The Other Widow

What is the term to describe a woman who has divorced her husband if in the intervening years he remarried, but tragically died? 

 
I wasn't his wife at the time of his demise, but I had been his wife, and I felt great sorrow that such a brilliant mind and driven spirit had gone so soon. We were still connected bu the greater bonds of humanity. But I had no comfortable role to assume. I wasn't a widow, even if I felt like a widow.
The news that my former husband had died worked quickly through the grapevine of friends and friends of friends and relatives. He had mourners on both coasts, the East where he had come from and the West where he had been living. I expected us to gather in groups for comfort and support. I had not expected a phone call from his widow--the actual widow.

I had to admire the courage she mustered to call me, although I had no bad feelings towards either of them. The bottom line was that my former husband had left some very specific intructions for his final rites, and for some reason these included me. He wanted cremation, and then to have his cremains split between the two coasts. The first half was scattered in a beachside ceremony near Santa Monica, California. And then his instructions got tricky.

Because of a rift that had never been healed and of understanding that was never attained, my former husband was completely alienated from his family, with the exception of an aunt and some cousins. To his parents, he'd already been dead for years. Essentially, whatever would be done in Pennsylvania would be up to the friends he had here.

More to the point, my former husband had appointed ME to orchestrate his final rites and officiate at the scattering. I told his wife I didn't understand why he'd wanted me and not her. But her pressing concern was whether I would be willing to take on the burden.

I'm only going to get one first husband. Of course I agreed.

His wife arrived at Philadelphia International Airport with a simple white urn in tow. Maybe that moment of meeting would have been difficult for other people, but we fell into each other's arms like long parted sisters. Then she began to meet his Pennsylvania friends, doing all they could to help her and give her comfort. She wasn't in what she knew as home, but she was home with us all the same.
I read over some of his documents. Specifically, he wanted his cremains scattered to the four winds at Wind Gap, a natural deciduous paradise where he had spent much time cycling and pondering. I organized to get everybody I could up to Wind Gap on that Sunday.

A written script would not have pleased him, so my eulogy was a collection of stories that brough out the humor, the love for life, the brilliance that were all his. We shared our anecdotes, laughing and crying and remembering. I asked that everyone (if the wanted) would take a handful of cremains and throw them into the valley in front of us. There would be no marker, no tombstone. The memory would live on in all of us.

"You're as much a widow as I am," his wife said, sniffling. "You were in his heart longer, and you are with him in death."

"But he is in your heart for as long as you keep him there," I said. "Death politely gives way for love on occasion."

So, did I get a title out of this experience? Old Widow? Former Marriage Widow? Co-widow?

No. I got a more important designation--friend. We're two women bound by our care for the same man. We've both lost him, and a light has gone out in the world. Now neither of us are any kind of wifely relation to him, and so we can begin again.