Group Eases Loneliness of Widows : Anger and Pain of a Husband’s Death Is Difficult to Face

Ruth Laska remembers the first New Year’s Eve party she attended after her husband died. At midnight, she hid in the bathroom to avoid the painful sight of kissing couples.

“Holidays,” the Studio City widow said, “are just crushing. Every one used to be a big thing for us. Now I wonder how I get through each one.”

Martha Sklar, 45, a Los Angeles widow, remembers feeling angry at friends who didn’t think to ask about her plans for her first Thanksgiving after her husband died 11 years ago. “I wanted them to do a kind of checking,” she said. “I don’t need it now, but I sure did eight or 10 years ago.”

Sunday afternoon, midway between the Hanukkah and Christmas celebrations they dread, these women and about 75 other guests will gather for an anniversary that holds no painful memories.

The anniversary celebration of the Center for the Widowed that Laska and others helped to found 10 years ago will include a catered dinner, speeches by center founders, a keynote address by Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, and live music from the ‘40s and ‘50s.

As usual, many widows will arrive alone at the Robert J. Green Contact Center in West Los Angeles, and most will go home to empty houses. But for a few hours, they will savor the company of the only people on earth they believe truly understand them.

A Special Group

“Widows are a group unto themselves,” said Laska, who still cries for her husband 12 years after his death. “Unless you have been in the position yourself you cannot know what it is like. Widowhood is a totally different type of pain because the only person we can get angry at we cannot vent our anger on . . . we are angry at our husbands for leaving us.”

Although the group is open to men, most of the participants are women, and they have much in common. Together they dread weekends and car repairs, and wonder with each other when all this pain will end. They share the names of reliable financial consultants and handymen, and exchange doubts about whether married friends really want their company, or just feel sorry for them.

In large measure, the Center for the Widowed owes its conception to Laska. Two years after her husband and mother died within two months of each other, Laska was still too depressed to get out of bed some mornings. She sought therapy with Culver City psychologist Albert Ross. It helped, she said.

“Ruth (Laska) told me about an article she had come across about a widow’s center in New York. It struck me as an idea whose time had come,” said Ross, whose mother outlived her husband by 30 years, but who, according to her son “died not one psychic increment closer to adjusting than she was on the day he died.”

A Very Basic Idea

“It’s a mental health principal that the more traumatic an event, the more beneficial it is for people to be with other people who have been through it,” the psychologist continued. “Veterans have discovered that, crime victims have, and now widows.”

Ross, a member of Temple Isaiah, which operates the Robert J. Green Contact Center, took the idea to Chuck Hurewitz, temple president. He liked it.

A few weeks later, Laska and others found themselves passing out questionnaires at a well-attended first meeting they had called at the Contact Center. What did the widows need, the questionnaire asked. Job help? Legal assistance? Financial assistance?

Overwhelmingly, the widows voted to establish support groups, where they could talk about their hurt and anger, and be assured of sympathetic listeners. Five professional therapists volunteered to moderate the group’s sessions, and the Center for the Widowed began. As far as the organizers know, it was the first such organization exclusively for the widowed in the Los Angeles area.

Since then, many communities have started similar programs. UCLA’s Self-Help Referral Center lists 14 in Los Angeles County. Officials from the Center for the Widowed said that in some cases their organization has served as a prototype.

Over the years, about 700 widows and widowers have participated in the support groups, and thousands have attended monthly Sunday afternoon information meetings which feature outside speakers, said Janet Witkin, center director from 1975 until 1983.

Cruise directors, retirement planners, physicians and others have given Sunday talks at the Center for the Widowed.

After the meetings there is cake, coffee and companionship. “The company, that’s what many of them really come for,” said Rabbi Aliza Berk, 33, center director.

The center is less in the limelight today than it was 10 years ago, former director Witkin said. “There was a time when we were on talk shows and radio shows, and had lots of newspaper coverage, but widowhood is not a popular subject . . . it takes a lot of energy to sustain that.”

Perhaps partly as a result of the declining publicity, membership has dwindled. In the beginning, five support groups met at a time. Now, there is only one.

“In the ‘70s it was go and talk about what’s going on with you,” Witkin said. “It’s not the tenor of the ‘80s so much.”

“It’s a difficult kind of organization to sustain because when widows get better, they re-enter (the mainstream).”

The Center for the Widowed also sponsors a Widowed to Widowed Hotline.

Sunday through Friday, between 7 and 10:30 p.m., an answering service patches calls through to the homes of hot line volunteers, who are trained to give a little advice, and do a lot of listening. The hotline number is (213) 479-8007.

“We never interrupt until they ask a question,” said Marlye Wolfson, a 71-year-old statistician and a hotline volunteer. “These women don’t feel that they can call their kids every time they feel like crying because no matter how good their kids are, eventually they start (saying) it’s time to get on with life.”

Sunday meetings and support-group sessions are held at the Contact Center adjacent to Temple Isiah, and temple member Fred Vollmer’s $6,000 annual contribution to the center provides most of its operating budget.

From the beginning, the organization has been a nonsectarian community service.

Participants pay $10 per year to join the center, which entitles them to attend the Sunday lectures, and an extra $10 if they want to belong to a support group.

The support group meets once a week for eight weeks with Berk, who has a master’s degree in marriage and family counseling. At the end of the term, most groups continue meeting on their own.

Berk talks to support group members about three stages of widowhood (initial shock, grief and anger, and eventual recovery), she helps members assess where they are emotionally and she tries to help them find new resources to help fill the gap left by their spouses.

Most of all, she reassures them that their symptoms, which can include everything from sleeplessness to physical pain, are normal, that they are not “going crazy.”

Berk, who has never been a widow, emphasizes that the real benefit of the support group results from widows and widowers airing their grief with others who are going through the same thing.

“There is a basic frustration with a group like this,” she said. “They all want to have all their sadness disappear, to have all their pain go away magically. It’s a process. They need to recognize that the pain won’t ever go away completely, but it will subside.”

Overall, widows who go to work seem to fare better than those who stay home, she said. And those who have not suffered other catastrophic losses in their life tend to recover more quickly than those who have.

Although the center was started for the benefit of widows, a year or two after it began, widowers were also invited to join.

Not many have. “That’s always the question in these groups,” Berk said. “Where are all the men?”

Census data indicates that in Los Angeles County, as elsewhere, widows outnumber widowers by a large margin. In 1980, there were 343,520 widows in the county, and 66,062 widowers, or more than five widows for every widower.

Of the 33 people who have participated in the eight-week support groups since Berk became director eight months ago, six have been widowers.

At Sunday afternoon sessions, the ratio is even more lopsided.

“When I see 60 people at a meeting, and only four men, I know we’ve really got a problem,” said Hy Weiser, a former widower and center volunteer. Like many widowers, Weiser has remarried, but he and his wife, Goldie, a former widow, have remained active in the center.

“Most (widowers) already have a lady friend,” he said. “They’re not as alone as the women are. If you’re a man you can go to a bar rather than be alone, or you can go to a dance and find nice ladies,” he said.