HOME is the two top floors of a condominium apartment building in Manhattan, near Central Park, which were demolished and rebuilt over the past year as a French palace. It is a work in progress: a butler in a white jacket serves soft drinks in crystal goblets as workers on tall ladders adjust the wiring for a chandelier in the rotunda.
Rooms are filled with gilded French furniture, crystal sconces, heavy silken fabrics, towering Greek columns and hand-painted murals. It has all been planned ""so you shouldn"t think you"re in America,"" says its owner, Joan Rivers.
But the minute she begins talking about her life during the last three years, the far-fetched trappings of celebrity and fortune fade away. As she speaks about life on her own without her husband of 23 years, Edgar Rosenberg, Ms. Rivers sounds like widows everywhere who are groping for a way to go forward despite what nearly all agree is the most painful, wrenching and self-defeating experience they have ever faced. Even though she did not become a widow under typical circumstances - her husband committed suicide - Ms. Rivers"s description of her passage through grief is not all that different from that of other women whose husbands have died.
""You don"t ever get over the loss of your husband: you survive it,"" said Ms. Rivers, who is Mrs. Rosenberg to her household staff. ""I was 52 years old and had to totally start a new existence."" At first, she said, she turned to close friends and a psychologist for help. ""But nobody can really help you,"" she said, her brash speaking voice toned down to a soft, serious level. ""You have to help yourself. This is a solo trip."" Few married women will escape widowhood. There are 11.5 million widows in the United States, and projections from census data suggest that nearly 80 percent of all married women can expect to be widowed, and that they will survive their husbands by about 16 years. Underlying those projections are two trends: women live longer than men, seven years on average, and men tend to marry women younger than themselves.
Ms. Rivers and other widows who have written new books on the subject all describe life as a black pit immediately after their husbands died. Philomene Gates writes in ""Suddenly Alone: A Woman"s Guide to Widowhood"" (Harper & Row, $18.95) that she ""wanted to die too."" She was married for 38 years to Samuel E. Gates, a lawyer who died of a heart attack in 1979.
Mrs. Gates, herself a lawyer in New York, goes on to write that she ""felt vulnerable, unattractive, unloved and hideously alone,"" and that ""the first few months of widowhood almost flattened me.""
""I felt my life was over,"" said Xenia Rose, whose husband the cellist Leonard Rose, died of leukemia in 1984; they had been married 20 years. ""There was no future.
""It was the worst thing that ever happened to me,"" added Mrs. Rose, a psychotherapist in New York. Her account of her experience, ""Widow"s Journey: a Return to the Loving Self,"" will be published in October by Henry Holt ($19.95).
Ms. Rivers described herself as virtually starting over from scratch. Her husband was found dead from an overdose of prescription drugs in a Philadelphia hotel room on Aug. 14, 1987. His death came three months after Ms. Rivers was dismissed by the Fox Broadcasting Company from ""The Late Show,"" a ratings failure that was an attempt to topple Johnny Carson. Her husband had managed her business affairs and was the show"s executive producer.
""I was totally unstrung, totally fragmented,"" Ms. Rivers said. ""I had no career. No husband. Nothing.""
""I didn"t know how to turn on the outside lights or where the burglar alarm was,"" she said. ""Edgar did everything, so I could concentrate totally on my child and my career. I didn"t even know the name of my bank.""
At the same time, she said, she was dealing with other issues typical of early widowhood: anger toward her husband, loss of self-esteem, friends" expectations of how she should and should not behave, rejection by married friends who felt uncomfortable socializing with a single woman, and worries about finances. She wanted to go back to work, but the combination of her talk-show failure and the circumstances of her husband"s death made her unemployable.
""Nobody wants to see someone whose husband has killed himself do comedy four weeks later,"" she said.
Some widows say that initially they are so exhausted by grief that they can hardly get out of bed in the morning. ""Putting on my makeup, deciding what to wear, thinking of what I had to do - it all took as much energy as climbing Mount Everest,"" Mrs. Gates writes.
Ms. Rivers had a very different reaction. Unable to work, she funneled her energy into frenetic travel.
""I went all over,"" she said. ""To Dallas for a party, the South of France for a weekend. It was better to be in the air for 14 hours than sitting at home.""
Like many women, she has never liked being called a widow. ""It is a terrible word,"" Ms. Rivers said. ""The connotation is a lady in a long black dress who has retired from the world. And then, when you start to go out, and you laugh in a restaurant, people look at you as the Merry Widow. That"s even worse.
""Part of the healing process is that you can laugh at something, even the next day, and then you start to cry again. There are terrible highs and terrible lows.""
For every widow, recovery follows an individual path. ""There are no rules for getting through this,"" said Mrs. Rose, who has remarried.
""I expected to feel 100 percent better a year after Leonard died. I felt worse.""
Mrs. Rose, who encourages widows to join support groups, said many women feel so much pressure to recover by the end of a year that ""they think they are weird if they don"t.""
Laurie Graham, the author of ""Rebuilding the House: One Woman"s Passage Through Grief"" (Viking, $17.95), said it was ""at least a year before I felt tentatively hopeful, but I still had terrible episodes of sadness."" Ms. Graham, a former editor at Scribner"s, was married for eight years to George Shieffelin, a retired chairman of Scribner"s, who died of a heart attack in 1988.
""I was not ready to meet new people until two years after George died,"" she said.
Ms. Rivers, who has resurrected an ""ice cold"" career and is writing a book about her life, said she was ""very proud"" of what she had done on her own. ""My life now is very busy, very full and terribly lonely,"" she said.
She came close to remarrying about a year after her husband died. ""I was so desperate, so left out,"" she said. Now she sees someone on a ""semi-regular"" basis, she said, but has no plans to marry.
Mrs. Gates has rebuilt what she called ""a co-ed life."" Although she said she still thinks of her husband ""40 times a day,"" she has worked hard to establish friendships with single men whom she can call to accompany her to parties and dances.
""I like men,"" she said, ""and I have made the most enormous effort not to have a circle of friends who are all widows.""
Ms. Rivers said she was now in ""the final phase of widowhood: you have adjusted, you are able to go on but you do not forget your husband.""
""I miss the person you can say everything to,"" she said, her eyes welling tears. ""I miss having a history with somebody. I miss getting into a car after a party and saying, "Could you believe that?" I miss the friend, the buddy who is really in your corner. There is no one to say: "I"m going downstairs. Do you want a sandwich?" Those are the things of widowhood that are just killers, even now.""
She took a deep breath. ""He"s not going to come back, so you have to get your life going again. You must get to it, and don"t wallow. A life can be made. It can even be terrific. But it"s never going to be the same.""
