Angella Johnson : VIEW FROM A BROAD
`Isn’t it great how you can get just about anything on the Internet these days,” says Gail Bentel cheerfully. We’re not talking about ordering a pizza. Bentel has run a cat-breeding business, made friends around the world, bought a house and found her dream man while surfing the Net.
Love was not what 53-year-old Bentel was looking for when, two weeks after her second husband died of a heart attack in September last year, she switched on her computer and started looking at mailing lists. She was searching for grief support without having to leave her 37ha farm in Muldersdrift on the West Rand, where she had lived virtually isolated from the rest of the world during her 15-year marriage.
“I was suddenly on my own and feeling very low,” she explains. “But I had my boarding kennel to run and could not spare the time to go outside for private counselling.”
Bentel has been surfing the Net since 1995 – she says it was a choice between a computer or satellite television, “but you can only watch so many hours of TV”.
She knew there had to be something for her among the plethora of online services offered in the modern computer age.
Among the multitude of sites ranging from pornography to recipes, she found three international mailing lists for grieving widows.
“I discarded the first two because one seemed to cater for people with raw grief, anger and pain, while the other was too depressingly subdued,” she says.
It was on the third, more upbeat list that Bentel hooked on to Ed Pomerantz, a widower of five years from New Jersey in the United States. He was among hundreds of people in this virtual community who have gained support and comfort by communicating with others also trying to cope after a spouse has died.
“For example,” says Bentel, “if I was having a bad day, I just sat down and wrote what was troubling me. Someone would always reply with a kind word or a story of their own which would help to ease the loneliness.”
Bentel and her late husband did not have a very happy marriage and they had no children. Nevertheless, when he died she was suddenly faced with the realisation that she was alone, with no close family nearby to turn to. “I was grieving for myself, I suppose,” she says with brutal honestly.
Sometimes she simply wanted to share with someone the beauty of the South African countryside, after sitting on her patio and experiencing the sight and sounds of the veld. The important thing was to know that when she reached out, someone would be there.
The first mail she received from Pomerantz, a 57-year-old industrial engineer, was very sympathetic but not especially encouraging. He had joined the mailing list five months earlier after reading about it in a magazine.
“Actually, he suggested that as a new widow I would be best going to another list as this was for more seasoned widowers, but I didn’t want to,” chuckles Bentel in a throaty smoker’s voice.
“Which is just as well, because after I had posted a few more mails Ed and I picked up that we had the same wicked sense of humour, and soon we were sharing private, emotional feelings with each other on a one-to-one basis.”
Bentel told Pomerantz all about her miserable, sexless marriage to John, who was 16 years her senior. He shared fond memories of times with his wife, Jill, before she died, and of the son they had adopted from Columbia.
Soon they were e-mailing each other three or four times a week and their friendship grew into something deeper.
Bentel said Pomerantz’s family in the US heard the word “Africa”, assumed his new love was black and were a tad concerned about her fitting into their world.
“We’d already become quite close before he discovered I was white. He said later that he just realised I was educated and that I was Jewish because of something I had written – Jews never write the word God, opting instead for G_d.”
It was not until Bentel put a memorial photograph of her late husband (it happened to be their wedding picture) on the bulletin board that Pomerantz could “reassure” his family about the colour of his computer companion. “But he still didn’t really know what I looked like because I had lost about 18kg since John died.”
Bentel, on the other hand, had already copied a computer picture of Pomerantz taken at a gathering in Texas of some members of the widows’ group, which was posted on-line. “I had fallen for him intellectually, but the physical was not bad either.”
As the romance blossomed, e-mails proved to be too restricting and they decided to upgrade their computers in order to have more interactive communication.
With the new system they could “chat” simultaneously using a split screen to see both texts, send virtual greeting cards, bouquets of flowers and even play music for each other.
Then last New Year’s eve, three months after their cyber courting began, the couple met in a “chat room” at about midnight South African time and saw in 1998 together. Bentel went to bed, woke up about six hours later and celebrated again on the computer, New York time.
“Ed phoned and we spoke for only the second time [the first had been earlier in December]. I jokingly suggested he should come and visit, but he didn’t say anything.” To her surprise and delight, he phoned 10 days later to say he had bought a ticket and would be arriving on Valentine’s Day.
“I spent the week before his arrival in a state of nerves, only to learn he missed his connection in London and would not come until the next day. It was the most miserable day I have had in a long time,” she recalls.
The next day she went to the airport and waited for her man. He walked out of customs with his 17-year-old son, David, and Bentel flew into his arms.
She says driving home was the longest 45 minutes of her life. “As soon as we arrived home, we disappeared into the bedroom and it was the most natural thing in the world to do.”
Three days later he proposed, saying he could not face the future without her. She accepted. Fittingly, this happened while they were both huddled over the computer chatting to their group.
He left 10 days later, she followed on May 1 and they were married on May 17 – to the delight of Bentel’s father, who travelled from Canada, where he lives with her sister.
“It’s my first Jewish marriage, so he was thrilled to have me back in the fold, so to speak.”
As Bentel prepares to start her new life as a New Jersey housewife, she argues that with computers no one needs to feel alone (though they must be able to pay telephone bills that can often exceed R2 000 a month).
“The Internet helped us to fall in love because we were able to talk freely, with none of the physical electricity that clouds people’s minds when they face each other. So you get to know the real person. It is much deeper and therefore, I believe, will be much longer lasting.”