Debbie Weiss - Available As Is: A Midlife Widows Search for Love

A Midlife WidowsSearch For Love

Debbie Weiss

Copyright 2022, Debbie Weiss

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Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America

Print ISBN: 978-1-64742-237-0E-ISBN: 978-1-64742-238-7Library of Congress Control Number: 2022906627

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Excerpt from Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman, copyright 1994. Reprinted by permission of Da Capo Lifelong Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

For my father

In loving memory of George Hansen(July 29, 1959April 10, 2013)

Its four in the morning, and Im putting together my profile for JDate, the self-proclaimed largest Jewish dating community worldwide. My husband, George, died fourteen months ago. George was my high school sweetheart, the strong man I curled up next to each night for thirty-two years.

Now that George is gone, I dont know who I am anymore. Ive lost the me that I was when I was married, but Ive got to come up with something to tell strange men.

This is what I put on my dating profile:

Im a former attorney currently writing a book and gardening when I get writers block. I am fun, witty and outgoing but occasionally shy, irreverent but kind, poised but occasionally awkward, with a wry sense of humor. I can talk about almost anything and am (not so secretly anymore) an eighties freak.

Im always hearing about online scams. So best to put right up front that Im a lawyer, never mind that I havent practiced in eleven years. Saying Im a lawyer will probably turn off some people because lawyers are widely regarded as jerks.

I know I was a jerk when I was a practicing lawyer. Now that I dont work anymore, my days are pretty mellow: walking a nearby trail, taking a yoga class, writing in my journal, and planting a few nandina shrubs in my garden.

I still talk to George. During this mornings walk on the tree-lined trail that runs through town, I was overcome by the different shades of green, shimmering and verdant, pierced with red bottlebrush and orange poppies. Afterward, in my garden, the arcing sprigs of my new plants with their neat oval leaves seemed so fragile.

George, Im sending them love, hoping theyll take to their new home, hoping that somehow my love will reach you as well. Maybe things look more intensely beautiful, because even in a world without you, I still want to live.

Of course, I dont put any of that in my profile. I dont want potential dates to know I still chat with my late husband. At least I no longer expect him to answer back. And thats progress. I know Im alone and it terrifies me, but Id better leave that out too.

I worry Ill sound terribly retro as I search for a man in an age when so many women have chosen to be single. And having spent over ten years working with male lawyers, I can see why.

The profile questionnaire looms.

I try to imagine the prospect of having sex with a new man. Failing that, I try to visualize going out with him for a nice dinner. Failing that, I go to the kitchen to get a dark chocolate truffle.

Me:50 years old (a terrible age to be newly single), 59, athletic build, green eyes, red hair (originally brunette, but I have a great colorist, and deeply insecure).

Location:Danville, CA.

Danville is an overpriced suburb forty minutes southeast of San Francisco. But in 1970 when I first met George at his parents pool party, it was all walnut trees and rolling hills dotted with ranch houses, just like Walnut Creek, where George lived ten minutes away.

My dad and his mom worked together as nuclear physicists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Our moms cooked and decorated their homes out of Sunset, a lifestyle magazine offering the best of the West, which seemed to involve miniature cactus gardens and dips made with mayonnaise and those tiny precooked shrimp. Georges first words to me were Do you want to see my model train set?

He was the cutest boy Id ever seen, slender with olive skin, a pile of black curls, and huge brown eyes. But he was an older boy, eleven to my seven. Worse, my mom had just cut my bangs too short, and I felt like a fat-faced elf in my navy bikini with the dorky white piping. Tongue-tied, I followed George into the den, aware that he too was wearing only black nylon trunks. I could smell the chlorine on his skin as we stood next to each other, embarrassed when our hands touched as he showed me how the engine car worked.

I thought about him long after Id gone home.

My past relationships:My relationship was my life.

I might as well say I wish Id died along with him. Delete and try again. I roll over and plop my iPad on the untouched pillow next to mine.

My relationship, singular, was great while it lasted.

George was a software developer, the technical lead on Quicken, Intuits personal finance program. An engineers engineer, he wanted to be only with me and his computer. I wanted to be only with him and my books. Both of us were introverted only children who never grew up.

We lived in our own little world of two, watching the same noir films over and overThe Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleepseeing new camera angles each time. We tracked down rare record albumsa Talking Heads EP on red vinyl, a foreign pressing of Joy Division on blue.

At least every other Saturday, George drove us to San Francisco to find obscure records and DVDs to add to his collection. We made complicated recipes that needed weird ingredients, like monkfish liver or five different kinds of chili peppers, eating whatever he wanted in our two-person universe.

When he wasnt working or cooking, he was doing projects like the home theater system that dominated our living room and that, since he was a perfectionist, he never finished. When people asked why we didnt have kids, we always said, Were having too much fun being kids. That, and our living room was an unsafe mass of wires.

I dont believe that everything happens for a reason (one of the worst things to say to a widow, by the way, as if my husbands death were necessary to forestall a plague of frogs). There was no reason for George to die of cancer at the age of fifty-three. He was a truly great guy, loved by his colleagues.

When he died, they wrote me letters about the many engineers hed mentored, his uncanny bug-fixing abilities, and his adherence to his motto, If you can dream it, I can build it. But mostly they told me how happy and upbeat he was to be around, even after his diagnosis, always ready to do anything from dreaming up new features to helping move office furniture.