OMG, Mormon Widows Gone Wild!!?

I have to say, I was shocked to discover that Mormon widows go through a slutty stage.

I mean the church-every-Sunday, garment wearing, sealed in the temple types. The things they get up to, honestly I was clutching my pearls! (And my opera glasses!!)

They engage in heavy petting after playing pickleball, they hike the Y and make out in their

Suburbans with divorcees they met on LDS Singles dot whatever.

They enjoy necking with elder singles they find on facebook recently bereaved widows groups.

Those widowers, they’re a hot commodity. They have no shortage of action. 

I was in Utah right after Matt died, and all of my widow friends were nice Mormon ladies in grief.

And, not gonna lie, in heat. And I love that for them! 

Even though I thought it was kind of funny to hear about their moms-gone-wild-exploits, it made perfect sense to me. They've been married-- they've been sexual grownups for years or decades. And they are not messing around for the sake of it-- they are taking it seriously. They are dating with the intent to marry, for time and eternity, even if that means divorcing their dead husbands in the process. And they throw themselves into this project of dating and trying out and connecting with a kind of heat and focus. All those inhibitions, all that grief, all that loneliness, it synthesizes into dry carbon catching on fire. 

Woo, hot widows! *click here-- NO JUST KIDDING, THIS IS NOT THAT KIND OF SITE--

But the slutty Mormon widow thing, it's kinda true. They go through this intense stage of focused, furious fu-- DATING. 

(Except if your nice sister or cousin is a Mormon widow, I'm sure this doesn't apply to her. Don't worry! I'm sure she's fiiiine, definitely abiding by the For The Strength of the Youth rules! Don’t worry your pretty little head about it!)

Anyway, I was thinking about slutty Mormon widows, and the intensity of their heat-seeking, earlier today in the Redwoods. As one does. On the California coast, the trees are as wide and impressive as cathedrals. Being in those woods made me wish I was an actual artist. Instead I have artist eyes but not artist hands. So I noticed the blue of the trees in the far distance, as if the coastal air was gauze. And the texture, like a zillion brushtrokes, of the leaves in middle distance. And the tremendous striped trunks, stately as titans. Occasional baskets of aerial gardens sling at their flanks, as if they are coming back from market with ferns and ravens. 

The air was oxygen ambrosia. I was drunk on it, huffing the trees. I wish I could paint how it smelled.

It's California, and it's the end of days, and now there's a new season in the Pacific Northwest called Fire Season. There were big black streaks on the redwood trunks. Some of the lower limbs were crispy. Some of the trees were dented with smooth black cradles, as tall as my 9 year old. But on the whole, these giantesses appeared unbothered by their singed ankles. 

My kids and I crawled below one downed redwood, as enormous as a cave, her gnarled toe-roots exposed. When we rubbed the dust off of one rooty knuckle, the wood was lipstick red. Her prone trunk was 20 feet tall and a platform for all kinds of new ferns and trees growing out of her body, and even her own branches, that had been growing one way before she fell, and then kept growing, lurching sideways, from her new place on the ground. 

It was those sunward reaching branches that caught my attention. We topple; we crash. Everything ends for us. But still, the impulse to grow, to remain a tree that grows, to remain a thing that transforms soil and light into sweetness-- that stays the same. 

The first thing my 6 year old said when I told her that her dad died was, "Stop crying. Get another one. A nice one, with a beard."

She was so little, her little brain couldn't hold the fullness of the disaster. Her impulse was to make us all carry on as always-- as quickly as possible, put things back the way they should be! Just, find another one! 

Reach for connection, reach for sunlight. Get a new one, erase the sensation of loss. 

What happens to a redwood that's felled like that, with her roots up in the air? Can new roots wriggle from below her flank, and let the new branches grow from her old body? If life was fair, that's how it should be. The felled tree’s striving for light should be rewarded. She should succeed, regrow. Reach towards photosynthesis again, in a new way!

I'm just saying, ladies. Reaching for connection, there's nothing wrong with that. 

The other thing I remembered as I was thinking about the redwoods and widows and replacing husbands with.... crooked branches, maybe... was the photo I found of my (now ex-) boyfriend Joe. It was weird to be a 39 year old widow dating a 56 year old guy and call him my "boyfriend"-- more like "gentleman caller"? Matt had died two years before we got together. The two had known each other, and Matt always thought Joe was cool, with his cool tattoos and his charisma, and I hoped I had Matt's blessing to pursue this new relationship-- one I hoped could shelter me.

Joe was older than me, with a house and grown-up kids, and a life’s purpose. He had seen some shit, spent time in jail, become a leader in his Native community. I met him and instantly wanted to be close to him, thawing in his sunlight. I felt like a teenager in love-- terrified and excited. 

But there was something off about it, too. I couldn't put my finger on it. It nagged at me-- I couldn't relax around him. I wanted to be close to him, hang onto his wrists, throw my arms around his neck. But there was some discordant note, too. I diminished myself around him, to wait for his attention, and fit into his life. 

I knew I was doing it, but couldn't figure out how to stop. I loved this guy, didn't I? Then why did being around him make me feel so... freaked out? Then I found this old photo of him in his house, in the guest room, from when he was in his 30s. He was on stage, playing his guitar, looking focused.

And looking just like Matt.

A kind of horror came over me. I had never realized it before, but suddenly it was obvious. They were both tall brown guys with long black hair, both kinda grumpy and sarcastic, guitar players and farmers, California boys who bridged Native cultures in some complex and fraught ways. That freaking picture. What was I doing? How mortifying. Was I just a dumb lost dog, following the first guy who came along, looking like my person?

One thing that Joe had that Matt didn't was the ability to intentionally put his finger into a wound, spiritual or psychic, or heck, physical. It was a gift-- part of his medicine. Not a fun gift-- I did not at all enjoy when he unerringly jabbed a hard finger into an infected patch of my brand new tattoo. But he had a gift for sensing where the pain was, sight unseen. Did he fix it? Fuck you, no. But hey, now you know where it is. Fix it yourself. 

Slutty mormon widows, I'm just saying-- look. Go be slutty little photosynthesizers. Everything is uprooted. So go ahead and turn toward familiarity and light, chase the impossibility of keeping everything the same. It won't be-- it can't be. But maybe there's something worthwhile in feeling the pain of difference, feeling the hard knuckle press of the wrong hands in the wound to feel, at last, the loss you can't escape from.