Singleness and the Church by Jana Marguerite Bennett

Author:Jana Marguerite Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Forgetting Widows and Widowers

Lynn Neff describes in detail all the losses that becoming a widow entails:

[S]‌tudies show that widows lose 75 percent of their friendship network when they lose a spouse. Sixty percent of us experience serious health issues in that first year. One third of us meet the criteria for clinical depression in the first month after our spouse’s death, and half of us remain clinically depressed a year later. Most experience financial decline. One pastor described us by saying we move from the front row of the church to the back, and then out the door. We move from serving and singing in choir to solitude and silent sobbing, and then on to find a place where we belong.5

We might think that these losses of friendship and financial decline impact only a small percentage of the population, and that is why there is less attention given.

In fact, widows and widowers comprise about 14 percent of the population, according to 2014 US Census Bureau data, which makes them a significant demographic group to consider, especially when we consider the size of other important demographic groups: African American population (12.3 percent), people who cohabitate (11 percent).6

Widows and widowers still encounter financial hardship, though they are less likely to be as destitute as in past centuries. Fifty percent of widows, and 35 percent of widowers found themselves left with incomes of less than $25,000 per year, as compared to divorced (27 percent/17 percent) and married (13 percent /14 percent) men and women. While the majority of widows and widowers are over the age of 65, still roughly 210,000 men and women find themselves widowed at an age younger than 54. Ageism may be one of the reasons, then, for forgetting to consider widows.

A US Pew Forum Religious Landscape survey finds that a similar number of Christians (around 10 percent) are widowed, though the number varies slightly by denomination.7 The number of widows and widowers as a percentage of Christian population by denomination is higher than the number of cohabitating adults as a percentage of Christian population, though cohabitation is far more widely discussed, as I alluded to above.

Sexism may also factor into the forgetfulness Neff mentions. Another earlier but more in-depth discussion of widowhood shows that about 1.4 million Americans are widowed, and that there is a very sharp gender gap: about a million of those widowed are women.8 Widows and widowers also seem to experience the loss of spouse differently. In psychological studies, widows were more “likely to seek emotional support” while men were more likely to seek “solace in exercise, religion, work, poetry, or in some more destructive patterns such as alcohol.”9 Sociologists suggest that differences in grieving come, in part, from cultural norms related to gender and grief. For example, the role of “wife” may be tied more closely to a woman’s central identity and role in society, while the role of “husband” may be seen as only one of many roles that shape a man’s identity. If

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