Grandma Couldn’t Have Made It Alone—But We Can

Claiming a new life on our own

My Portuguese American grandmother, Anne Avina, grew up in an era that did not encourage women to be independent. Once married, she never held a job. She never learned to drive. She was a terrific cook and handy with a sewing needle, but she knew nothing about home maintenance. She did not venture out alone beyond her neighborhood in Santa Clara, California.

When my grandfather died of cancer in 1967, women were still not allowed to apply for credit or acquire property in their own name. It was perfectly legal to refuse to hire women for many types of jobs. Many of the rights we take for granted now were just not there in 1967. Plus, Grandma Anne was already 65. Where would she have found a job?

We forget how much has changed since those days. Back then, only 13 percent of Americans lived alone, as opposed to 28 percent now. Culturally, a woman living alone was a rare and not quite proper thing to do.

I have no idea how much money my mother’s parents had when Grandpa died, but I suspect it wasn’t much, a little social security, maybe a pension from his years working as a cannery foreman. Did they have health insurance? It was far from universal in those days.

Being left alone is hard. Being left alone with no money makes it even worse, and it happens a lot.

Married women were treated like children in many ways, so it was a rude awakening when their husbands died. Many saw no choice but to move in with their children or siblings. Grandma’s situation was a little different because her son, my Uncle Bob, was living with her. A quadriplegic, he needed a lot of care and had paid caregivers coming to help every day. He was not able to help Grandma in her bereavement.

A few years later, Uncle Bob got married and moved out, so Grandma was on her own.

She depended on her nearby siblings and their children and leaned hard on my parents. Our phone rang often with calls from Grandma needing a ride or asking my father, an electrician, to deal with everything from burnt out light bulbs to a heater that didn’t work. Mom was called on for all kinds of errands.

For Grandma Anne, who had never been very independent, it was too late to change. She followed the example of her own mother, Anna Souza, who was widowed young, with seven growing children. She didn’t speak English and had no real education. She worked at a cannery and helped clean the church. She also accepted charity. But she was not alone. When her children grew up, they stayed nearby, always available to help.

My grandmother’s sister-in-law, Aunt Edna, also Portuguese, was widowed and childless, but she did well on her own. She had worked for many years and was financially comfortable. After Uncle Tony died, she traveled, volunteered at the church, and went out with her friends. She and her sister Virginia, who had never married, helped each other.

Maybe the trick is to have a life of your own so that if your spouse dies, you have something else to hold on to.

How would these working-class widows have managed if they did not have children or nearby family, if they were alone like me and many of you?

I suppose they would have figured it out. Many a widow has done whatever work she could find, even if that meant washing people’s clothes or renting out rooms in her house. If she didn’t drive, she rode the bus. If necessary, she accepted donations of food and hand-me-down clothes. In every generation, people do what they have to do to survive.

What did widows with money do? I suppose the wealthy widow wouldn’t have to worry about money. She could pay for the help she needed, but she would still be alone.

My grandmother didn’t stay in her house. After a few years, she moved to an apartment next door. Her new place overlooked the house where she had lived most of her adult life, a house that is now shown on tours of vintage homes.

My facts are fuzzy because I was a kid, and our parents didn’t share much information with my brother and me. I don’t know if she moved because she couldn’t afford to keep the house or because she needed a smaller, more manageable space. It had to be painful watching other people tear up her garden, pick fruit from her apricot tree, and work in Grandpa’s garage workshop.

In later years, Grandma suffered from diabetes, and her vision was impaired. She had trouble walking. She lived with each of her adult children for a while, but she needed more help than they could give, so they moved her into an assisted living facility. She died there at age 80 after falling and breaking her hip.

When I remember my grandmother in those years, I see her looking sad, always about to weep. The anchor of her life was gone, leaving her lost at sea. In her mind, life was over. All that was left was waiting to die and be with him in heaven. In my interviews with Portuguese women for my book Stories Grandma Never Told, I saw that attitude over and over again.

What about widowers, one might ask. Men lose their partners, too. In some ways, it would seem like men would be okay because they had all the power, but in other ways, they were just as lost. They didn’t know how to cook or wash clothes or manage any of the household chores their wives handled. They didn’t know how to be alone. As a result, widowers tended to remarry far more often than widows. Were they looking for true love or a maid? I don’t know. Probably a little of both.

My father’s father, seen as a “catch” among the ladies, was brokenhearted when Grandma Clara died, but he was soon dating. He remarried a few years later. Staying alone forever was not an option. My dad, on the other, hand couldn’t imagine loving anyone the way he loved my mother.

Losing a spouse is brutal. Here on the Oregon coast, surrounded by older people, I have lost count of the funerals for which I have played music. We had another one last week. Nearly always, it’s the man who has died. I watch the new widow walking in shock at this huge change in her life. Some sit staring at the casket or the urn while others sob. Either way, I ache in sympathy.

An article by AARP says, “Women shouldn’t be surprised to learn they will outlive their husbands. Women live longer than men and tend to marry older men. Among married Americans, 58 percent of women age 75 and older experience widowhood, compared to 28 percent of men. An astonishing one-third of women become widows before they’re 60, and half before they are 65.”

Daunting, right? We all hope to be in the percentage for which that doesn’t happen, but we need to be ready to carry on if it does.

I have read numerous books for widows that assume we don’t know how to do anything by ourselves. Those books drive me nuts with chapters on how to host a dinner party or start dating again. Let’s have some practical information like how to do your income tax, get rid of bugs in the kitchen, or change the filter on the heater. Thank God for YouTube with all of its instructional videos.

Women today are more independent and self-sufficient than they were in the 1960s. In most countries, we have the same rights as men. We go to college and have careers that continue through marriage and motherhood. We can take care of ourselves. Whatever we don’t know how to do, we can learn.

Not that being alone is easy. It hurts like hell to lose your partner. It’s a loss we don’t ever get over, but we may also find we like our independence, especially if the marriage was less than ideal or we spent years taking care of an ailing spouse. We might be half blinded by tears, but we can figure things out on our own.

Widowhood is just one way people end up alone. Some people never marry. Others get divorced. I was alone for five years between marriages. I learned how to live by myself. By the time I met Fred, after a series of bad relationships, I thought I would be alone for the rest of my life. When he died, I knew I could manage.

I’m not sure Grandma could have survived her bereavement alone. She just didn’t have the tools. Luckily, she didn’t have to. But this is a new century. We can do it. It’s not always easy or what we would prefer, but we are strong, free, and able to take care of ourselves, with a little help from our friends. We are still alive. Let’s not waste the years we have left.

Grandma couldn’t do it alone, but we can.

Let’s talk

• How did the older widows you have known manage after their husbands died?

• I still see older widows who don’t even know how to write a check. How can we make sure we know what to do if we end up alone?

• Are you a widow or widower? Aside from losing the person you loved, what was the hardest thing to deal with?

• Do you think losing a spouse is more difficult for men or for women? Or is it equally difficult?

Have I bummed you out? We’ll move on to a cheerier topic next time. Thank you all for being here. Go do something today that makes you feel good.

Photo of Anne Avina by Sue Fagalde Lick, around 1979

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How did I end up alone? My first marriage ended in divorce. My second husband died of Alzheimer’s after we had moved to the Oregon coast, far from family. I never had any kids, only dogs. Now I live by myself in a big house in the woods. You can read our story in my memoir, No Way Out of This: Loving a Partner with Alzheimer’s, available at your favorite bookseller. Visit https://www.suelick.com for information on all of my books.