Why Do We Seem So Afraid Of The Word “Widow”?

In an article for British Vogue, Siri writes, "O​​n 30 April 2024, my husband, Paul Auster, died, and I became a widow, a creature whose existence has long been defined by the non-existence of her male spouse. Derived from the Old English widewe, the word has roots in Sanskrit’s vidhua – to be empty or separated. I’m empty of and separated from a person I love. The cruel paradox of bereavement turns on time: grief is a wrenching form of unrequited love in the present, not the past. I’m in love with a ghost.

Not long after Paul died, an acquaintance on the street in Brooklyn offered me her condolences. I thanked her and said, “I’m a widow.” She said, “No, no, no.” Annoyed at her denial of what I regarded as a statement of fact, I said, “Of course I am. I’m a widow. That’s what it’s called.”

I recounted this exchange in the memoir I was writing at the time, Ghost Stories, a book about Paul’s illness with lung cancer, his harrowing treatments, his death, my grief, but also the years we spent together. I wonder in the book if, like “death”, “widow” has become a word people avoid. In the US, no one dies anymore. They pass. Is the euphemism meant to hide the corpse, a thing that must be burned, buried or embalmed before it putrefies and decays?

After I finished the book, I attended a dinner with nine other women, not all of whom I knew personally, but the guest list included feminist writers I admire. I referred to myself as a widow and was greeted by nervous laughter. I asked why they rejected the word? No one seemed to know exactly why, but I gleaned that they found the term antiquated. Not one of them thought it should apply to me. Was it because, for my fellow feminists, the word summons a pathetic being still tied to a dead man?

I Googled: “Has ‘widow’ become an offensive word in Western popular culture?” and discovered that “widow” teeters on the threshold between a term of objective description and one that stigmatises. Words bear social burdens, sometimes so weighty they crack under pressure and are exiled from polite society. “Moron”, “idiot” and “imbecile” were once clinical terms that appeared in sober articles in the field of eugenics, a discipline that generated countless academic articles and had massive popular appeal among right-wingers and progressives alike. After the Nazi mass murder of the “unfit”, eugenics became a signifier of horror. The word was suppressed and the discipline justly vilified. The thought, however, lived on under other names. In 1954, the journal Annals of Eugenics became the Annals of Human Genetics.

After Paul died, I noticed that my presence at some social events created embarrassment, as if I had burped or let out a fart. The word “widow” wasn’t uttered, but I asked myself if my proximity to death acted like a bad smell in the room? Another question followed: if I were a widower, would it be different?
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