DEPARTMENT:

Kokua Corner

Surviving the
Death of a Spouse

by Kathy Titchen

When my husband Jack died in March 2006, I learned that a friend in Rhode Island, a schoolmate from kindergarten through college, had also lost her husband. We exchanged condolence notes and e-mails.

“Help!” she wrote with both poignancy and humor. “I’m not ready for widowhood, retirement, Social Security or Medicare!”

Amen. How well are we really prepared when a spouse dies, especially when we are also moving into the last phases of our own lives? Aside from personal loss, a spouse’s death can change your life drastically. It can force you to take Social Security early, delay your retirement, sell your home or move to a distant city to be closer to family. At 65, you’re on Medicare, regardless.

Estate planners try to prepare us for all this, but no matter how much planning we do, there always seems to be a banana peel on the path somewhere.

Paperwork nearly drowned me. Jack’s assets were in trust, so there was no probate, but still the paperwork was daunting. Some examples:

Getting Jack’s death certificate took four months. There isn’t much you can do to settle an estate without it. The process is quicker, I was told, with a private funeral home, but Jack had donated his body to the Willed Body Program at the John A. Burns School of Medicine, so two state agencies, the University of Hawaii and the Department of Health, were involved.

The DOH will not even tell you if the certificate is ready until you pay for copies in advance. When I finally stood in line at DOH to collect them, the employee handling the transaction printed and stamped all copies with the state seal before asking me to check for errors. There were a couple of errors, but she couldn’t just print new copies. I had to go to the corrections office and file paperwork to have the changes made, get a receipt from the first office to make sure I didn’t have to pay twice and then wait more weeks for the corrected copies. Couldn’t this be more efficient?

In the last few months before his death, I struggled to organize Jack’s papers. He was too weak to be of much help. We had prepared our tax returns together for years, and suddenly I had to do it alone. In spite of my efforts to meet the April 15 deadline, I had to take an extension because of missing information after he died. I also learned that starting the year after his death, a separate 1041 tax return has to be filed annually for the trust.

The good side of this paper chase is that I found a second life insurance policy I didn’t know existed. My copy named me as the beneficiary, but the company’s records showed Jack’s trust as the beneficiary. Since I was the trustee and principal beneficiary, it didn’t matter except for extra time spent on the paperwork.

A check for Jack came in the mail from Australia, for A$1,600. When I tried to deposit it with a branch of Central Pacific Bank, the teller insisted, “We can’t accept this. It’s not a real check.” I took it to Barbara Haji, financial service representative at CPB’s Kapahulu branch. She processed it through the Australian bank that issued it. The check was “real” and worth about US$1,000, but it was stamped “non-negotiable.” This meant only that it could not be cashed outright because it was in foreign currency. Bank tellers should know this.

Are these common experiences? Apparently they are. I had the uneasy feeling that there are widows who would have thrown away the Australian check after the initial rejection.

Michelle Tucker of Sterling & Tucker, an attorney, certified public accountant, investment adviser and certified financial planner, agrees. Even today, Tucker said, there are women in their 80s, even in their 60s and 70s, who “have never handled finances, never written a check and don’t know how.”
Given the nature of her occupation, Tucker doesn’t see many people without wills and trusts, but she does see widowed people (mostly women) who have no idea what their spouse had or even how much they need to live on because the spouse handled all the finances. Sometimes they hang on to worthless papers, she said, such as “stock certificates from companies that went belly-up years ago.”

Estate lawyer David A. Bernstein said, “I can’t imagine how many insurance policies go unclaimed because people don’t know they have them. It’s like a scavenger hunt for the survivors unless everything is documented.” He, Tucker and others suggest people should keep a list of the assets they own, with account numbers, where survivors can easily find it.

Stress in dealing with a spouse’s death is inevitable. Debbie Garrow, a real estate agent in Ewa Beach, went to Kapolei Satellite City Hall to transfer her husband’s car registration to her name, waited in line for an hour and only then was told the notary she needed to sign the documents was on vacation. It was enough to make her crumple to the floor and bawl, she said. She called a friend, who took charge of the situation and helped get the transfer made at another office. Garrow’s complaint: “Couldn’t they put up a sign so people don’t wait?”

Such frustrations can loom large when you are under emotional stress.

My friend in Rhode Island and I discussed the stages of grief developed by the late Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, author of the classic Death and Dying. My friend’s husband died suddenly. Mine was under medical care for a long time. We wondered if we experienced the five stages (denial, anger, bar-gaining, depression and acceptance) the same way.

Probably not, said Felicia Marquez-Wong, bereavement coordinator for St. Francis Hospice. “We’ve gone a little beyond Kübler-Ross,” she said. “We call it grief recovery and it’s different for each person.”

Chris Otake, bereavement co-ordinator at Hospice Hawaii, said a parent with children to care for may even postpone the grieving process for years until the children have left home.

Finding ways to cope with your loss is essential. Two friends, Agnes Ho and Anna Derby Blackwell, provided valuable support for me. Ho has been widowed once, Blackwell twice.

Ho, a property manager, took me to lunch soon after Jack’s death and helped with his memorial service. “Get at least 15 copies of the death certificate,” she advised. “You’ll need them.”

Blackwell, a writer, coined the term “widow therapy” to describe the constructive activities you need to find to fill the void your spouse left. Blackwell found nights alone were hard. A singer, she is a member of the Honolulu Symphony Chorus, her church choir and the Prince Kuhio Hawaiian Civic Club. Rehearsals and performances get her out several nights a week and she’s made new friends.
Death throws a monkey wrench into the best-laid plans. Honolulu Advertiser reporter Mike Leidemann lost his wife Helen to cancer last year. They had planned to retire at 62, when their mortgage would be paid off. With only eight years to go on the mortgage, Leidemann had to take out a new 30-year mortgage to make ends meet when he began living on one salary.

“You think your life is upside down,” he said. “I can be in a movie and there’s a scene of Italy that reminds me of our trip there and I’ll cry for a few minutes. But I have work, I have friends, and don’t have time to be morose.”

“There’s a mystique about death,” said Howard Mote II. “We’re afraid to discuss it, but it needs to be talked about.”

Mote’s wife Marcie was killed in a boating accident in Texas years ago. His burden was guilt. A building contractor with his own construction business, he worked long hours and said, “I felt if only I had gone with her, or talked her out of going, if I’d been more attentive...”

His practical advice, after moving from Illinois to Texas and then to Hawaii to take care of his parents, is, “We are in a mobile society, and laws are so different from state to state, it’s a good idea when you move to have a local attorney look over your will and the way you are holding property. I thought I was prepared but I wasn’t.”

One rule of thumb is that widowed people should wait a year before making major decisions, but every rule has exceptions. Howard Dicus, Web and broadcast editor of Pacific Business News, whose wife Marilyn died last year, said, “I was blessed to find love soon after Marilyn’s passing. Most people were happy for me, but a couple of people found it unseemly, a breach of grief etiquette.”

In Sydney, I worked with a highly competent secretary who lost her husband at age 50. Within weeks, she had sold her home in New Zealand and moved to Australia, where she came to work at our office. She was confident in her decision, even in such a short time, and said, “I don’t do what other people tell me to do.”

In contrast, the original owner of my own home sold it soon after her husband passed away. She was persuaded to move into a senior facility and regretted the decision for years.

It seems there is a delicate balance in widowhood, between not rushing into change and not allowing yourself to stagnate in the past. Most of all, you can’t allow others to dictate your future.

“Widowhood is never what you expect it to be,” said Agnes Ho. “Once you move past the grief, life is a new adventure, a new highway to travel.”

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