“I feel lonely because I miss the company of a man that will be good to me but I don’t miss my late husband. I am not happy that he died but I am happy with where I am, now.
“I am a university graduate, yet I felt lost and miserable due to the kind of marital experience that my late husband gave me.
He married me when I was barely out of my teenage years but never made me feel wanted or loved. We have children. And he lived away from us due to the nature of his job.
I marvel when I visit women whose husbands show affection and compassion because my husband would see me struggling with a filled cylinder of gas up the stairs and pass me by.
What I know is that he put food sufficiently on the table.
We have a decent roof over our heads but he never showed me affection.
My husband never gave me money for one day to shop for myself!
Whatever personal belongings I owned were from casual jobs I did here and there when I could.
At a point, I embraced the church to soothe my pains. Because I felt unloved.
It would seem the experience worsened my matter because I stopped making any efforts to brush up my look as a woman and began to copy the ‘’born again’’ looks of the women in that church.
I wanted something that would distract me from my marital pains.
My pain came from wishing my husband would make me feel loved…just a little.
It wasn’t because I suspected he was into other women.
He didn’t look the type to me because even when we were still having children, all he did (during sex) was climb on top of me, ejaculate, and climb down.
He never touched my body lovingly or complimented me for one day.
Whatever loveliness there is about my body, I am just hearing it from the outside.
What I wasn’t prepared for was the SHOCK that awaited me after his death.
He slumped (at work) and was rushed to the hospital…where he was pronounced ‘’dead on arrival’’. He was in his fifties.
When the time came for me to go bring down his belongings from the city. And I got there.
It was like I was in the space of a stranger.
What shocked me most was the various sex enhancement products, which he was ordering from Asia…including the one that promises that ‘’he will just kill the woman in bed with his hardness.’’
My husband was into all these, yet he carried the Bible at home!
Do you know the most shocking of my discoveries in his space?
Learning that he lived with another woman over there!
I am dark-skinned but the one he lived with over there is very light-skinned.
After all I saw over there, I sat down and began to cry.
I cried over the wasted years of my life, especially going into a marriage that made me feel lost very early in life.
What I did before I left was to go for an HIV test.
I am happy that he was using a condom at least but the sex energy I felt in his space made me subject myself to that test, just to be sure that I am not carrying around what I am not aware of.
It’s been about three years since his death and what I can say is that I love this new me. And where I am today.
The only reason the death of my husband hurts is because the children lost their father, his parents lost a child and his siblings lost a brother. It is me who is incapable of feeling that I lost a husband.
What I miss is that deep connection with a man, where feelings are genuine and vulnerabilities are handled with empathy and not abused.
If given the choice to have him come back to life, I would prefer God gives him to another woman.’’
From Oby…
A lot of widows will not admit this openly but take it from me, it is not every widow who is drowning in the river of sorrow over the death of her husband. Some of them feel liberated.
It is when the memories are fond that you would have something to cherish when a spouse is no more but if it was a loveless experience with them, their death does not leave you sorrowful.
The heart only thinks fondly of people who gave it good memories.
Death will not make you a good spouse if you are not good to your spouse while alive.
Credit: Chukwuneta Oby