there are parts of our personality that are put on hold or fall into the background of the relationship. "At some level in a long marriage, people forget about an aspect of themselves, something that wasn't fostered by their partner," she said. "In a sense you can lose some private part of yourself in a marriage that can now be rediscovered when you're alone. Sometimes you need a shock to make you see those things, and make a real change in your life."

Helen Kane rarely had to visit the post office, bank or cleaners because her husband took care of those chores during their marriage. "I would think nothing of saying, 'Oh, stop and get stamps', or, 'Go ahead and drop this off at the bank,' and that was that," she said. "I really never made those trips myself." Since he died, she has little choice.

A hospice volunteer who also counsels other widows, Kane said one of the first tests of a newly widowed person's emotional resilience comes in April — tax month. "For people who never had to worry about the finances, it's a very big deal to get that done, because you can't concentrate very well after this person has left you, and it's very hard to close out a year when you've got a death in it."

Over time, the oddest thing for many widows and widowers may be that the initial shock and grief soften, the waves of sadness no longer crash on every anniversary, and what was once such a painful and persistent event drops gradually into the past. It's as if the emotional chemistry has altered, which, psychologists now say, is normal.

For many years, said Columbia University's Bonanno, the common belief among mental health experts was that people who didn't continually grieve after the death of a spouse were unfeeling or in denial about unresolved issues. "But now we can say that this is the how human-beings handle the loss of the most important person in their lives," he said. "They grieve and move on."