Dear Mariella

Dear Mariella

Setting up home with a widower can be a challenge – especially if he won't put away his first wife's possessions. Mariella Frostrup advises a jealous woman to choose her battles
    • The Observer,
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The dilemma I'm living with a widower whose wife died 11 years ago. They had a daughter and his wife died three months after the child was born. My problem is with his dead wife. Although we have a son ourselves, I'm jealous of her. I feel like they had a nice marriage as he always talks about her as a most beautiful woman. He has her clothes in his wardrobe and wedding photos in his drawer. Is that normal? I feel like a second choice and that if she hadn't died he would be now with her and not me. We argue about this, but he still keeps her things.

Mariella replies At last a letter I really do know the answer to! You don't want to go competing with a dead spouse. They occupy similar unassailable emotional territory as the children of bitter divorcees who, no matter how dysfunctional, spoilt, drug-addicted, demanding and downright unpleasant, will forever be the apple of their warring parents' eyes. God help the poor step-parent who tries to step into the fray and introduce any sort of rationality and good sense to that guilt-dictated relationship.

When it comes to the prematurely departed the temptation to canonise is even stronger. They say a dead wife can do no wrong and in fairness they're probably right. As for her being beautiful, haven't you noticed we are all beautiful and dripping in friends and virtuous and sorely missed in death in a way that's generally unrecognisable from life?

I can't wait to read my own obituary, though I'm not in any rush to speed through life to earn one. The only unwelcome thing about that review of your lifetime achievements is that you have to be dead to warrant it.

Reading obituaries gives me renewed faith in life. Equally heart-warming is listening to people discuss the recently departed. Who knew there were so many utterly perfect people, now sadly deceased? It's enough to make you wish you were dead, too, just so your peers might start appreciating you.

There are exceptions: Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Papa Doc Duvalier and Saddam Hussein, though I must Google their death notices to see if dictators, despots and mass murderers are handled in death with the kid gloves they failed so miserably to use in life.

Death leaves a volatile nest of triggers and if you're occupying space vacated by another, caution and a light step will serve you well. I know there's nothing as frustrating as lurking in the shadow of the dead and dying, and it's definitely a losing wicket, as they say in Liz Hurley's favourite sport.

Not being in your situation, it's easy for me to point out the hopelessness of waging war against a lover's memories. If you pit yourself against a foe who can neither respond nor defend themselves, they remain freeze-framed in rosy hues, their legacy gently tiptoed around so as not to disturb the myth while you increasingly take on the appearance of a hissing Medusa.

The fact that your husband's wife was a nursing mother only increases the stakes against you in your battle to usurp her memory and achieve pole position. My advice is not to bother with a fight you can't win. You, too, will no doubt aspire to be similarly venerated in death, no matter how irrationally. So stop obsessing about the abstractions of the situation – how she's remembered and canonised in his memory is no business of yours. Indeed you could argue that following in the footsteps of a beautiful, kind mother and wife is to your credit, too. It suggests your partner has immaculate taste!

I suggest you turn your attention to what you really can't live with. That you have to do battle for shelf space with her memory is not acceptable. I'd be tempted to buy this man a beautiful trunk, go crazy and have your predecessor's initials carved on it, then suggest that items as precious as her belongings shouldn't live for ever in a mere drawer. These symbols of her time on earth deserve their own tomb, straight out of the pharaoh's handbook, where her worldly goods can be kept unsullied (in the loft) in case she has reason to need them in the afterlife. Small practical steps are the only way to resolve any issue, whatever the size.

You can't have his memory wiped, so removing the source of daily irritation is the first step. Big problems are like big mountains; from a distance they're intimidating, but once you start tackling them they lose their daunting dimensions. Baby steps will get you there in the end.


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