The first widower I dated introduced me to his wife. She was six feet under.
“Barbara, this is Jan,” he said, as we stood at her tombstone. “She’s come to take care of me now.”
I gulped. I had been dating this sweet man — I’ll call him Stan — for five months, long enough to know he sometimes cried himself to sleep. He had been married to Barbara for 40 years and been without her for seven.
Time does not heal all wounds, I know. For most of us, though, time numbs the raw agony. Not so for Stan. His desperate, codependent need for caretaking smothered me.
