"I couldn't believe it," says Smith's daughter, who asked that her family's names be changed to save her father embarrassment. "My parents had an agreement that if this happened, they wouldn't be kept alive by a machine. And there he was telling the doctors to do everything they could ..."
They wound up taking Smith's mother off of the respirator, and she died shortly thereafter. Her father saved the answering-machine message the doctor left in which he said, "I'm sorry to hear your wife is back in the hospital again." And for the next 12 months, Smith's father made it his mission to find out whether the hospital had made some error with regard to his wife's care.
"He was a scientist. He was doing 'research,' " Smith says, using her fingers to make quotation marks around the word "research." He has since hooked up with someone else, but it took more than a year.
Advisors with widower clients say men who begin new relationships often face consequences that can be summed up in two words: The children. Sons and daughters sometimes fear the new woman will take their father away, try to replace their mother, and worse-steal the family fortune.
"I've seen it where the children have sunk the second marriage," says Ken Anderson of Kochis Fitz/Quintile, a multifamily office based in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Anderson says one man hooked up with another woman so quickly, he wasn't even finished grieving, and he was still in a very emotional state. The man was successful, financially, and the children feared the woman was a gold digger.
"It was a rebound marriage, and he was in a depressed state and wanted a companion, and the children got jealous of that and feared the companion had ulterior motives," Anderson says. He notes that pre-nuptial agreements often allay those fears.
The men who don't remarry quickly sometimes wind up spending a lot of money in this period, Anderson says. They'll spend money on private chefs, maids, house managers. Anderson says he has clients who have a whole staff just to serve one person.
"The interesting thing is how they rely on that staff now, for support," Ken says. "I have some clients who open up more to the staff than they did when they were married."
Men may seek out new partners more quickly than women do because their lives change so much more dramatically when their wives die, says Linda Fitz, also of Kochis Fitz/Quintile. That is, a lot of women stayed home and ran the household, so while their day-to-day lives change when their husband dies, it's not as stark a contrast as it is when a man's wife dies.
"If the men are still working, they're now coming home to an empty house," Fitz says. "Men who have lost their wives are very at sea when it comes to dealing with household tasks and bill paying, because their spouses who weren't working were always taking care of that kind of stuff. So we find ourselves offering bill paying services, Merry Maid services, even chefs."
But while male clients may sometimes need more handholding on the home front than female clients, widowers can be easier to deal with when it comes to the finances. That's because it's often the men who handled the couple's finances. So when it comes time to take stock of everything, men know where the bodies are buried. Women can be left scrambling because their husbands may have had accounts scattered in four different banks, two different stock portfolios and a variety of investments across the country.
It becomes a scavenger hunt, says Karl L. Hicks, a certified financial planner with The Leonard Financial Group LLC. Hicks says he had one female client where the only hints she had about the locations of her assets were the monthly or quarterly statements that would trickle in.