It's a very different category of loss, I have no doubt, to mourn a child rather than a spouse — when my first husband died, I lived in a house he'd built, filled largely with furniture he'd built or acquired and sculptures he'd made, had to take over the small business he'd created, and had to maintain his small collection of vintage British sports cars. For a time it was comforting, and then, to be brutally honest, it was suffocating. I realized I faced a choice of either creating space for a life of my own — which entailed a years-long, complicated process of divesting — or subsuming my identity into a sort of living museum for my dead husband. As guilty as I felt for not choosing the living museum option, it felt like another death to me: my own. Like I said, losing a husband in midlife is very different from losing a young-adult child.
It's a very different category of loss, I have no doubt, to mourn a child rather than a spouse — when my first husband died, I lived in a house he'd built, filled largely with furniture he'd built or acquired and sculptures he'd made, had to take over the small business he'd created, and had to maintain his small collection of vintage British sports cars. For a time it was comforting, and then, to be brutally honest, it was suffocating. I realized I faced a choice of either creating space for a life of my own — which entailed a years-long, complicated process of divesting — or subsuming my identity into a sort of living museum for my dead husband. As guilty as I felt for not choosing the living museum option, it felt like another death to me: my own. Like I said, losing a husband in midlife is very different from losing a young-adult child.