I Became a Widow at 39. I’m Never Dating Again

Which may explain why my friends picture a date, and I picture onboarding.

Where did you grow up? Do you have siblings? Are you close to your family? Do you cook? Do you ski?

I understand that intimacy depends on learning these things. I once loved knowing them.

We had been blissful newlyweds for seven months when my husband started getting dizzy. The vertigo kept happening. Eventually he had a brain MRI. It showed a massive tumor.

I was nine months pregnant. We would walk into the hospital to see his brain surgeon, and people would take one look at my enormous belly and assume we were there because I was in labor.

Freydkin and her husband share smiles, including at their 2010 wedding in Austin, Texas (bottom right).

Courtesy Donna Freydkin. Wedding photo: Derick Rhodes.

The whole thing was surreal enough that we somehow convinced ourselves we could beat it. Glioblastoma has no cure, but we behaved as though a combination of doctors, medicine and willpower would return us to the life we had been living.

The retirement accounts he had encouraged me to set up for some far-off old age suddenly became urgent because we were being forced to plan for a future he would not live to see.

Our son was born. I was working, raising a baby and becoming my husband’s primary caregiver.

This is the part I still have trouble putting into polite language.

He withered away. Steroids changed his body. The disease stripped his independence away. He became nearly incontinent. The man who had spent our life together making things work now needed me to do things for him.

I wish I could say I handled it with grace. I was angry. I yelled. I cried. I raged at what was happening to us. Again and again, I heard myself saying, “I can’t believe this is my life.”

The anger was aimed at the tumor, the scans, the chemo, the radiation and the debilitating back pain that came as the cancer spread. My husband was the person standing closest to me, so he heard it.

During one of his lucid moments, he told me he had married me because I was spiky and had a temper. He loved that about me, he said. He had never expected me to turn into a nurse.

That, too, was marriage. He knew exactly who I was, even when I was at my worst.

He lived for 15 months after his diagnosis. I took care of him until he died. I would have cared for him for as long as he needed me. I wish I had been given the chance.

So I became a widow at 39.

I came away knowing what promising to join your life to another person’s can ask of you. I have no desire to make that promise again.

For years after my husband died, my life was organized around raising our son. Now he is getting older, and I can see a different life coming.

I am scared of it. I am also curious about it.

For the first time in decades, I may get to discover who I am when I am not someone’s wife or someone’s mother. I do not need a partner to answer that question for me.

This is where my friends and I keep missing each other. They hear “alone” and imagine absence. I hear it and imagine space for my work, my friends, my interests and a self I have not had much time to know.

So when my friends tell me we need to get cracking on my dating profile, I will tell them the truth: We don’t.

AARP essays share a point of view in the author’s voice, drawn from expertise or experience, and do not necessarily reflect the views of AARP.​ ​