Chabad Widowhood Quotes

I guess 'joint' would imply two people had ownership, which, thanks Life, is simply no longer the case. ~ Ann Benjamin

Being a rock widow is not my job, so I would hire people to do it for me. ~ Courtney Love

Widowhood conferred a mystery and status divorce lacked. The difference between returning World War II and Vietnam veterans. Both had been through a war, but a judgmental public conferred glory only on those who had been victimized in a socially acceptable manner. ~ Nevada Barr

In the first year of my grief, there were times when I felt like hiding my personal story of loss and other times when I wanted to wear a sign on my body that read "Be nice to me, I'm grieving," or "Don't tick me off; I've already got the world on my shoulders," or maybe even "BEWARE - don't upset the widow!" I needed a variety of signs that I could switch out depending on my daily mood. ~ Elizabeth Berrien

You evidently feel that brevity is the soul of widowhood. ~ Hector Hugh Munro

What armies and how much of war I have seen, what thousands of marching troops, what fields of slain, what prisons, what hospitals, what ruins, what cities in ashes, what hunger and nakedness, what orphanages, what widowhood, what wrongs and what vengeance. ~ Clara Barton

In this way unwittingly the Widow-to-Be is assuring her husband's death - his doom. Even as she believes she is behaving intelligently - "shrewdly" and "reasonably" - she is taking him to a teeming petri dish of lethal bacteria where within a week he will succumb to a virulent staph infection - a "hospital" infection acquired in the course of his treatment for pneumonia. Even as she is fantasizing that he will be home for dinner she is assuring that he will never return home. How unwitting, all Widows-to-Be who imagine that they are doing the right thing, in innocence and ignorance! ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Classical Sanskrit prose writers made very long sentences like this: "Lost in the forest and in thought, bent upon death and at the root of a tree, fallen upon calamity and her nurse's bosom, parted from her husband and happiness, burnt with the fierce sunshine and the woes of widowhood, her mouth closed with silence as well as by her hand, held fast by her companions as well as by grief, I saw her with her kindred and her graces all gone, her ears and her soul left bare, her ornaments and her aims abandoned, her bracelets and her hopes broken, her companions and the needle-like grass-spears clinging round her feet, her eyes and her beloved fixed within her bosom, her sighs and her hair long, her limbs and her merits exhausted, her aged attendants and her streams of tears falling down at her feet...." and it goes on. ~ Abraham Eraly

The final lesson of learning to be independent - widowhood ... is the hardest lesson of all. ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Brainwashing, thought Mrs. Pollifax contemptuously, and suddenly realized that she was not afraid. She had endured other crises without losing her dignity
births, widowhood, illnesses
and she was experienced enough to know now that everything worthwhile took time and loneliness, perhaps even one's death as well. ~ Dorothy Gilman

A widow is a fascinating being with the flavor of maturity, the spice of experience, the piquancy of novelty, the tang of practiced coquetry, and the halo of one man's approval. ~ Helen Rowland

Chabad is very important because without Jewish education, Diaspora Jewry would disappear. ~ Harry Triguboff

As if auditioning for widowhood, Sloane Wolfmann strolled in from poolside wearing black spiked-heeled sandals, a headband with a sheer black veil, and a black bikini of negligible size and made of the same material as the veil. ~ Thomas Pynchon

There are many women whose lives would be immeasurably improved by widowhood, but one should not always point that out. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

[Hermogenes] despises God's law in his painting, maintains repeated marriages [almost certainly a reference to remarrying after divorce or perhaps even widowhood, which Tertullian, who became a Montanist, opposed], alleges the law of God in defense of lust [likely same reference], and yet despises it in respect of his art. ~ Tertullian

If we would be pure, if we would save Hinduism, we must rid ourselves of this poison of enforced widowhood. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Widowhood provided Mama with a higher form of being. In refusing to recover from my father's death she had discovered that her life was endowed with a seriousness her years in the kitchen had denied her. She remained devoted to this seriousness for thirty years. She never tired of it, never grew bored or restless in its company, found new ways to keep alive the interest it deserved and had so undeniably earned. ~ Vivian Gornick

I don't believe in divorce. I believe in widowhood. ~ Carolyn Green

I've done you a disservice," he said at last. "It's only fair to let you know, but you won't have a normal life span."
I bit my lip. "Have you come to take my soul, then?"
"I told you that's not my jurisdiction. But you're not going to die soon. In fact, you won't die for a long time, far longer than I initially thought, I'm afraid. Nor will you age normally."
"Because I took your qi?"
He inclined his head. "I should have stopped you sooner."
I thought of the empty years that stretched ahead of me, years of solitude long after everyone I loved had died. Though I might have children or grandchildren. But perhaps they might comment on my strange youthfulness and shun me as unnatural. Whisper of sorcery, like those Javanese women who inserted gold needles in their faces and ate children. In the Chinese tradition, nothing was better than dying old and full of years, a treasure in the bosom of one's family. To outlive descendants and endure a long span of widowhood could hardly be construed as lucky. Tears filled my eyes, and for some reason this seemed to agitate Er Lang, for he turned away. In profile, he was even more handsome, if that was possible, though I was quite sure he was aware of it.
"It isn't necessarily a good thing, but you'll see all of the next century, and I think it will be an interesting one."
"That's what Tian Bai said," I said bitterly. "How long will I outlive him?"
"Long enough," he said. Then more gently, "You may ha ~ Yangsze Choo

Widowhood had done nothing to curb my smart mouth. So much for diplomacy. ~ Esther Williams

What changes when a woman marries? What does a woman lose and what does she gain? For Abishag, marrying king David gave her instant status. As a wife, impugning Abishag's character meant a swift death. As a wife, she inspired fear.
What changes when a woman is widowed? For Abishag, it meant foreign women came to Jerusalem to marry Solomon
and she was relegated to that of a spectator. In Abishag's widowhood, none feared her.
pg 17 ~ Michael Ben Zehabe

Musing thus, she set out upon on her widowhood, and became altogether as good a widow as she had been a wife. ~ Marilynne Robinson

His mother had always been a headstrong woman, and with her grayish-white mane and unsmiling face, she appeared as regal and intimidating as she had ever been. Still, seeing her through other people's eyes, Hanfeng realized that all that made her who she was - the decades of solitude in her widowhood, her coldness to the prying eyes of people who tried to mask their nosiness with friendliness, and her faith in the notion of living one's own life without having to go out of one's way for other people - could be deemed pointless and laughable. Perhaps the same could be said of any living creature: a caterpillar chewing on a leaf, unaware of the beak of an approaching bird; an egret mesmerized by its reflection in a pond, as if it were the master of the universe; or Hanfeng's own folly of repeating the same pattern of hope and heartbreak, hoping despite heartbreak. ~ Yiyun Li

God spoke through the prophet Isaiah and said in Isaiah 54:4-10 (NLT)

4 "Fear not; you will no longer live in shame.
Don't be afraid; there is no more disgrace for you.
You will no longer remember the shame of your youth
and the sorrows of widowhood.
5 For your Creator will be your husband;
the Lord of Heaven's Armies is his name!
He is your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel,
the God of all the earth.
6 For the Lord has called you back from your grief -
as though you were a young wife abandoned by her husband,"
says your God.
7 "For a brief moment I abandoned you,
but with great compassion I will take you back.
8 In a burst of anger I turned my face away for a little while.
But with everlasting love I will have compassion on you,"
says the Lord, your Redeemer.

9 "Just as I swore in the time of Noah
that I would never again let a flood cover the earth,
so now I swear
that I will never again be angry and punish you.
10 For the mountains may move
and the hills disappear,
but even then my faithful love for you will remain.
My covenant of blessing will never be broken,"
says the Lord, who has mercy on you. ~ Anonymous

This determination to manage - to cope - to do as much unassisted as possible - is the Widow's prerogative. You might argue that it's a sign of her wish to appear to be - which is not the same as being - self-sufficient; or you might argue that it is a symptom of her derangement. But then, in the early minutes/hours/days of Widowhood - what is not, if examined closely, a symptom of derangement? ~ Joyce Carol Oates

I think first of the children. What the hell am I supposed to tell them? Then I think about money, the house, all those things no widow will tell you ever crossed her mind. ~ Shannon Celebi

And by the way, Lanwa, you must stop preaching the sermon of our people's old custom and tradition. This your long story of kinsman and cousin and half-brother connection with my late husband cannot catch me like a deer in a snare! I reserve the right to choose the type of life I want to lead. It could be that of woman deliberately aloof in self-contentment, untouched by the victimisation and oppression of the man; or that of a woman sulking the anger of an injury, protesting humiliations heaped on her, over the years by the man. I may choose to shield off man, permanently in my life, and transfer all affection and devotion to my children, spoiling them every minute with motherly love and care. I may deliberately engage in twenty different odd jobs, from cockcrow to cockroost, not resting and not sparing any moment to talk to men, or even look at any man's face. Not your business Lanwa, how I want to live my life! ~ Bayo Adebowale

As a traditional Jew, I have benefited personally from the hospitality of Chabad Hasidim on many occasions, and I marvel at how many Jews Chabad has brought back to their primordial home. ~ David Novak

You're not a virgin and you didn't get divorced, but suddenly there's this thing you can start doing again with someone who is not your husband. ~ Ann Benjamin

The first stage of widowhood is paperwork. ~ Adriana Trigiani

No, what numbed these fields, peopled with bad dreams was not the oppressive grip of a plague but rather an ailing retreat, a sort of sad widowhood. Man had started to subdue these vacant expanses, then had grown weary of eating into it, and now even the desire to preserve what had been claimed had perished. He had established everywhere an ebb, a sorrowful withdrawal. His cuttings into the forest, which were seen at long intervals, had lost their hard edges, their distinct notches: now a thick brushwood had driven its sabbath into the broad daylight of the glades, hiding the naked trunks as high as their lowest branches. ~ Julien Gracq

What kind of wife would I be if I left your father simply because he was dead? ~ Jess Walter

Like the long gone captains of the Confederacy, he stood watch at the edge of Dauphin Island, his old life just out of sight across the water. What he felt in those moments, pelicans skimming the chop, tankers lugging cargo to ports unknown, was not loneliness or loss, as you might expect, nor the weight of tragedy but its opposite, pure lightness, the hole left inside him by Suzette's death as big and hollow as a zeppelin and just as buoyant, as if the shape of her absence might lift him up and carrying him away. ~ Michael Knight

There is nothing on earth so easy as to forget, if a person chooses to set about it. I'm sure I have as much forgot your poor, dear uncle, as if he had never existed; and I thought it my duty to do so. ~ Richard Brinsley Sheridan

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Not fitting is it that the Elder Children of Ilúvatar should wed the Younger; nor is it wise, for they are brief, and soon pass, to leave us in widowhood while the world lasts. Neither will fate suffer it, unless it be once or twice only, for some high cause of doom that we do not perceive. But this man is not Beren, even if he be both as fair and as brave. A doom lies on him; a dark doom. Enter not into it! And if you will, your love shall betray you to bitterness and death. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

When the moon, after covering herself with darkness as in sorrow, at last throws off the garments of her widowhood, she does not at once expose herself impudently to the public gaze; but for a time remains veiled in a transparent cloud, till she gradually acquires courage to endure the looks and admiration of beholders. ~ Augustus William Hare

people who had neglected my acquaintance during my widowhood. Widows were skeletons at the feast, dampening everyone else's pleasure, ~ Deanna Raybourn

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

She did not belong to the healthy group of widows and widowers who, after mourning, would nurture the seed of their grief into growing from loss - perhaps continuing the dreams of the lost, or learning to cherish alone the things they'd cherished together.

She belonged instead to the sad lot who clung to grief, who nurtured it by never moving beyond it. They'd shelter it deep inside where the years padded it in saudade layers like some malignant pearl. ~ Darrell Drake

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You never hear widows voice the sentiment, but I could stave off companionship indefinitely. Sex, not so much. ~ Abby Fabiaschi

The best possible outcome of marriage was a wealthy, childless widowhood. ~ Jennifer Egan