My father’s favorite canned advice, whenever he found me floundering in my academics (which was often) – was “Why don’t you just be a golfer. Women can make good money that way.” I’d no interest in golfing, nor had I ever played. Every time he said it, I would look up at him, but he was always looking somewhere else. At the gridlock traffic in front of him. At the underside of the lawnmower whose blade had dulled from hitting too many rocks. The advice felt like a phrase he was repeating, something he’d heard from a context that had nothing to do with me.
Anyway I went another way and became the wife of a man who saw limitless potential in our children – and in me. Over our 24-year marriage, I would become all sorts of things: I became a mother of three. I earned three college degrees. I became a reader and devoured composition texts and literary novels like Stephen King’s Memoir of the Craft on Writing, Richter’s The Critical Tradition, and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. I became a journalist for newspapers and magazines, a writer of blogs and fiction, and an English lecturer teaching college and university students how to craft arguments, design technical documents, and communicate ideas through the wielding of rhetorical strategies.
My husband, JD, was there at every moment. He would catch me in a puddle of defeat every now and again and sit down beside me, hand me a glass of wine, ask me about the weather. That was his way of saying, you okay? I remember telling him once that I might quit my grad program, that I felt like my peers were intellectually superior, that maybe I should have become a golfer, instead.
He chuckled, “Who ever told you golfing was easy?” Then I laughed, the revelation catching me off guard.
He was quiet for a minute, and then he said, “God never leads you to a cliff for the sake of plummeting to your death. He shows up. He shows up when we pray like hell for answers.” When I looked up at him, he was looking right at me with his big blue eyes.
I smiled, and then a sense of dread came over me. “What if I led myself to this cliff?”
He chuckled again. “You think you got this far without God’s guidance?” He asked, already knowing the answer.
I thought about that conversation a lot after he died, and I was standing at the cliff of Grief.
His grandmother, Mary (introduced to me as Gram) was 100% Hungarian. She taught me how to make dishes like cabbage and noodles, sucked the marrow out of turkey bones on Thanksgiving, and said things like – “When you make a baby with a woman, you stay with the woman!” I loved her audacity, her survival instinct, her realist stance on life.
She’s the reason JD and I stuck it out during the tough moments that marriages always have, and for that I am eternally grateful. Young marriages need a tough Hungarian woman in the background, threatening matriarchal guidance. It’s good for the soul.
She called JD and I “asshole buddies” on account that we were always cracking up laughing over an inside joke, behaving like a couple of ornery idiots. I miss that woman, but I’m sure she is sharing her own inside jokes, being ornery with JD in Heaven these days.
In the last five years of grieving, I’ve stood on the edges of a hundred cliffs. I’ve lived in three different states, worked jobs for the sake of health insurance, and driven across the country twice chasing kids, grandkids, and a teaching career that seems to both torture and soothe my spirit. The next few months of life will bring me to the edge of another cliff, the result of department budget cuts at work.
I am running scenarios, working my budget, applying for jobs everywhere, running backup plans, moving – again. I am tired. I want to grow roots. I want to settle down and find a place to call home, but the sun is setting on that idea, at least in Southern Maryland. The situation is forcing me to pray more, work harder, refuse luxuries, cut out people and things that could distract me from navigating the edge of this cliff. I’m trying to figure out how to either climb down into the gorge, cross the river, then climb up and out – or build a bridge. Somehow I need to get to the other side.
I miss the man who walked beside me all those years sharing inside jokes and causing mischief with me. I miss his chuckles, which so often lent revelatory perspectives that shifted my entire way of viewing life. I miss Gram’s tenaciousness and her no-nonsense advice that kept everyone centered on family, and I’m doing my best to channel their voices.
I can hear Jay echoing his “pray like hell” philosophy as my career rides a wave of national transition – the result of political impact on education budgets, the impact of AI on English departments. Gram’s voice is there too, telling me to buck up and stay the course. I just need God to show up now, maybe bring some rappelling rope.
About Sonney Wolfe
Sonney Wolfe is a writer, educator, mother, nona (grandma), and widow. She holds a Master of Arts in English, teaches academic and professional writing for the University of Maryland, and writes features, press releases, blog posts, and personal essays for various news and social media.
Widowed in December of 2019, she soon joined the masses in COVID lockdowns, which deepened her understanding of grief as she witnessed widespread loss, especially among students. Now, she integrates grief support in her college classrooms by addressing pandemic disruptions, community loss, and mental health challenges. Her autobiographical teaching philosophy, born from her own grief journey, provides a platform to share her experiences and support students who have also lost loved ones.
In her professional writing, she sheds light on the human experience of loss and grief, particularly for widows. She explores the complex societal shift they face, transitioning from wives to widows and often single parents. This sudden change forces widows to navigate not only grief, but also a landslide of challenges: income loss, economic strain, relocation, career shifts, altered healthcare needs, and declining mental health.
Her Blog WIM Dispatches (Woman in Motion), https://sonneywolfe.com, chronicles her personal grief journey and advocates for the needs of widows, along with her IG: @WIM_Dispatches – and Facebook page: WIM Dispatches Life After Jay.