Not So Merry Widowers

The stresses of survival can be a mortal blow

Social scientists have long recognized that few traumas are as hard to bear as the death of a spouse. For the survivor, the intense distress can lead to serious psychological and physical ailments. Now, a new study of survivors shows that widowhood dramatically raises the chances of death for some survivors --men. The death of a husband has almost no effect on women's mortality rates.

The study, published in the current issue of the American Journal of Public Health, was conducted by three researchers from the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health. Knud J. Helsing, Moyses Szklo and George W. Comstock followed the lives of 1,204 men and 2,828 women in semi-rural Washington County, Md., who were widowed between 1963 and 1974. With each spouse's death, the survivor was matched with a still married person, cross-referenced for comparison not only by race, sex and age, but also by such factors as years of schooling, age at first marriage, frequency of church attendance, whether the person smoked cigarettes, and the number of bathrooms and number of animals on the premises.

The study's most unexpected finding was negative: there was no evidence that either men or women were significantly more likely to die in the early months after bereavement. "That was the big surprise," Helsing, the, principal investigator, told TIME last week. "Our original premise was that the stress of the loss of a spouse would show up in mortality very quickly, and then the person would get over it. Instead, it is the stressful life situation of the widowed that seems to be hard on people." A great deal harder on men than on women, it appears. The overall mortality rate was 26% higher for widowers than for married men, compared with only a 3.8% difference in the rate between widows and married women. For widowers aged 55 to 64, the mortality rate was almost 61% higher than for married men in the same age group.

The researchers do not know why wives are less affected by the loss of a spouse than husbands, except to suggest in their paper that "the same physiologic and psychologic differences that give females greater longevity than males also act to make females more resistant to the stress of widowhood." Says Helsing: "Women may be more adaptable. They may have more of a sense of survivability."

One of the study's most important findings was that remarriage by widowers dramatically lowered their mortality rates. In men under 55 who remarried --and at least half of them did--the death rate was at least 70% lower than for those who did not; in men aged 55 to 64, it was 50% lower. In fact, death rates for widowers who remarried were even lower than for men in the same age groups who were married throughout the period of the study.

One finding was equally devastating for both widowed men and women: a dramatic rise in mortality--by three or four times--if a widowed person moved into a retirement or nursing home because of illness or inability to live with other family members. And there is no consolation in living alone: this too contributes to higher mortality rates. Even allowing for the fact that it may be the less healthy widowed who fail to remarry, the researchers feel it is fair to ask whether it may be marriage--or remarriage--that "provides the care and social support that tends to reduce mortality." If a causal connection between remarriage and reduced mortality can be established, they observe, "changes in Social Security and income tax laws to encourage remarriage of the widowed would be justified as public health measures."

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