I have been thinking about this part since I read it.
One thing which is very striking about this fic so far is that it is a widowers' story. That is not surprising, given that Clark is a widower here. (He is a widower after Lana, not after Lois, or I wouldn't be reading the story.)
But like I said, it is very much a widowers' tale. In the previous part, Gary the widowed pastor figured prominently. In this part, Lana's father, Dennis Lang, is apparently a widower too. We were told absolutely nothing about his wife (or if we were, I missed it, sorry), but we were told that there is a woman who is there for him, consoling him. Her name is Virginia McCoy. So in some sense Dennis Lang has moved on, or he has taken steps in that direction anyway. Interestingly, so has the pastor. Not only is this a widowers' story, it is a story about widowers moving on.
Again that is appropriate. Clark is a young man, and we wouldn't want him to spend the rest of his possibly very long life just grieving.
However, one male character who figures prominently in this part is conspicuously not a widower. Jonathan. And it struck me, when I read this, how extremely rarely Jonathan has been widowed in LnC fanfic. There have been many alt-Clark stories where both Martha and Jonathan have been dead, of course, but extremely few stories where only Martha has been dead and Clark has had to take care of his widowed father and struggle with the question of whether or not to sell the farm. This made me wonder why there are very many more Lois deathfics than Martha deathfics. Perhaps that is because a Martha deathfic wouldn't be sufficiently nobly tragic, seen from Clark's point of view. A grown man can hardly rant and rave at the gods because his mom has died. At the same time, a Martha deathfic may be even more bleakly heartbreaking than a Lois deathfic. A widowed man can move on, which is pretty much the point of this fic, if I have understood it correctly. But a grown man who has lost his mother can never replace his mom with another woman who can be his beloved childhood caretaker. A mother is more irreplacable than a wife. Maybe that is why FoLCs tend to shy away from writing Martha deathfics, because Martha's death would hurt Clark (and the readers) more deeply than Lois's death would?
So a motherless man is motherless forever, but a widowed man can move on, as I said. Which set me thinking about what happens when a widowed man does start looking for other women.
I don't know many widowers at all, but let me tell you about one that I know. His name is Martin. I saw him a lot about twenty years ago, when he and his wife Agneta visited my parents very often.
Martin was five years younger than Agneta. He was and is slim, blond and boyish. Agneta was dark, with an understated elegance, and with sparkling, glittering dark grey eyes. She had the more prestigious job of them, because she was an anesthetist, and she made more money than Martin.
The two of them seemed very happy together. They were always smiling a lot. They loved to travel to exotic places together.
Martin and Agneta could not have children. They had already done some voluntary work in Poland, helping out at orphanages, and now they decided that they would try to adopt a child from a Polish orphanage. They soon set their hopes on two small brothers who had been abandoned by their parents, because the parents had too many children to feed anyway. The boys were only one and two years old when Martin and Agneta started the lengthy and emotionally and financially draining process of getting to adopt them. Finally, when the boys were three and four, Martin and Agneta could take them to their new home in Sweden.
Adopting children who are old enough to have begun to adopt a culture and a language that is different from your own is not problem-free. For example, Polish and Swedish are very different languages, much more so than Swedish and English, for example. Making these little boys happy and secure in Sweden was not easy, but Martin and Agneta were very happy in their new roles as parents.
Then, after only two years, catastrophe struck. Agneta was diagnosed with lung cancer. She had never smoked in her life, but she was an anesthetist, and she had breathed in a lot of that stuff that is used to anesthesize patients. Whatever the cause, she had cancer.
Agneta had one lung removed, and she recovered very well. For a little while she seemed healthy. But then her cancer returned, and this time the doctors were helpless to do anything for her.
Agneta died at forty-five. Martin was forty. Their little sons were six and seven.
You can imagine how horrible this must have been for the little boys. Being adopted, being aware that you don't have a "real" mother and father like other children, and always being behind on language and other things that other children seemed to know almost instinctively, took their toll on them. Agneta and Martin had taken the boys away from the country where they were born, and where people at least spoke the same language as them. And where there was, perhaps, at least a chance that their real parents would take them home again. And then, after only three years, Agneta died, leaving the boys motherless for the second time. I can only imagine their confusion, their loss, and, yes, their sense of guilt. Was it perhaps the boys' own fault that their mothers always left them? Disappeared from them?
Martin had to deal with his little boys' trauma as best he could, while at the same time he had to deal with his own crushing grief. Not only that, but Agneta had been an only child, and Martin had to try to comfort Agneta's eighty-five-year-old mother, too.
This happened about twenty years ago, and Martin is now in his early sixties. One of his boys is doing well, but the other one is having problems, and he is drinking far too much.
For himself, Martin has tried to move on. He is now on his fourth relationship since Agneta died. My general impression is that Martin is deeply needy, that he can't really face life without a woman by his side, but at the same time he seems to have lost his ability to build lasting relationships. I think that all his new women have been "bandages" that he has tried to wrap around his own bleeding heart. In the end, the women have been fed up and left him.
I have no idea how typical or untypical Martin is as a (young) widower, but I think it is true that all his "new women" have been second choices. They have been his crutches rather than the woman he truly loved. Martin had one soulmate, and that was Agneta.
Which leads me to wonder what things will be like for Lois and Clark in this fic, Terry. Will they get together romantically? Will they get married? That is hardly a given here. And even if they do, will Lois be more than Clark's second choice? Will she be more than the woman he married because his true soulmate has died?
Those are very interesting questions. I'm looking forward to the answers, Terry.
Ann
