I am a Widow — by Randy Schaefer Chapman
I fought. I searched for the best doctors, the best treatments, the best chances. I learned the language of survival before I ever wanted to know it. We were lucky, he lived. Not just lived but thrived. We were given twenty-six years of cancer free, that felt like stolen time, sacred and ordinary all at once. And then, without mercy or warning, it returned. e same enemy. e same fear. Only this time, we both knew what it meant. is time there were new protocols to ght his cancer. And ght it we did, still loving, still laughing, fully aware of how precious our time together had become. Perhaps it made our marriage stronger. ere was no room for pettiness or wasted moments. What mattered was clear. What didn’t fell away. I made sure there were family gatherings, moments where he could sit back and simply be. So, he could enjoy his children from another lifetime, see the people he helped shape, and quietly take pride in all he had accomplished. I wanted him surrounded by evidence that his life mattered; that it had been full, meaningful, and deeply loved. ere were trips to exotic places, friendship formed along the way, and albums lled with photographs meant to prove how full our life was. We celebrated o en. We gathered people. We marked time with memories. My world revolved around keeping my husband healthy and happy. He stopped working at sixty. I kept pushing my career forward, believing that someday we would nally slow down and enjoy the life we had built together. But just as that moment seemed within reach, a business associate created an unthinkable situation, one that stopped me cold
I am a WIDOW
e dictionary reduces it to a denition: a woman who has lost her spouse during a marriage and has not remarried. A single word meant to explain an entire life split in two. e Bible goes further. It calls a widow a woman whose husband has died, o en le vulnerable economically precarious, socially isolated stripped of her primary provider and protector. As if the loss can be measured in money, safety and standing. But neither denition captures the quiet devastation. Neither explains what it feels like to wake up every day in a life that no longer ts, carrying a title you never asked for, one that arrived the same moment everything else was taken.
I am a WIDOW
I now check a box on paperwork that asks if I am married, divorced, single or widowed. A small square that holds the weight of a lifetime. Every time I mark it, I am reminded that my soul mate of forty-four years is no longer here for the moments that made our life ours-the laughing and the crying, the shared silence, the sunrise beginnings and the sunset endings we once took for granted. at box doesn’t ask about love. It doesn’t ask about history. It doesn’t ask how a heart survives when half of it is suddenly gone. My husband was diagnosed with cancer at y. I was thirty-four and I was told to get everything in order. As if love could be led, sorted and prepared for an ending. I refused to accept. I was determined not to become a young widow.
38 Coastal Pearl Living - INSPIRE
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