Thank you for the picture, Carol. It does show that Clark will grieve for Lois.
It doesn't show that he will grieve for her more than she will grieve for him, however.
It could be that many people are more touched and impressed when a man is obviously grieving for his wife than when a woman is grieving for her husband.
Or it could be that I'm all wrong about that, and that most people feel the same amount of sympathy for the bereaved one, regardless of this person's gender. But in fiction, it could be that the widower is seen as slightly more interesting than the widow. At least it struck me a year ago or so that there seemed to be a whole spate of new movies about men who had lost their wives and children who had lost their mothers. (The only "widower-movie" that I can remember the title of is Pixar's animated "Up", but there were many others.) During the same period there seemed to be no new movies at all about women who had lost their husbands or children who had lost their fathers. (At least there weren't any such movies that I noted.)
Of course, most movies are about men in the first place, and therefore most movies about a main character suffering bereavement will naturally be about a man having lost his wife, because if it was the other way around the movie would have to be about a woman.
I think it is fair to say that people who create fiction are "encouraged" by the surrounding society to make their main character a male person, because that is how it is usually done. Therefore stories about "bereavement" will more naturally be about men grieving for their women than the other way round.
Ann
P.S. As I said, there are few Hollywood movies whose main characters are females. Once recent such movie, however, directed by Peter Jackson, was a movie about a young girl who was... dead! The movie was basically about her happy life as a dead person, after she had been murdered! But only her parents were the victims of her murder, because she herself was as happy as could be!
So judging from Hollywood movies, the best thing a woman or a girl can do to "set off fascinating stories" is to die. And if she does, she herself is never the one we should feel sorry for.
