Losing a spouse is one of the most painful things that can happen to a person. Reliving it by writing a book isn’t something to be expected in the normal course of grief. Still, for Christina Hamlett, “Everything I Know About Widowhood I Learned from Jessica Fletcher” was both cathartic and a guidepost for others who might find themselves in this situation.
Hamlett is the widow of Mark Webb, a well-known workers’ compensation expert who was the Decisions Editor of Cal-OSHA Reporter. He died on Easter Sunday, 2023, after a short illness. Following the 2022 holidays, Webb suddenly began feeling ill and rapidly losing weight. He was diagnosed with Stage 4 esophageal cancer – a death sentence.
Suddenly, his wife was confronted with impending widowhood. “I don’t’ think anyone is ever prepared to lose a spouse,” she says. “Mark and I, however, had three months for me to prepare for my new life. He made sure I not only knew of all his passwords, finances and insurance information, but that I also had a checklist of what I needed to do and who to notify within the first three days of his passing. This opened my eyes to the reality that far too many couples don’t engage in ‘unpleasant conversations’ until it’s too late.”
“Everything I Know” is part love story, part tragedy and part self-help book for both widows and widowers. “The writing actually came easily to me because my goal was to pen an easy-to-navigate guidebook interspersed with humor and nostalgia.”
Writing, in fact, is her stock in trade. A former actress and theatre director, Hamlett (yes, that’s her real name) has written 50 books, many of them mysteries, more than 270 plays, and many articles, interviews, and blogs.
Her reference to Jessica Fletcher is a tribute to a television character, the widowed mystery writer and homicide sleuth from “Murder, She Wrote.” Hamlett draws inspiration and wisdom from the character, played by Angela Lansbury. Hamlett and Webb were good friends with the show’s producer, Peter S. Fischer, although she never got to meet her hero Lansbury. She was also inspired by another filmland widow, Gene Tierney, in 1947’s “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.”
“Much of what I gleaned about how to be a confident widow came from watching MSW,” Hamlett remarks. “Although writers are reclusive by nature, the last thing Mark would have wanted was for me to spend more time with my fictional characters than with other humans.”
The book includes nuts-and-bolts advice to the newly widowed, including ordering certified copies of death certificates and notifying the Social Security Administration, your insurance company (and filing appropriate claims), and the executor of the estate; canceling your spouse’s health insurance; updating property titles, including vehicles; contact credit bureaus; review debt information; and update your will and change the beneficiaries. The book contains a wealth of useful information that bereaved spouses often overlook in the traumatic time after a death.
Hamlett also manages to draw humor from her experience, channeling another Jessica – Jessica Mitford, the Queen of the Muckrakers, who in the early 1960s wrote the groundbreaking “The American Way of Death,” an expose of the funeral industry.
Hamlett relates her encounters with the man she calls “Cremation Guy,” who was persistent in his insistence that she should buy an expensive urn for Mark’s ashes. When she informed him of her plans to store his remains in a bottle that had held expensive champagne (Webb was a gourmand, expert cook, and a wine connoisseur), Cremation Guy replied, “Most people would want something more tasteful and respectful.” Hamlett replied that the bottle was indeed elegant, wryly adding, “I am sooooo not ‘most people.’”
She says Mark overheard the conversation while in his hospital room “and he thought it was pretty funny.” She had discussed the idea of him being “decanted” in the bottle, which is mounted in their house in a metal-winged dragon named Diavlo. It’s important, she says, for spouses to discuss in advance what kind of arrangements they prefer for their remains.
The story of how she and one of their mutual friends managed to transfer Mark’s ashes into the bottle also brings a chuckle.
Hamlett and Webb both believed in the afterlife and in ghostly manifestations, and she is convinced he has communicated with her from beyond. After his death, she bought a Turkish rug for their master bedroom, and “multiple times throughout the day, it managed to move from its original placement,” Hamlett says. Thinking Webb didn’t like it, she replaced it with another rug and moved the first one to her office. The replacement has stayed put, but the original rug continued to move a few inches each day, despite being anchored by a heavy stove.
She has since determined that “his regular moving of the Turkish rug … was a message that he wanted me to ‘get moving’ on something important to him.”
That something is a cookbook based on Webb’s notes and recipes. When she endeavored to publish it, “he finally stopped moving the rug.”
The cookbook, “The Open Door Gourmet,” has just been released. “I can’t wait to see what new ghostly maneuvering he comes up with next,” she says.
Hamlett adds, “If there’s a takeaway message from my widowhood book, it’s ‘Continue to be the person your spouse fell in love with, and you’ll do just fine.” Or, as she says in the book, “Build and bridge and get over it.”
“Everything I Know About Widowhood I Learned From Jessica Fletcher” is available at Amazon.com.