There were many tributes paid to the Jersey aid worker Simon Boas when he died of throat cancer in July, aged 47. In writing and speaking about his terminal diagnosis with courage and humour, he was admired on the island and beyond. My mother-in-law, having spent years working with aid charities, lives on Jersey and knew Simon well.
So I listened with interest earlier this month to an item about him on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. The host, Emma Barnett, had spoken to Simon days before he died. Now she was about to interview his widow. Or, as she referred to Aurelie Boas, ‘his wife’.
As editorial mistakes go, this may not seem especially grievous. It is certainly common. The Daily Telegraph fell into the same semantic trap with its headline: ‘The late Simon Boas garnered attention for his stoic, cheerful perspective on dying. His wife reflects on life without him.’
Yet there is more than pedantry at stake here. When a spouse dies, their marriage dies with them. A wife becomes a widow, a husband a widower. That may sound legalistic, even callous. But, as someone widowed in 2018, I think these apparently trivial slip-ups reveal something profound. They are stepping stones along a path that ultimately leads us towards the de facto abolition of widowhood.
Ignorance about death is growing. Conversations about it can be awkward, especially with the young. In 2021, a youthful civil servant rang me and asked to speak to my wife. I explained that she was dead and not to worry – I wasn’t offended. He then kept referring to my ‘ex-wife’ and sounded genuinely baffled when I suggested that he meant my ‘late wife’.
When vocabularies shrink, the words left behind may be too imprecise to faithfully describe the world around us. Language not only mirrors behaviours, it shapes them. When we retain the words ‘wife’ and ‘husband’ beyond the point where they can be accurately used, we are refusing to face up to facts. Worse, we may be delaying the process of moving on.
Of course, not everyone who loses a spouse or partner wants to put their loss behind them. I was lucky that my late wife, before she died, urged me to re-marry. But imagine a world in which I had been unable to draw a distinction between my status as a ‘husband’ or ‘widower’ with such clarity. For one thing my six children (in whom my late wife lives on) might have found it harder to accept a stepmother. If Daddy still has a ‘wife’, how do they feel about him meeting someone else?
Grief, far from being as natural as any other phase in our lives, is viewed almost as a kind of mental illness
This may sound abstract, but I suspect it springs from our growing distaste for traditional rituals of mourning, with their emphasis on exactitude. When our nearest and dearest dies, who wants a gloomy funeral? Let’s act as if nothing irrevocably sorrowful really happened. Leave the body at that hospital, David Bowie-style, and throw a party. Let’s pretend death hasn’t changed this man from a husband into something else.
The subtle effect is to sap widowhood of its power. Already, the zeitgeist suggests the bereaved are not fully in control of their faculties. Grief, far from being as natural as any other phase in our lives (a point Simon Boas put well in his book A Beginner’s Guide To Dying), is sometimes now viewed almost as a kind of mental illness. To die with serenity, aware of what’s coming and content with one’s fate, is to be ever-so-slightly doolally. Which is why journalists often insist that someone has ‘lost their battle’ against cancer, even though it was a battle they never fought nor expected to win.
The abolition of widowhood is not just a linguistic evolution. To be widowed requires being married in the first place. Fewer weddings mean fewer bereaved spouses. But when someone insists, from ignorance not malice, that I am a ‘husband’ not a widower, or that my dead wife is my ‘ex-wife’ because they know no better, the effect is the same. Widowhood is reduced to just another form of separation, even though neither party wanted to separate.
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