She stole her husband's button for the new guy?

The death of a long-time spouse seems so horrible that I'm not sure how people can stand to get married.

I made some pretty great pancakes this morning (ok, more like 1pm), let me tell you.

The writing is awful.

It's written exactly like every Modern Love column, which is to say that the editor is awful.

I still like the woman who married the Chinese stranger who couldn't drive and moved him to upstate NY. Now that took balls.

I couldn't get through it. Graceful as a heron, pink satin ballet slippers, basketball in the twilight, shivering in a nightgown in the winter night, blah, blah blah.

oh, stop it. It's written or edited poorly, but if you're going to be reading these columns, at least the protagonists aren't superficial twats, and there's life after 40, or after 20 years, or what have you.

The death of a long-time spouse seems so horrible

I'm sure I'd hold on to jewelry and other stuff that I'd think my daughters would like to have, but I think it would be hard to have constant reminders like a bunch of clothes in the closet.

there's life after 40, or after 20 years, or what have you

That's what I thought before I read this column, but this woman was so obsessed with Supernanny that she says it was like a heroin addiction.

It's sweet. You people marking it down for style points are soulless zombies.

The column seems to be switching from people who reveal too much, in the process showing themselves to be silly twats, to people who reveal very little. I find over-revelation more interesting. But I like the train wreck style of personal essay. I also enjoy reality TV.

9: but this woman was so obsessed with Supernanny that she says it was like a heroin addiction.

I believe the idea was that she was killing the pain for a while. Big deal. It happens.

Supernanny is sort of like heroin. It's fascinating, and doubles as effective birth control.

Deep Thought:
I want to be a writer and if something interesting
happens to me, I could write about it, and that would be
interesting. But if I have a mundane life, what will
I write about ? I will write about nothing.

The best story from ML (or shoulda been ML) was

By DARCEY STEINKE
(Published: December 23, 2007)
DURING my junior year abroad, I lived with other American students in a suburban house outside Cork, Ireland. I was a skinny, eye-rolling 21-year-old with literary pretensions.

I was a skinny, eye-rolling 21-year-old

HOTT.

Let us not revisit Darcey.

Darcey... Bussell? Also hott, despite (or perhaps because of) the whole walleyed thing.

14 refers to a Darcey column that was subject to debate here not long ago. I thought it more recent than December 23, 2007, but maybe not.

Ah, here's the unfogged discussion. Check out the original Fashion & Style Darcey column linked there.

I'm sure I'd hold on to jewelry and other stuff that I'd think my daughters would like to have, but I think it would be hard to have constant reminders like a bunch of clothes in the closet.

I can imagine myself in that position thinking almost daily that I should box up the clothes but being utterly and completely unable to do it. I would argue with myself over whether it was somehow disloyal (and over whether "disloyal" isn't quite the word for what I mean). I wonder if this isn't the sort of thing friends should do for (or possibly with) a widow/er?

You people are tough. Becks is right. The column was sweet.

You people are tough.

No, they're monsters. It's a sweet essay. And the button thing is cute.

The article is not very discreet about identities. I started testing this by looking for federal judges who were born in the right years in South Carolina. Then at the bottom of the first page, Michael's last name is given, and it matches up with the first hit.

I'm not sure how people can stand to get married.

Some people seem to get married very quickly, for just that reason. Too hard not to have a spouse. I know several 60-something men who did that.

I can imagine myself in that position thinking almost daily that I should box up the clothes but being utterly and completely unable to do it.

Not an uncommon reaction, in my experience.

It's written exactly like every Modern Love column, which is to say that the editor is awful.

It's better than most, and the story is sweet.

And there's no way I would be able to get rid of the clothes.

It's definitely better than most, and I very much appreciate its lack of an extended simile conceit.

I think this woman also had a This American Life story, about how her son was coping as her husband was dying, when he had recently moved from their house to a nursing home. It was so, so sad, and I was listening to it while I was jogging, and my throat kept closing up every time I heard something sentimental, which makes it REALLY FUCKING HARD TO JOG when you can't breathe.

I was worried that people wouldn't find a way to be judgmental about this one, but you really came through.

I thought it was sweet, honest and generous all the way through, with none of the smugness or passive-aggressive payback I've come to expect from ML columns.

Since this ML seems to be deficient in snark fodder, may I suggest It's Not You, It's Your Books from the Book Review (also could be viewed as a spin-off from the Winnowing thread).

Among the deal killers:
- never having heard of Pushkin
- being keen on Ayn Rand
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance changing your life
- "books about life's lessons learned from dogs"
- having The Unbearable Lightness of Being on the bedside table
- "Baudrillard (way too pretentious), John Irving (way too middlebrow), Virginia Woolf (way too Virginia Woolf)."
- having an artfully worn, older-than-me copy of 'Proust' by Samuel Beckett
- not having laughed while reading 'Candy' by Terry Southern

And there's no way I would be able to get rid of the clothes. I guess this is an appropriate day to discuss this, since my father died this day in '86. My mother gave his clothes up bit by bit, as she could bear to. It was a drawer needed for something else, then another one, then stuff hanging, and so on.

She apologized each time and agonized over the "disloyalty" too. Even so, she has many reminders of their life together around still.

The ML story rang perfectly true.

The only "Modern Love" that would pass muster around here would include the words "coprophagy," "flamethrower," "pimpmobile" and "my spouse's cooling corpse."

I still have some clothes of my mother's, including a beautiful leather jacket from the 70s that I would wear if it fit me (and indeed, I did wear it in high school).

I think the thing to do with a dead person's clothes is to keep around those clothes that the deceased person would keep, for sentimental value, were the person still alive.

Re 17: Is Darcy Bussell wall-eyed? I never knew.

It's helpful to have someone just outside the immediate family deal with the clothes. When my dad died, one of my BsIL cleared out his closet and dresser that week, which turned out to be the least painful way to deal with all that stuff at a very bad time. Some nicer things went to family members, and since I shared his named I got the lab coats with the name embroidered over the pockets. The rest of it was just suddenly gone, and just as well.

When my exboyfriend died, I was already married, but I wished I had some of his clothes. Like an old jumper I could wear when I was feeling a bit under the weather or something. I remember feeling a bit resentful that because I was married to someone else, people didn't want me to wallow in my grief. If my husband died I could wear his jumper without anyone thinking it was weird. So yeah, I'd keep his clothes for as long as I wanted them.

I liked this ML column, even with all the "oh, look, I'm a WRITER" bits.

My mom gave me a bunch of my dad's clothes (basically whatever would fit me). She's still got most of the rest, I think, but she seems quite anxious to get rid of whatever she can.

When my mom died, my sister and I went through her clothes. We gave away most of it, but we held onto some things that were particularly meaningful. We made most of the decisions, but checked with my dad about a few of them.

One of the things he was at a loss for how to deal with was a towel with her first name on it, part of a set someone had given them, the other with his name. It was a stupid gift -- for my parents -- because they weren't into anything cutesy like that. But giving away that towel was one of the few things my father balked at. So he kept the one with his name, and I took the one with hers. It sat for a few years, but I eventually started to use it, which still seems a little weird sometimes, because it's not a sentimental item that I connect with her, but her name is right there on it.

All of which is to say, among other things, that dealing with the material stuff is just a weird process, and you really don't know how you'll end up reacting.

Oh, god, this is the same woman from those TAL pieces? Heartbreaking.

This was a really sweet piece.

Peter Stallybrass wrote an excellent, moving lecture on clothes and mourning called "Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning, and the Life of Things" that is really worth a read. He talks about the experience of wearing his collaborator's blazer after he died, and stuff like that. It's along the same lines as this ML, but deeply engaging, descriptive, a little tear-jerking, and beautifully intelligent. Highly recommended.

I'm usually a much more generous ML reader than the rest of you lot, but there were style things that kept getting in the way of what seemed like a very tender and honest story. Oh well. IT reminds me that I liked what AWB had to say about why study grammar over at her joint: it gives you options to express yourself.

My sister is enraged at me for getting engaged while she was still mourning our 95-year-old grandmother. Death in my family is experienced as a handy cover for unleashing neuroses on other members.

From my father, who died youngish (60), when I was 30, I took, or saved, his watch -- oversized, a large man's watch, which I actually was wearing at UnfoggeDCon2, now I think of it -- and his leather checkbook case, still in use. Some miscellaneous other household things simply because it seemed silly to throw away soap ... though it was bizarre to be washing in Irish Spring for a while there.

I enjoyed this week's Modern Love. I thought it was very sweet.

We should be encouraging more people to get married.

OT:

Has anyone discussed the Times magazine's article about premarital sex foes?

The woman from Harvard's quote about masturbation: "Oh, God, No!!!!"

Has anyone discussed the Times magazine's article about premarital sex foes?

No, but here's a strong candidate for most offensive paragraph:

Chen and Fredell described the event to me later, when I met them separately for lunch. Chen was a small Asian woman in a miniskirt and stilettos who ate every crumb of everything, including a ginger cake with cream-cheese frosting and raspberry compote. Fredell, when the dessert menu came, paused at the prospect of a "chocolate explosion," said, "I may as well -- I mean, carpe diem, right?" And then reconsidered -- she really wasn't that hungry.

(Chen is a campus pro-sex activist; Fredell is her counterpart on the anti-sex side. And yes, I feel comfortable calling it anti-sex although I think her organization might not see itself that way. And despite the obnoxious tone of the article.)

We should be encouraging more people to get married.

Don't shill, will.

We should be encouraging more people to get married.

s/b

We should be encouraging people to get married more often.

Witt:

I thought the writer took great pains to make judgments based on silly stuff.

Although that Fredell seemed very odd. Her emphatic denials of any lasting sexual desire and/or the portrayal that she seemed surprised by other's desire.

It's sweet. You people marking it down for style points are soulless zombies.

A-motherfucking-men.

Typical ML pieces grate on me as much for the subject matter as for the syrupy prose style. To wit, they frequently revolve around people's conflicts and unfulfilled desires regarding sex, social status, career advancement, and reproduction--all the components of small-m, small-l modern love that are endlessly fascinating to the person involved, but interesting only in a car crash kind of way to the rest of humanity.

Here is a woman who has all that behind her and is finding, to her own surprise, that she can know love again. We feel her emotion vicariously for the same reason a community breathes a sigh of relief when any widow/widower among us remarries: because it assuages the primal fear we have of growing old amid loss and grief and then dying alone.

My father died the week before last, and yesterday I remembered to take the last bag of his laundry from the hospital out of my car. I don't know what my mother will do with his clothes - they wouldn't fit either of my brothers. We will always be surrounded anyway with heaps of stuff that reminds us; for the wake we put lots of photos of him in happy times around the house, and we're in no hurry to take them down.

So sorry about your loss, emir.

Oh, so sorry, emir. Sounds like you have lots of family around. It helps so much.

Sorry to hear it, emir.

My condolences, emir.

Thanks, all. This has been coming down the wire for nearly two years, but we're not any less sad for that.