What Do I Do Now?

Learning how to live a fulfilling life after the loss of a partner.

Sheila Weinstein, writer and pianist, reinvented her life after the death of her husband of 50 years, which led to her book, Moving to the Center of the Bed. See full bio

August 18, 2009, Resilience

Freedom can be a scary thing!

The joys of freedom are often tempered with sadness.

Woodstock has been in the media a great deal of late. Forty years after the historic concert at Max Yasgur's farm in Bethel, NY we are treated to lots of pictures of the event and the attendees. I wasn't one of them, but I know that many of you reading this may very well have been at the concert and have a scrapbook of pictorial memories of your own. It was all about freedom...freedom to be who you were, protest injustices, turn on, tune in and drop out. In 1969 I didn't do any of those things. I was 32 years old, the wife of a very busy ophthalmologist and the mother of three young children. Freedom was not part of my vocabulary. Did I think about it? Yes, A lot... as I looked at my college degree in my bathroom when I changed diapers.

Forty years after Woodstock, those attendees are past middle age and into the stage of life about which I have first-hand knowledge...a stage of life that brings with it, besides the wisdom of age, the perils and diseases of the same. Boomers are now faced with losing loved ones and trying to figure out how to go on without them. Some of them email me through my website: www.centerofthebed.com and talk about the shock of discovering that... first of all, they are ‘no longer young,' and then about how life has handed them hardships in the form of spouses with dementia, spouses who died of cancer or other diseases...and they have to figure out how to live again. The irony of that happenstance is that once again the word ‘freedom' enters their vocabulary.

Two years after my husband's diagnosis he entered a dementia facility. We had been together for 44 years and suddenly, ironically, I had the freedom to choose what the rest of my life would look like. Formidable, flabbergasting, fascinating ...freedom. A daunting prospect at the age of 64 when I thought my husband and I would be reaping the rewards of our lives well lived together. Now I was free to choose whether to stay in the muck of depression and despair, wishing things were other than they were, or to put myself squarely in the center of my own life...to say goodbye to the old and create something new. As it turned out: a life alone.

I started gently. Next time I'll tell you what I did first. Something so simple and yet so profoundly meaningful. Stay tuned.

Please send me more of your questions and comments. It helps me to zero in on what matters to you about learning to live a life alone.

See: Moving to the Center of the Bed: The Artful Creation of a Life Alone