Staying Fit
Veteran Newsday reporter Becky Aikman got kicked out of her widows' support group. After losing Bernard Lefkowitz, her husband of 20 years, to a rare cancer at age 65 in 2004, the 49-year-old Aikman went looking for "constructive, helpful advice about moving forward in my life."
To her dismay, the leader of the support group she joined had a different idea: "He felt we should all sit around and focus on how sad we were." When Aikman demurred, the leader cut her loose: "Maybe you just don't fit in. Maybe you shouldn't come back."
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"I was a wife without a husband," recalls Aikman, "and now I was a widow without a widows' support group."
So Aikman formed a six-woman group of her own — the Outlaw Widows, she called them — and convened them one Saturday a month to compare notes. They also undertook fun adventures designed to help them overcome loss: a spa visit, a cooking class, a museum tour, some lingerie shopping, even a trip to Morocco. How each woman fared in a year of get-togethers is detailed in Aikman's new memoir, Saturday Night Widows: The Adventures of Six Friends Remaking Their Lives.
Q: I was struck by the differing causes of the group's losses.
A: Yes — one husband in our group had died from an ATV accident. Another dropped dead [in his wife's presence] from a sudden heart attack. A third had committed suicide; his wife was the one to find him, and she chose to do the book because she wants others to recognize that depression is an illness like any other.