Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Fanfic Related Ultimate Lois Deathfic

My previous post added nothing to the deathfic debate, so I deleted it. The reply I'm going to post now does add something, or at least I think so.

I decided to check out what pictures I would find if I googled "mourning widower". Could I find any pictures that could illustrate the concept of a grieving Clark Kent?

Google immediately responded to my request for widowers by asking me if I didn't prefer pictures of widows instead. To Google, it was apparently more natural to ask for pictures of women grieving for their husbands rather than for husbands grieving for their wives!

I decided to google "mourning widow" too, to see if Google would ask me if I wanted to know about mourning widowers instead. But no. Google was fine with me asking for pictures of widows and showed no particular wish to display pictures of widowers instead.

When I checked out the pictures I could see when I googled "mourning widower", it turned out that most of the pictures that had anything to do with a bereaved spouse at all showed me widows instead of widowers! Even though I had specifically asked for widowers! This, for example, is a cartoon of a widow who has gone to a "spiritist" (or whatever they are called) to get into contact with her dead husband:



This is a cartoon of a dead man and a woman who is unhappy about his death, even though she may not be his widow:



Here's another widow:



One of the comparatively few pictures of widowers I found when I googled "mourning widowers" was this one:

He looks sad, no?

The only picture I found of a widower that looked heartbreakingly sad was this one:



To me, this man looks like he wasn't part of our Western culture at all.

Another man who mourned his wife was the Indian mogul Shah Jahan who built the superb mausoleum Taj Mahal for his favorite wife Mumtaz Mahal:



(You have to wonder how much he mourned his other wives.)

And there is quite a poignant story about the English King Edward I and his wife Eleanor. Their marriage had been arranged as a 'marriage of conveniance' in 1254, when Eleanor was ten and Edward was fifteen. When they started living together about eight years later they fell in love and had fifteen children. When Eleanor died in northern England in 1290, Edward I decreed that wherever her body had been put down to rest on its way home to Westminster there would be erected an Eleanor Cross. The most famous of the Eleanor Crosses is the one at Charing Cross, London.



The Eleanor Cross at Charing Cross.

So there have certainly been widowers who have mourned their wives. Still, judging from Google's tight-fisted response when I asked for pictures of widowers, our culture doesn't take a great interest in widowers and doesn't expect them to do a lot of public grieving. Again judging by the willingness of Google to provide pictures of widows, our culture expects more public grief from widows than from widowers.

Could it be that precisely because our culture may not expect widowers to grieve much, it becomes that much more tempting to imagine Clark's grief if Lois was to die? Because he would surely grieve a lot, and that would be so unusual and wonderful to see. Maybe Lois would grieve as much for Clark as Clark would grieve for Lois, but perhaps our culture expects more grief from widows than from widowers, so that Lois's grief would be less unusual and wonderful than Clark's, and therefore less tempting to write about?

Ann