53 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 12-29-17”

  3. Kare, you commented on the situations from my experience as a counselor. In all I counseled 10 or 12 times, three times in Arizona and seven or eight in Illinois and Michigan, one week per summer. For several of the years I lived in Chicago I got two weeks of vacation a year, and I would take one of those weeks to counsel at camp, which left me only one week to travel and see family. (I have six siblings, all of them in a different state from me, and my mom was still in Phoenix until she died the year I moved to Nashville.) Taking a week to volunteer at camp was thus a huge sacrifice of time. But I had loved camp as a child, and I thought I could give back by that week of counseling

    What I didn’t tell yesterday was my very last time of counseling, when I finally said to myself, “That’s it. I’ve had enough. Maybe I’m getting too old for this.” I had counseled at the same camp several times. At this point I was living in the inner city, allowing neighbor children to come by my house, and attending a church that was 60% black, with just two white children in the children’s program in which I volunteered. In other words, my common experience with children, at that point in my life, was nearly all with black children. I went to counsel at camp and looked around and realized that every cabin but mine had a single black child in it. Mine was all white children, and I felt a bit culturally out of my element.

    I made the mistake of commenting on that to the direcotor’s wife. The following year, inexplicably all the black girls were in a single cabin, mine. I didn’t have a full cabin, just six or seven girls. But a couple of them were tough cookies. One girl in particular. Now, that camp had a daily counselor meeting during breakfast, with one counselor from each cabin attending and then eating breakfast late, so I was not present for breakfast the first day. The first night (the night before) I hadn’t yet known the girls by name, nor did I pay attention to what they ate, but at lunchtime this nine- or ten-year-old, let’s call her Amy, didn’t like any of the food offered and refused to eat any of it. One of the others informed me she hadn’t eaten any breakfast, either. She didn’t eat supper, or breakfast the following day. At lunchtime I told her she had to eat or no canteen (the girls had told me she ate lots of candy the day before); she didn’t eat. (I came along at canteen time to see her eating a candy bar someone had given her out of pity; I took it from her, to her anger.)

    Every activity we did, this girl didn’t like, and refused to participate. She had a cousin there, too, and the cousin started hanging out on the sidelines, as well, and other girls weren’t sure whether or not to play the games if these didn’t want to. All week long I heard “I don’t like, I don’t like, I don’t like.” I truly pitied the girl–clearly her parents had somehow raised the most discontented child I have ever seen. I finally asked her what food she liked (candy was all she could think of) and what she liked to do (watch TV). (To be continued)

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  4. Day two or three of camp, a counselor went home sick. The camp director’s wife came to me and told me I was one of their most experienced and trusted counselors, and I also had the smallest cabin, and could I spare my junior counselor to move into this other cabin? I said yes rather reluctantly. At camp you hardly dare even run to the bathroom unless you have a fellow counselor in the cabin, especially if you have untrustworthy children, and I had some of those. Fortunately our cabin was right next to the bathroom, so if I needed to go in the evening, I would either ask a wandering adult to watch my kids for two minutes or I would sneak out while the kids were all distracted doing other things and they might not notice. But it is not a good thing to have only one counselor in a cabin of six or seven nine- and ten-year-old girls, including a couple who aren’t cooperative at all.

    By about the same time I lost my fellow counselor, I had decided I had had enough of little “Amy.” She clearly was not enjoying her camp experience and she was poisoning the attitude of all the others. She is the only child I ever tried to send home from camp, but I had enough. As I recall, when I told the director’s wife my decision, or what I was thinking about doing, she told me to give the child one last day to try to cooperate, and to tell her she needed to go home the next day if she did not start participating in activities and also eating something. But the last day brought no improvement in her attitude, and worsening of that of her cabin mates. She had to go home.

    During free time, as pre-arranged, Amy and I went to the office. The director’s wife called the mother, and she and Amy both talked to the mother. I didn’t stay, as I was not needed. But the director’s wife flagged me down soon afterward. Amy’s mother said she could not come until tomorrow to get her kid–would that work? Having no choice, I said yes, it would work. Somehow, however, the mother never did come to get her child.

    (Continued)

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  5. The last night of camp was really horrible. First off, the day was (by Illinois standards) quite hot. I think we reached 100 two days in a row, or very close to it. Experienced campers knew to bring fans, as the cabins were not air conditioned, and that day we spent as much time as possible in the only building that was air conditioned, even allowing campers to hang out in it during free time if they chose. Our cabins had screens on the windows, and boards that were propped up on the outside to allow cross-ventilation and light. As we were getting ready for bed, all the windows crashed down. One of the boys’ cabins had decided it would be great fun to close all our windows. However, it was 95 degrees out, and that cross-ventilation was no luxury. In addition, most of my girls were not strong enough to prop those windows back up, and I couldn’t be outside doing it and leaving my girls alone. I rushed outside, caught the boys running away, and told them that it was too hot to do such things and that they must open our windows back up (which they reluctantly did).

    Inside, the atmosphere was also deteriorating. For reasons I forget, one child, likely Amy, decided to sneak out, and the other girls told me about it. I locked the back door, and I stood guard myself over the front door and refused to let her leave. Before long, girls were screaming at each other. It was hot and miserable, and the attitude that had been building all week spiraled out of control. I kicked myself for not insisting days earlier that whatever they did or didn’t do with Amy, I could not keep her in my cabin and be the sole counselor in it.

    I stepped outside, asked the first passing adult to send me the director’s wife (DW). She and her adult daughter soon appeared, and the daughter stepped into my cabin to work to restore order while I and DW took a walk to talk about what had happened that evening. When we returned, the daughter told me that the girls had been told they must quietly go to bed. DW and I were talking quietly in the front of the cabin (inside) when Amy’s cousin suddenly screamed, “She’s trying to suffocate herself!”

    In that hot cabin, Amy had quietly climbed into a top bunk, wrapped tightly into her sleeping bag, covering even her face. Was it some sort of attempt at suicide, some way to self-comfort, or some way to get attention? Had she done such a thing at home, that her cousin quickly jumped to that conclusion? I don’t know. But suddenly the cousin was up on the bunk, fighting her cousin’s strength to pull back those covers from her face, while she and other girls fanned Amy. Meanwhile a couple of other girls turned on me and told me it was my fault, because I hadn’t let her leave the cabin when she was trying to run away.

    I’d been through a lot in my years as a counselor. I’d had the girl in the bunk above me wet her bed (and, with it, my pillow and my hair); I’d had to hold a girl’s hair as she leaned over the toilet and threw up; I’d had parents warn me their daughter had started sleep walking frequently (leaving me to keep an extra-watchful eye at night, since our cabin was a straight shot down the walk from the pier and the lake); I’d watched a child walk in front of guns with live bullets in them at the camp where safety was regularly ignored; and more. But that night, a child who defied me all week, refusing to eat a single bite at a single meal, and refusing to participate in any activities all week, and who should by any standards have been sent home, threatened suicide and the hot, hot cabin mutinied, and that was enough. Could I have shared duties with another safety-conscious adult, or even a responsible teenager, I would have continued to do it. Camp could have been fun for me, too. But while paired with junior counselors who thought only of fun (leaving me to be the one who had time and energy mostly for rule enforcement and thoughts of safety, not fun) or left alone altogether, camp became far too hard an experience to continue to volunteer a week of vacation each week.

    I do have good camp memories, too, but largely I remember it as being a disappointment that year after year I was unsupported, and how hard it is to take care of as many as a dozen children without a fellow mature adult to help.

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  6. It has been a busy last week of the year. I will need your prayers every day going forward as I am now the Qualifying Broker of 185 agents. That means I answer their questions and if they get in trouble I am standing beside them in court. I am assured that very few brokers are sued and I have been assured that the former QB will not abandon me. She is my consulting broker. This was part of the package in me coming to Pensacola last June.
    Deep Breath…
    I can do this.

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  7. I always tell you life has led me on a bumpy ride in which I tend to see the humor.
    The ONLY church camp experience I ever had was attending an Assembly of God camp sometime around 8th grade.
    There was a “baptism of the Holy Spirit”. The preacher of the church that I went with followed me outside and explained that some of what I saw was real and some was fake. He didn’t know which was which, but sometimes emotions ran high. Only God knew for sure.
    All in all I had a good week.

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  8. On the other hand I allowed BG to go to “Big Stuff” in Panama City Beach, FL one year. It was the year the youth pastor signed for an under-aged girl to have her belly button pierced. BG also had a good time, but I am not sure how much “church-y” stuff they did.

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  10. That’s pretty big stuff to get a belly button pierced! 😲

    Son gave me two books for Christmas, The Listening Life, by Adam S. McHugh who is a PAC pastor, and Teach Us to Want by Jen Pollock Michel who writes for Her.meneutics. Has anyone read either of these books?

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  11. Cheryl, that was quite a camp experience. So sorry that you were put through that. If she had died, you would have been even more traumatized along with all the other campers. It is really a horrid situation that no one should have had to endure. They should have put her in isolation in the nurse’s area because she was mentally off in not eating the camp food.

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  14. Proud of you, Kim.

    Happy birthday, Kathleena, according to FB . . .

    I attended a memorial service for a 99 year-old character from my Bible study with a raucous laugh who died in November at a care facility. She’s been missing from my class about 5 years.

    I sat beside my darling Jo, who turns 100 in May, and always kept track of where she and Bea were age-wise. (Bea had a tendency to exaggerate–maybe that’s why I liked her!).

    Jo has announced that once we finish our study on David, she’ll have to move to an afternoon study;it’s too hard for her to get up and moving for a 9:30 class.

    (We all wish she would at least move downstairs from the upstairs apartment where she has lived for 20 years! She says those stairs are keeping her in shape. She’s way too thin).

    We sang hymns so old, I wasn’t sure how the tune went–which got me several elbows from Elaine on the other side with whom I sing in the choir.

    Jo said, “these are songs I remember from childhood! I haven’t sung these in years!”

    Yeah, like from before I was born! LOL

    Bea was convinced her daughters both walked away from the faith because they went to college. As our pastors have a sheet of paper they ask you to fill out to help plan your memorial service, Pastor B had a Gospel and hymn packed service.

    He read aloud her statement about what she wanted people to know about her life, and what were the most important things.

    Her faith, and her family–in detail. We all had tears in our eyes by the time he finished reading through the list.

    We all told stories about her zanniness, but as her “final Bible study teacher,” I felt compelled to get up and talk a little about the faith that sustained her. It started as a child when her German father made sure all six of his kids attended Lutheran Schools and were well trained in Jesus. (They also had to walk in the snow to get there, of course!).

    A commendable heritage and it was an honor to be there.

    Jo leaned over and said to me, “I’ll need to fill out one of those forms.”

    I whispered back, “Just make sure you put me in as reading the Scriptures for you.”

    One of her sly quick grins was returned.

    Really, the six of us old Bible study ladies in the front pew were a bit mischievous during the service.

    But Bea would have loved it.

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  16. Ignore the above. I was going to question the logic of having a belly button pierced. But who knows what women might do.

    When we lived in H’villle, out paper lady asked us to save cans and other metal. She sold it to augment her finances.
    So? Not only did I save my cans, but when I saw a can flattened in the parking lot, or some such, I would pick it up for her.
    Now. A year and a half later, I have to resist a momentary impulse to pick up a flattened can in the parking lot.

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  18. Cheryl, No. As far as I can tell he is still there. He is the music leader for the contempt-ory service on Sunday mornings during my Sunday School class. The brick and concrete walls vibrate. I do not care for it. (This is First Baptist)

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  21. I loved my two weeks at Girl Scout summer camp every year. I got to earn my way there by selling cookies. We had lots of fun rowing, canoeing, sailing, hiking, camping, crafts (okay, that was not such fun as I don’t do crafts) singing, eating, etc. We slept in tents. I think I went every year for about ten years, then I was a CIT (counselor in training) and then a counselor. That is when I realized I was not equipped to be a counselor and I had been oblivious to the lesbian behavior taking place in camp with counselors, campers, and both. That behavior drove one of my fellow new counselors to leave one night and most of us piled into cars to search for her, leaving the approximately one hundred campers largely unattended. I did not send my children to that camp. But did send the boys to Boy Scout camp when the Marines were in charge and the Army. They enjoyed it. And I sent two of the children to 4H camp where they learned to start fires in their cabin using hairspray. And I sent one to horse riding camp where she learned to ride. And two to writer’s camp where they learned to write. And three to church camp one year but was quite uncomfortable with it. It went well.

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  23. Girl Scout camps were pretty tame. 🙂 But we had fun — from tobogganing down the local mountains in snow to swimming all day at Catalina Island to horseback riding at the local “Lazy J” Ranch. Good times. No piercings. Only occasional girl drama.

    Congratulations, Kim!

    Just one more story to do for the week, on the upcoming Jan. 1 Polar Bear Swim now in its 66th year locally.

    Friday — this week that means it’s trash night tonight, delayed a day for the Christmas holiday. It will be the same schedule next week.

    My cousin and I are planning another movie outing tomorrow. And I will start dismantling Christmas (boo-hoo) this weekend as well.

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  24. I guess Girl Scouts weren’t as tame in Idaho?

    I’m sending photos of my mom’s early 1900s student (oil) lamp in pieces (with some pieces missing) to a lamp restoration place in Indiana. I’d spotted photos of the work they did on a lamp that looked almost exactly like my mom’s and sent them an email asking if they could recommend someone in the LA area who does similar work, but they said no one does what they do (which I doubt, but … ). Anyway, he said send photos so I will. Trying to determine how big a challenge and expense a job like that might be. It may have to wait for another day considering I still have some big things looming on the house (stucco repair, painting, etc.).

    But my mom had always wistfully talked about how she’d love to get that lamp restored — she never did and I found its pieces in a box after she’d died. I’ve carted it with me ever since and decided to at least get it checked out to see if it’s doable or not.

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  27. While we sometimes have shenanigans at our camp, most of our staff are there because they love Jesus and love the campers. Last summer some of the activity leaders who were third staff in cabins, had their time off during the cabin devotions and were upset because they wanted to be there for them and to take a turn leading them. It was a good problem to have 🙂 We give our staff a certain amount of time off during each day because they work 6 days a week for 2 months straight and do need a little down time without responsibility in order to keep functioning well.

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  32. I can’t think of any good camp memories, at least not at camps where children go without their parents.

    I loved the family camp. No counselors, since kids had parents and older siblings to take care of them. I had pretty much free run of the entire camp, to choose what activities I pleased (and since I was well-behaved, no one worried about me getting into trouble on my own). My favorite place was the library, which I often had to myself. Or walking along the lake. The play house was OK, building stuff out of Legos, but then there were usually other kids around. My very favorite was playing croquet, especially when adults let me play along with them.

    Day camp and resident camp, though, made me miserable. I much preferred to be either alone or with adults, and having to spend a week with kids my own age was never a lot of fun. I endured it because it didn’t occur to me I could tell my parents I didn’t want to go. They thought I should make friends, I guess, and probably hoped I would make friends at camp. I never did.

    When I was a counselor, it was a well-run camp with responsible counselors (we were all Bible school students and had classes specially on being camp counselors before the summer started). But I had never been good with children and didn’t enjoy it, though I think I did a good job for the most part. The last week of the summer, I volunteered to work in the Spanish camp where they needed a few more adults just to be a presence, even if we didn’t speak Spanish. I was glad not to have to be a true “counselor” that week. And I memorized my first Bible verse in Spanish, 1a de Juan 1:9. (Maybe that influenced me to take Spanish in college that fall – a year later I was in Spain for six months and had switched to a Spanish major.)

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  33. I did not like camp when I was young. Except when my parents were volunteering and it wasn’t my age group. I had the run of the camp and had so much fun with another staff kid.

    I would also have not made a good counsellor – which is why I serve in the office. Admin is my thing!

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  35. Well, I’m behind again, but am jumping in with a question I meant to come here & post this morning. . .

    Here in Connecticut, our winter temps get below freezing regularly, of course, into the 20s & teens, with single-digit or below-zero temps coming at different times throughout the winter, usually in a string of several days here & there. This week we are having one of those strings of several days of bitter cold.

    When these temps come in, to avoid burst pipes, we are advised to keep our faucets going at a very slight flow, & open the under-sink cabinets in kitchens & bathrooms so it doesn’t get too cold in them, possibly freezing the pipes.

    Last night, lying in bed after taking care of those things, I was wondering what about those of you who live in regions where these frigid temps are the norm for winter. Do you actually have to keep your faucets slightly running, & your under-sink cabinets, open every night? Are there different measures you take to avoid burst pipes? We do have some kind of covering around our pipes in the basement.

    I remember someone on the WMB, who did not live in a northern state, once said that the idea of bursting pipes was merely like an urban legend, that it couldn’t really happen. But it does happen around here every winter. It is often hard to get a plumber to come out for other plumbing problems during particularly cold weather because they are out taking care of customers with burst pipes.

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  36. Kizzie, we have better overall house insulation? In some older homes up here or those who have pipes in an outside wall, you should leave your tap running. Our pipes are either on inside walls or on the inner side of the insulation.

    A few years ago when we didn’t have much snow cover our neighbours sewer line froze! Those are buried at least 6 feet underground below the frost line, but if there’s no snow to insulate the ground obviously freezes deeper.

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  38. I don’t know if it’s because our house has good insulation (which it does) or if we’ve just been lucky, but our pipes have not frozen. I bought a thingamajig to put over the outside faucet on the back wall, which is supposed to help protect it from freezing, but then I couldn’t figure out how to attach it so I’ve never used it.

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  39. That is why I like a good snow cover before the temps drop. Our neighbor, a twenty three year old who just took over his grandfather’s ranch, had his pipes freeze a couple of weeks ago. We run the water on consistently cold days. We have put a heater under the house in the past but I don’t like that idea due to fire hazard. We have an electric heater like a blow dryer for when our freeze free hydrants freeze.

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  41. Something I have wondered, even more so since being widowed, is if, when they remarry, widows & widowers still miss the spouse that died. I would imagine there could be some conflicted feelings in that situation.

    My guess would be that they do miss the person at least somewhat (maybe as someone would miss an old friend who has died?), even though they have moved on into a new marriage. My parents were friends with a couple who were each widowed before they met & married. They would occasionally go together to visit the graves of their deceased spouses.

    (Not that I expect to remarry at this stage in my life. But knowing God as I do, I know that He sometimes surprises us by bringing something into our lives that we would never have expected.)

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  42. I know my dad misses my mom sometimes, but stepmom is gracious and will even ask questions about how she did things. We try not to sit around and reminisce about mom when stepmom is around, but we certainly aren’t careful to never mention mom.

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  44. My dad called my stepmother’s deceased husband St Patrick because in her world he had never done any wrong while my dad sometimes irritated her. I laughed to myself when he had been gone 3 or 4 months and she elevated him to St James.
    I chuckled, looked up and said “There you go Jim Bob. You have become a saint.

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  45. Roto rooter are good friends are good friends of mine.

    My mom was maybe just 50sh when she was widowed but never seemed to want to remarry, though a couple fellas, including the plumber, showed an interest.

    Sad shooting in our area today, spent the last part of the day, after I’d left work already, hunting down and relaying a number for the shooter’s best friend whom we knew from port events — a few reporters from our sister paper are working it tonight. Ugh. 😦 😦

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  46. Kizzie, it totally depends on the person, I think. My mom was married to Dad for 31 years, and her second husband had been married for nearly 50 (48 or something like that); it was with their first spouse that each had had children, and that second marriage lasted about two years. They had agreed to be buried next to that first spouse rather than each other, which probably made the most sense for the children. (And the couples had known each other.) Mom told me once, after Pop (her second husband) died that while he was alive she never dreamed about Dad, but now that Pop was dead, sometimes she dreamed about Dad (who had been gone 19 years when she herself died) and sometimes about Pop . . . but she joked that if they ever showed up in the same dream “I’m outta here!”

    My husband told me that when he was on the online dating site, one woman’s profile said she “still missed” her late husband, and he went right on past for that reason. Yet, somewhat humorously (to me), he and I had been in communication for about six weeks before we met in person, and already knew we were likely to marry. We had dinner with friends the first evening we saw each other in person, and then the next day we spent the day together, going out that evening for our first “real date” (a real restaurant and not fast food, and I asked him to wear a tie). It wasn’t five-star dining, just O’Charley’s, but it was a real restaurant and a date I looked forward to. But nearly the entire dinner conversation was his going into some detail of the cancer death of his first wife. Even at the time it struck me as the weirdest of all first-date conversations. Still, it was something to be discussed, and not over the phone, and we were past making first impressions of each other, so in that sense it made sense. He teared up a couple of times in that conversation, telling me that now most of his pain was for the girls having lost their mom and not for himself (she had been gone almost five years), but that in talking about it–something he had not done in detail since her death, since most of the people he knew had experienced the death with him–he remembered the pain. A couple of years later, when a man from church was losing his wife, my husband cried to me and told me that he knew what that man was facing. Again, when our daughter was getting married, a few weeks before the wedding he cried and told me that this was when he missed her, because she wouldn’t be there to see their daughter get married.

    My sister told me that when my husband talked about his first wife, she looked at me to see if she could see any sign of jealousy or discomfort, and she was pleased to see that she didn’t. No–I could wish that I had known him earlier in life, that I had borne his children, but that wasn’t God’s choice for us. And while his first wife is the one who bore his children, I am the one who gets to see them enter adulthood, marry, and bear children someday. I asked to see her photo while we were dating, and now even the girls will casually speak of their mom. She’s part of the family. (My husband’s father often called me her name the last year of his life–he had Alzheimer’s. I understood that–they were married 17 years and we had only been married five at that point.)

    But last I heard, my brother still mourns his first wife, seven years into marriage to his second one. In my opinion he should not have married her (about 14 months after burying his wife of 32 years) until he had dealt with that grief sufficient to be able to move on. I think it is unfair to his second wife, and unkind to her. Men often remarry very quickly, since they find they cannot handle being alone. But anyone who is marrying someone who has been widowed or divorced needs to know that the person has truly put the loss in the past adequately to love again whole heartedly. I am my girls’ stepmother, but I am not their father’s stepwife. A couple who remarries late in wife after decades of a first marriage (like my mom and stepfather) may go into it with the full understanding and acceptance that this marriage is not the same thing as their first marriage, that it is a marriage of companionship in old age. But that wasn’t my situation, and I wasn’t willing to accept anything less than a full marriage. I had a church wedding with a white dress. And to my delight, though the girls call me “Cheryl” and not “Mom,” they respond to me as a mother. (Though it took two or three years to get there.) Since they are the only children I will ever have, the children of my husband, and my heirs, I am very, very happy about that.

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  49. Cheryl, when Dad married stepmom, she immediately thought of us as her children and grandchildren (but not asserting herself). I chose to call her mom right away, but my sister still calls her by her first name. We were in our 30s when they married.

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  50. Kare, I too chose not to “assert myself,” but to give the girls all the space they needed. For instance, I never said “I love you” to either of them in person for about the first year (because there is some pressure to “say it back” when someone says that), though I did say it in notes and cards. I also chose to do very little in terms of changing anything in the look of the home, and I didn’t take any photos of the girls except at family events (e.g., Christmas or graduation) for about two years–I didn’t want them to feel like I was trespassing in their home and their privacy. And several times in that first couple of years one of the girls went into her room a bit upset and my husband quietly went and knocked on the door and went to talk to her, because they didn’t feel comfortable crying in front of me. Occasionally I would suggest that he take one or the other out for breakfast because I could sense she needed some daddy time. Both of them now say openly that that first year was tough (I think it was harder on them than on me) but that we’re a family now.

    I determined that it was my job to be their mom, but that I had no right whatsoever to expect them to see me that way. Occasionally what that looked like was different to my husband and to me. For instance, when we married our older girl was in college (she lived with us full-time for two years between graduation and her marriage last year, but initially she was only with us on school breaks) and our younger a high-school senior. My husband and I frequently ate dinner when the younger one was away from home, working or out with friends. I would put leftovers on the top shelf for ease of her choosing from the freshest foods in the fridge; my husband thought I should actually make up a plate she could put in the microwave. To my own thinking, she was a 17-year-old high-school senior with a drivers license and she was fully capable of making her own plate, and in addition she was better qualified than I to know which foods she wanted, and how much of each. In honor to my husband, I did sometimes make up a plate, but in my own opinion, it was enough that I cooked the food and that she was welcome to eat with us if she was home when we ate. Now that she is living with my mother-in-law since the death of my father-in-law, Mom even makes a lunch for her to take to work, and to me that’s just something a 23-year-old doesn’t need you to do! I was making my own lunch by fourth or fifth grade, at least sometimes. But families are different.

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  51. An interesting day and now I have a bit of alone time. My daughters invited the grands to their staff party so that they could play with their cousins. Before that we had a couple of hours to play together as they rode scooters and I walked. Then their mom had no plans for dinner so I took her out for dinner. I had been praying for more time with her to form a relationship and someone gave me money for just such a purpose earlier today. It was a sweet time and now she is off with a close friend. God is good.

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  52. Kizzie, my experience is secondhand, but I think it confirms your suspicions.

    Mrs B’s parents, Kay and Ollie, had been married for 42 years when Ollie died. Kay was 63 years old. A year and a half later she married Denny, a widower who had also been married 40+ years and raised a family. Kay and Denny were married nearly 20 years until Denny died.

    Kay loved Denny and felt very much that he loved her. They had each “moved on” after being widowed and were able to build a good new life together. But so much of Kay’s life had been a life lived with Ollie, and her children and grandchildren were his, so memories and thoughts of him were never far from her mind. Whenever she reminisced about things she had done with Ollie, it was with a sort of wistfulness.

    Denny was a very different man from Ollie, so the second marriage was very different from the first, not inferior, just different. Being married to Denny was a blessing, but a different blessing than being married to Ollie. As you said, I think it’s like missing good friends who have died or moved away even though other good friends have taken their place.

    I’m sure Denny also missed his first wife, though I don’t think he ever talked about it in my presence.

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