International Gay & Lesbian Review

Gay Widowers: Life After the Death of a Partner

• Nonfiction
• Publisher: Haworth Press
• Publication Date: 1997

This is a truly sobering, moving book even for those of us who have been in the trenches fighting the good fight for the last 18 years or more! I remember how, shortly after my partner Tom died after an eleven year battle with AIDS, I desperately sought help that addressed the issues that gay men face at the death of a partner. Issues quite different than those faced by straights. Issues not quite like those facing a man just coming out of his closet. Issues that continue to be as perplexing now to me as they were in my grief. Those issues embraced the mundane [going grocery shopping alone] to the more existential [when to accept or make that first date and what should one expect or not expect.] Each chapter is written by an individual who has lost a partner, predominately from AIDS but not necessarily so. Thus, each chapter offers a unique point of view and a canopy of voices that range the gamut from rage, anger, fear, numbing sorrow, determination, fond remembrance, hope. All depending upon where the author is in his own process. Thus, each essay offers an individual a road map through one's own experience of grief; what one might expect and what one might not expect. While not a self-help book per se, the individual stories allow the reader to quietly contemplate the implications underlying a particular story and to reach one's own decision on how to handle not only the issue of grief itself but the overarching issue of how to go on living. For that is the ultimate question each individual faces and wrestles with and eventually comes to terms with. I especially found the essays by Winston Wilde, Michael Shernoff, and the interview of Don Bachardy to be exceptionally perceptive and, indeed, inspirational! Wilde's anger, Shernoff's cool, detached analysis, and Bachardy's upbeat measure of remembrance all underlined the many aspects of my myriad feelings when I read this excellent book. Buy it! Read it! Tell friends about it. Keep it on your book shelf. I still dip into the book in those quiet late night or early morning hours when I remember what has been and what has gone before!

commenting closed for this article