How I See It

I've been away for awhile living my life and moving on, but more on that later. For me, moving on does not mean abandoning what I've lived through. Bereavement is now a part of me and adds to my perspective, but I don't cling to grief or push it on everyone I meet. Over time my identity as a widow has blended with other aspects of my life and personality. I've consciously sought wholeness and fought against indiscriminately stuffing the spaces left empty when Al died. Friends, lay and religious counselling, and self-inquiry have helped, as has the passage of time.

Unrelieved, unprocessed grief--grief that is harbored--is not healthy. We who were left behind are supposed to live. Anyway, that's how I see it.

I can understand, though, people who hold on to their mourning. I think, at least in part, it's a reaction to our culture's suppression of grief displays. Our culture is riddled with unexpressed grief. It gnaws off its own limbs in futile attempts to disown this most basic part of our destiny. Well it can't be denied for long. It merely dislocates and crops up as rage, paranoia, and ruthlessness. Or numbness. Just look at us, so afraid of sadness. Let me tell you something--sadness doesn't kill when you acknowledge and respect it. Then you can move on.

Material Stuff

When Al died, one of my widowed friends offered to come to my apartment that week and help me get rid of his things, as her sister had done for her in her time of need. It was a generous offer, but I declined. I wasn't ready to let go of all the material stuff that had meant so much to him. He had treasured his collections of clothes, belts, boots, hats, other accessories, and when he especially liked the fit or quality of something, he bought duplicates, ensuring their replacement when the original wore out. His assumption was that he would live a long, long life, and his fear was that he would not have enough to last to its end.

As a result I wound up with closets and drawers stuffed with his possessions. Somehow his reverence for these things transferred over to me (partly because he had occupied the apartment for a couple of decades before I'd moved in). I couldn't even contemplate cracking open his closet doors, let alone entering and emptying their contents. Three months after his death, when our relatives flew to New York for a memorial service, I invited our nieces and nephews to take whatever they wanted. They had no trouble whatsoever in breaching the hold. The girls took his cashmere sweaters and ties. The boys shirted and suited up for post-college interviews. When they were finished, my bedroom looked like the end of a 75% off sale day at Barney's. I consolidated what they'd left behind and lived around it all for a couple of years. It's funny what a person chooses not to see or feel. 

I'm not sure what made me decide to make more space for myself in my own living quarters or, rather, in my own life. I needed to work up to a major change in my perceptions before I could take what felt to me like a major action. It was a few years after Al's death that I hired an organizer to come in and help me. The project took nearly all day. We started with two industrial-sized garbage bags: 1) to give away and 2) to throw away. A third pile was to keep. Hiring a professional was money well-spent. The woman was ruthless and relentless, just what I needed. She gave me little time to dwell on or protest the process, and I was swept up in her determination. We wound up with about twenty-five bags and a tiny keepsake pile. We drove to Housing Works with about twenty bags stuffed with contributions, brought the refuse bags to the basement, and redistributed my things into the emptied drawers and closets. Done, done, and done. 

I sometimes wish I was like my friend who offered to help me clear out my apartment the week Al died. She tends to act with immediacy in other circumstances too. People like that get more accomplished more quickly, and life, as we know, can be so brief. But I'm just not made that way. I suppose accepting the way we are made and figuring out how to work with our own material is an accomplishment too, whenever we happen to come to our realizations.

Lifelines

As the years accumulate since my husband died, I am beginning to retrieve a sense of myself, the part of me that did things on my own and dreamed on my own even when Al and I were married. Part of that self is what I protected all the days of our relationship. There's another part from the literature I've been reading all of my life.   And then there's a part that's pure mystery.

I was in my late 30's when Al and I met and, by then, had drawn lessons from observing what happened to women who hadn't nurtured their independence when divorce or widowhood struck. He and I agreed to continue  our alone time and to maintain our long-time friendships, together or individually--whatever worked. Like many couples my husband and I weren't always drawn to the same pursuits. He was an athlete, and I was drawn to books, theater and contemplative workshops of different kinds, especially writing. Most days we happily made plans for dinner together while he left for his morning run, leaving me to read or face the blank page. On the nights when I went to a play with one of my single friends, the experience was made sweeter by my knowing he was waiting for me at home .

When he died I continued many of my routines, but theater stopped making sense to me. Contemporary art didn't work at all, seeming like empty, futile exercises in callow intellectual neatness. The only workshops I attended were for the bereaved. Writing was out of the question. The last thing I wanted to do was delve into my thoughts and feelings without a workshop leader or counselor holding the other end of a lifeline.

Even my teaching was infused with grief and isolation. I taught across a wide gulf, a chasm really, that was only apparent to me, or so I believed. Sometimes students would come to me with their own loss of parent or sibling. Some were trying to maintain discipline in the face of their devastation. Others had lost it and were drowning in their own confusion. I was able to be the steady one then, offering compassionate coaching I wasn't yet ready to take for myself.

I taught literature by rote then, having accumulated enough years of experience by that time to draw on the combined wisdom that had once guided me. I had no choice but to keep the faith that, even though the gates were presently closed to me, the poets and writers continued to light the way for others. I always understood that much of great literature is written in the shadow of the knowledge of mortality, but where I once conceptualized that belief, now I knew it in my heart.

I remember back when I was a student myself, thinking why does there have to be so much death in this stuff? Yet all that death didn't put me off from continuing my studies in literature. I was enticed by the minds whose writings helped me think beyond the mercantile world view of my immediate family. I was willing to put up with the death stuff, willing to pick around it for what I needed then, forgoing old Lear for young Hamlet, but then going back to Lear for all that juicy, blatantly-articulated family disfunction.

I remember too thinking the death stuff might be for later, much later, in my life. It was too far ahead to be of concern. I had the world by the tail when I was a college student, and death could be forestalled for many decades while I made my mark. Still I must have taken it all in, all the images on mortality I'd picked through and tried to leave untouched. It must have affected me on an unconscious level, even though I forgot about it for years.

Literature, friends, counselors, my students--they've all been my teachers in this process. And it may have been that by my dwelling for a while on the rock bottom of Lear's "No, no, no life" (a final realization before he dies--rejection and acceptance, negative and positive wrapped up in a single thought), I'm choosing to grab a lifeline and say to myself, Alright then. This is how it is and yet I live. This is how it is and yet the world goes on.

Letting Go

On the floor in the back corner of my hall closet are two cartons holding the ashes of my late husband. I'm waiting until the time seems right to release them. I think I may be approaching that time.

Al died in August and, knowing his prognosis, had made the arrangements for his own cremation earlier that year. He didn't want me to have to deal with it after he'd died. I was the one who worked on keeping him alive; I could brook no concept that included his death. He, the more practical one, settled those matters in his usual direct approach. He had me come with him, so that I would know. We sat in leather chairs in the wood-panelled office at Riverside Memorial Chapel. Al did most of the talking, stating his plans to the sales rep who sat on the other side of the huge, highly polished desk.

No frills, Al said. Simple cremation. I remember the lush design of the office, meant to look like a gentleman's den from an earlier time. All that soft leather and polished wood. Heavy velvet drapes. I was glad it looked the way that it did because it complimented Al's ideals of refinement.

Al got the sales rep to talk a bit about how he'd gotten into this business. I didn't listen to the details. While he told his story, he asked if we wanted to reserve the chapel for a memorial service. No service, Al was adamant. I almost argued, but the reality of "an after" was beginning to make itself known to me. I remained silent.

I think maybe Al, who was such a social person, couldn't bear to think of our having a party without him. Not that they were parties, but my congregation held a special service the week he died. And months afterwards (to allow for our far-flung families to fly to New York) I arranged for a service to be held at the Ethical Culture Society.

After the papers had been signed and the check written, the sales rep handed Al the contract and telephone numbers for the nationwide network of funeral directors who participated in the program. All of the documents were folded into a heavy cream colored envelope embossed to look like leather. Al handed it to me. Keep it in a safe place, he said.

As we were leaving the office, Al asked the sales rep what size shoe he wore. I give the guy credit; he didn't miss a step and answered that he wore a size eleven. I have a beautiful pair of cordovan lace ups, Al said, hardly ever worn. Could you use them? I don't remember the man's story, the one Al elicited from him, but I think he said it was a hardship to have to wear a suit to work every day. Sure, he said, thanks. Al had wonderful taste and an extensive collection of shoes. I don't know if the man expected to see Al alive again, but that same week Al said he needed me to drive him by Riverside Chapel. He dropped off the shoes in their original box. I didn't know which one was doing the greater favor--Al for giving the man a good pair of dress shoes or the man for taking them.

After he died a friend drove me to pick up Al's remains apportioned into three plain cardboard boxes. I sent one of the boxes to his brother, who was visiting Maui at the time. He took it to the top of Haleakala and released Al's remains with prayer. Al loved Maui, where his youngest brother, Eddie, had lived with his family. Al and I had been married on Maui, and when Eddie died several years before Al got sick, the family held a similar ceremony atop the same place, Haleakala, the dormant volcano.

I'm not familiar with cremation; it isn't a part of my family's traditions. So I have to reach deep down inside to feel my way through this material letting go. It's coming up to four years since Al died. I don't have to release him all at once. Maybe this summer I'll give some of him up to the mountains in Columbia County, where we had such good times. And maybe this fall I'll let some of him go on the walkway by the East River, where he loved to run with our dog Star. I'm thinking that will be enough for now.

Second Year Regrets

For me, the second year of widowhood was worse than the first. The shock that had enveloped me in the beginning of bereavement had begun to thaw. Relief that my husband's suffering was over had all but faded. Regrets flooded me, and I relived them over and over again. Two isolated incidents in particular nagged at me. Or I should say non-incidents. Why had I refused to go riding with him at the stables he had discovered near our house? And what made me say no to his suggestion of a hot air balloon ride over the Hudson Valley?

In the second year of widowhood, especially in the early morning hours, these two particular self-recriminatory details of the ways I had failed him played over and over in my mind. Unacknowledged were the days spent at chemo, in doctors' waiting rooms, by his bed in the hospital; pouring over research for therapies, encouraging statistics, and foods to tempt his waning appetite. Unappreciated was the exhaustion that became second nature to me as I continued to teach four college courses, chair meetings, and write the textbook I had contracted to finish before he fell ill. Unregarded were the bedside buckets, the salves and gauzes, the saniwipes, and the pill counts.

Time had collapsed in my memory. I racked my brain trying to remember when he had wanted to go horseback riding and hot-air ballooning. Was it before he got sick? Did I refuse his wish when our time together seemed as if it would go spinning on for many decades? Did I refuse during the time when I believed I had a right to say I don't feel like doing that today; when the understanding was maybe tomorrow or next year? Was it before he was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer when nothing would be the same again? It must have been. It had to have been before that. After, neither one of us had the strength or will for anything but fighting the enemy.

When I had the courage to stay with my regrets over what I did and didn't do with and for Al, I recognized that a much larger remorse lurked below the surface. My main regret, the motherlode from which veined out all of my smaller, more manageable self-recriminations, was that I hadn't saved him. That's the one that grew loud in my sleep, the one that I stifled as soon as I began to detect its insidious questions that begged no answers. Why hadn't the doctors detected the cancer earlier? Why had I let him go by himself for his routine physicals? Why hadn't I known when his symptoms changed from those of a healthy athletic man who pushed his body to extremes into the symptoms of a man incubating cancer in his lungs? Oh I knew I was regretting the impossible, but I regretted it all the same.

Still, in the sleepless early mornings of that second year (and, yes, sometimes even now), I wish I had said yes to every wish and whim he had ever expressed every moment of our lives together. I imagine us waking early on a crisp fall morning and mounting our horses, the pungence of leather and steed, the steady clopping of hooves on mountain paths. I see us dismounting at the end of the trail, laughing at our aching thighs and bowed legs, eager for a hearty lunch. Or I change the scene entirely and picture us together in a basket strung to a giant stripped balloon,  amazed at our luck, rising, rising together above the valleys, over the mountains, and into the clouds.

Within

Within the holy
grief settles around stillness.
Who left? What remains?

This is for another day.

Now there is smoke
and a ravenous sea
barely felt through ends

and seen, if at all, on
a tiny pane, fog
from the earliest voices.

Lighten Up

Lest I give the impression that all of my hours alone were spent in the dulldrums, I want to talk about something I did to our home that would have started an argument when Al was alive. He died in August and the following summer I decided that I'd had enough of the dark wall panelling in our upstairs bathroom. The house is a rustic contemporary with skylights and many windows, and we had fallen in love with all of the light that flooded every room. But he had decided that the wood in the master bath needed refinishing and, against my wishes, had it stained brown. I was bothered by the way it absorbed the light streaming down from the two skylights, but agreed that at least the wood was protected from the shower and bath steam. So I lived with it.

The June after he died, once school was over, I bought a gallon of white pickling formula and tore up a pile of Al's old tee shirts and went to work. He wouldn't have minded my changing the walls; in fact he would probably have liked the results. But the slowness of my process would have driven him crazy. He liked things done quickly and efficiently, and he wasn't exactly a do-it-yourselfer.

All summer and into the fall I lovingly and meditatively rubbed pickling fluid into the wood, plank by plank, and inch by inch. Each board was a revelation, the way the grain stood out from the background and picked up a subtle sheen. I wouldn't have rushed through that job for anything, and it felt like a luxury not to be forced. The physical act of rubbing the wood was a great comfort, bringing me close once again to my late father who used to make craftsman-level changes to our rowhouse in northeast Philadelphia. As the younger of two daughters, I sometimes played "the son," handing him his tools and quietly keeping him company as he worked. That comfortable male compatibility bloomed in me as I reworked the wood in my own home.

And there was something about slowing the work in progress that I enjoyed. I liked seeing how every lightened plank added to the effects in the room. I liked comparing its look in the daytime to that of night. I liked too the anticipation of the next unveiling and knowing I could wait. In fact I liked to wait.

And I liked the tiredness in my arms from pressing the whitening into the wood, following the grain. I liked stopping when that exercise felt like enough. Finally I was taking care of myself and recognizing my own rhythms.

I admit it. There was even a part of me that liked doing something in a way that Al would have hated. He would not have kept his feelings to himself. In the palpable absence of his critical voice--not my favorite of his voices--I felt liberated.

The wall project stayed unfinished from June to November until the upcoming Thanksgiving, which I held at my house, pushed me to lighten the final plank. The result was glorious.

Pictures from the First Year of Widowhood

It's hard to remember my first year after Al died. I lived so much of it by rote. As Emily Dickinson put it, "The feet, mechanical, go round--/Of Ground, or Air, or Ought--/A wooden way/Regardless grown,/A Quartz contentment, like a stone--."

I didn't recognize the shock that enveloped me, but nearly four years since his death I see that it kept me upright and steady, like braces for a falling body. It kept me busy too. I went to work every day and taught my four writing and literature courses. I went out with friends every weekend, obeying the small voice inside that warned against isolation. I signed up for a three-month meal delivery service in an effort to fill in part of the nurturing that Al had offered whole-heartedly as the head cook and take-out planner.

I enlarged my favorite photographs of Al to display in my office, city apartment, and the rooms of my house. Thinking back, I suppose I overdid it, displaying pictures everywhere, but it's just one of the ways that being married to Al changed me. When we first met, I was struck by all of the pictures of family members and friends that he had on his apartment walls. I had been raised to be private, and I took those values to the extreme. Here was a man who went to the other extreme. When I first saw all of his pictures of far-off relatives and friends, both present and past, I was reminded of F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story "The Rich Boy" about an unfullfilled man who substitutes photographs for relationships.

I remember doubting whether the guy I was just beginning to know had any more potential than the character in the story. Despite my literary allusions I must admit I carried a sort of Good Housekeeping checklist for potential mates in my head that left no room for my instincts or Al's originality. But I saw things in Al that convinced me to ignore the deeply-ingrained, simplistic warning signs of an unpromising match and kept me moving forward together with him. In fact, if it wasn't too much of an oversimplification, I'd say that over the years he showed me how to let go, and I showed him how to hold on. In his honor I will not attempt to edit that dangling preposition.

And it was in his honor too, that I chose to exhibit photographs of him, of him and me, of him and various nieces and nephews, and of him and Star all over the place. He had put an enlarged photo of the two of us out in the dining room after he had gotten sick, and I remember demuring at the time, but not much. After he died, I nailed it to the wall. It's still there.

One of the photos I enlarged for display was taken on our honeymoon in Hawaii in 1993. It's a close-up of Al that I shot. He took a good picture. He is sitting cross-legged on a hillside. His runner's legs and muscular arms are tanned and shapely. He isn't smiling and he's starting pointedly at the camera. He is wearing a hot pink baseball cap that he never would have chosen for himself. He wore it for me because I loved how it set off his hazel eyes.

Al was 55 when we married, and it was his first marriage. It was my second at 44. I had been decidedly single since I was 29. Even though we had been together for the five previous years, we were both wary at the beginning of our honeymoon and still guarding our illusions of independence. Tying the knot had pushed us into high alert for a few tense days until I realized what was happening and clued him in during a calm moment. We both pretty much settled down after that and enjoyed ourselves. But I loved that picture because it showed him in all of his masculine glory just as he was deciding to compromise his ideals of masculine colors--mostly blues and grays, definitely not hot pink.

I had taken the second picture too, on the deck of the house that we bought in 1998. Al is kneeling on one knee with one arm around Star, our standard, and the other holding a rifle that he used for target practice. I admit that I was as attracted to his marksmanship as I was repelled by the gun. Despite the weapon he gripped with his dominant left hand, his expression had gentled in the five years since we had married. I don't think I've often seen emotion portrayed quite so potently in a photograph, except for some stills taken of actors playing their film roles. I once heard the actor Giancarlo Giannini say after a viewing of Seven Beauties that a good actor knows how to punch out the camera lens, and that statement aptly describes Al's energy, but he wasn't acting. The authenticity of Al's emotions come through in the picture just as it did in his life. People knew if they wanted to hear a blunt and intelligent perception of truth, they could come to Al. And those who didn't want to hear it stayed away, because he didn't hold back.

Al was one of those rare people who had the ability to lend the camera a piece of his spirit. Even today as I write while looking at this photo, his powerful essence comes back to me and quickens my heartbeat. Back in 1998 when I got back the developed shot, I was struck by how much his compelling gaze sent a lifeline beyond the frame and lovingly made me a part of the picture.

In 2007 after he died, I reached for those pictures for the same reasons I ordered a meal delivery service. I needed to keep up the illusion that he was still physically present and seeing to our material needs. Even now, although I'm conscious of the impression all of our pictures must make on guests to my home (I know what I'd think if I visited someone's house and saw what amounts to a shrine in the public rooms), I haven't changed any of them yet. I like keeping the tension going between his extroversion and my private ways. The tension keeps him alive to me as much as the pictures themselves do. It reminds me of how, over our years together, we had surrendered our individual ways for something far more wonderful, even as I begin to wean myself from him.

An Ice Storm

In the northeast part of the United States, we'll remember the winter of 2011 as a harsh one to have endured. It's March and after a mild, rainy week, I was awakened by a crash outside the house. Things are always creaking and crashing in the mountains, so I didn't get up right away to explore. Instead I stayed under the covers and stared at the icy branches of the birches just outside my picture window. The temperature had dropped to the teens and frozen the rain into an overnight ice storm. It was a gray morning, but those intricate cross-hatched branches were catching light from somewhere beyond the clouds. I contemplated getting my camera to try to capture their beauty, but I've known for a long time that I can either be with a riveting presence or photograph it; I can't have both. As I get older more and more I choose being with the thing, taking it in and sending back...what?...wonder, I suppose.

The tree closest to my bedroom was bent nearly double with the weight of the ice. It's an old tree, old for a birch, its trunk much wider than my arm span. Birches aren't supposed to live too long, but the ones surrounding my house look to be somewhat venerable. They looked old when Al and I moved in a dozen years ago, and despite their fragility, they've held their ground until now. But this harsh winter the ground is covered with broken limbs and trunks. I've lost many trees already and was looking forward to the year's thaw. I'd been hoping that the past few mild days marked the beginning of the change, but change doesn't usually happen in so predictable a linear pattern.

When I went downstairs to make coffee I saw that on the other side of the house, our biggest birch tree had fallen. That was the crash I'd heard. I could barely look at it, my thoughts flipping from mourning its beauty to methods of disposal to relief that it had fallen away from the house and along the edge of the woods. But it was to sadness and loss that my thoughts returned most. I guess I carried some belief in me that since it had made it to old age, it would take on the strength and longevity of the mighty oak. Certainly it was an unexamined belief, buried deep beneath my conscious, rational thoughts, some form of magical thinking.

I brought my coffee back upstairs to drink in bed, all the while looking out at the tree that still stood outside my bedroom window. Bent as it was, it was holding, and the weather report had forecasted a mid-afternoon thaw. I willed that tree to survive until the sun came and released its limbs from their crystal shackles, allowing it to stretch once more towards the sky. I stayed in bed longer than I should have, sending out my good wishes and cheers, pushing away the thought that some inner rot that I couldn't see might get the better of it, wondering if that was what had done in our oldest, strongest birch.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

It's been nearly a month since I've written an entry. When I decided to start this blog, I was on break from teaching and determined to make something positive of the rest of my life. What a tall order! Each morning I rushed to my office, a mug of coffee in hand, and the thought that this was truly the first day of the rest of my life in my head. I have a love/hate relationship with cliches--sometimes they feel like the only wisdom that lights my way.

I rushed out of bed to break the hold that sleep and hiding has had over me since Al died. Its temptations swirled around me like a fog dulling the edges of shock and pain. I rushed through the fog to my light-filled office and sat myself down to make something bigger and better than my self-involved, isolating grief. But I've found it's easy to backslide. I'm back in school now with plenty of work to justify my temporary abandonment of this project, but I live with a lingering sense of self-betrayal.

Grief isn't just a feeling to work through or get over. It isn't temporary at all. It lodges in the heart and will not be evicted, only hidden away in a remote room with a locked door. At least that's the way our culture has decided to deal with it, allotting it a finite period of acknowledgement. It's taken as impolite to show grief or mention a dead loved one past the allowed time, whatever that might be. I observe otherwise sensitive people turn impassive or quickly change the subject when I try, and I must admit to a certain perverse pleasure in continuing to try.

Al was an iconoclast and provacateur, and while he lived I was often trying to smooth things over and neutralize his thrusts and parries.  Now, I like to think I'm honoring him by digging up what people insist on burying from their conscious thoughts--death hangs over us all. I'm not nearly as good at it as he was; I'm restricted by a veneer of niceness that ladies were brought up to hide under in the 1950s. But I do crack its shell as often as I can these days. Breaking through gives me hope for a better future, even as I make myself nervous when I do it.

Other cultures are much healthier when it comes to grief. Sobonfu Some, who comes from Burkina Faso near the Ivory Coast of Africa, tells about grief circles in her village. She says there is at least one always going, with people dropping in as the spirit moves them. There's the Mexican Day of the Dead and the belief that the dead are always with us and not to be feared, but rather included in our daily lives. I've attended services at the Barrio Museum in New York City and was struck by the normalizing of what is, of course, a regular part of everyone's life cycle. I also find comfort in my religion's weekly sabbath Kaddish service or prayer for the Dead, where we speak the name outloud in the presence of the other congregants before reciting a prayer of gratitude for life. It doesn't have to be a relative or friend we're acknowledging; some people rise and pray for the unknown dead who might have otherwise been forgotten.

It's tempting to forget. It's easy to bury oneself in work or other duties and distractions. But denying death denies life. I somehow feel that I'm snuffing out my life force when I edit Al and my parents out of my conversations. They're part of who I am, how I think, and what I feel. Once again, I vow to write and relate from a holistic perspective. And when I backslide, either from a sense of politeness to others or a need to escape from my own experiences, I vow to forgive and try again.

Grief: Act I

Kuber-Ross made a major contribution to western civilization when she distinguished between the stages of grief. Regardless of whatever information was released about her change of heart in her later years, she is a hero of mine. Her individualizing and naming specific emotions brought them out from hiding and helped remove some the shame enveloping a mourning process that takes its time.

Not that my grief has proceeded in an orderly sequence, but still I can see how grieving proceeds in stages, although often for me it's one step forward and two steps back. I believe in my eventual evolution because I know widows of sensitivity and substance who have arrived at a perspective of life that appears more balanced than how I feel most days. Some of my friends were widowed before me, and I know their lives. Their stories have helped me to believe that sometime in the future, my acceptance of my husband's death and resolution to live a full life will carry me over into another state of being.

I keep reaching for that acceptance, but for now I'm still mostly in the first act. My determination to move on dissolves into anger and tears at the drop of a hat. I'm at odds with myself. On one hand I want to be done with grief. I want it excised from my mind and spirit. On the other hand, letting go of it feels like letting go of my husband, and I'm not sure that I'm ready to do that. Trying to overrule my ambivalence doesn't work. My grief acts up when I attempt to ignore it. Sometimes I'm rougher and try to kill and bury it, but that doesn't work either. My grieving needs to die of natural causes. Or go to sleep. Or transform. Or remain a part of me, but in a more bearable state.

I don't know how it will be for me. My friends can only share so much of how it's been for them. This deepest and most mysterious of experiences renders dumb even the most articulate among us.

Patience, I tell myself. Be patient and have faith.

A Mood

I've been postponing writing another entry until I felt more in command of my mood, which doesn't seem fit for public attention. I was doing fine before 2011 showed up, getting into a rhythm of composing that I was determined to maintain.

I guess I was hoping to write a sort of "Helpful Tips by Heloise for Widows" column, but I couldn't sustain my cheeriness and optimism beyond the turn of the new year when I left my home to visit my best friend and her husband. I've made this visit every year since Al died, spending New Year's Eve and the following week with them. But the wind left my sails when I entered the New Jersey suburbs, where it seems like everyone is married, and when a marriage fails or a spouse dies, well, the single person finds someone else to marry. I was in the land of couples for a week, and it ticked off the uncertainties that lurk beneath my surface.

Or maybe that wasn't it at all. Maybe it was being a guest instead of a hostess that shut me up. Leaving my house in upstate New York, I was overcome with a sense of my own transience. When I'm home I try to modify this feeling by imposing routine on my days. But I couldn't shake off the knowledge that I was passing through my friends' house and passing through my life, as all three of us were and as we all are, every moment that we live.

And yet, even to me, knowing what I know about mortality and the suddenness with which we can be struck down, even then, her home held the illusion of permanency. That's what got me down--knowing it's an illusion. I'll never be blissfully ignorant of death's inevitability again. My friend, as much as she suffered on my behalf, was not transformed when Al died. It doesn't work that way. Intimate knowledge of death is the great divide, and I'm on the other side now.

As guest I was witness to the everyday banter and bicker of husband and wife, the delegation of chores, the plans and concerns of an on-going household. I tried to help, stay out of the way, and otherwise accommodate as a good female guest should do. I fell back on the lessons my mother taught me back in the 1950s. I set aside what I know about life cycles and concentrated on life's minutia. It was a great escape for me, better than television, which I watch too much when I'm home.

Unnatural death--that's an oxymoron, and yet that's how I see my husband's death at 69, unnaturally early. I was 58 when he died, too young to be a widow. Al's illness and death shattered my expectations of life's possibilities, and I've been living in a split screen since then. In order to fit in with friends whose knowledge of death is through loss of parents, I acquiesce to the shared illusion that death works in an orderly, generational sequence, oldest ones out first. But in the background, my newsreel plays, humming wrenching loss and psychic bleeding that has (thank goodness) slowed to a manageable trickle, now possible to ignore in social situations. I have psychic anemia through the loss of Al's lifeblood. See? I can joke about it now.

Speaking of jokes, I'm reminded of a scene in the comedy film It's Complicated where four friends are gathered to exchange secrets and support. Meryl Streep's character who is divorced is confiding her man trouble about her ex-husband with whom she is still involved. Her trouble is indeed complicated, and one of the friends turns to another and bluntly says, "You're lucky. Your husband's dead." The actress who plays the widow in the group responds with a double-take, a sarcastic "thanks," and then silence. The audience gets it and laughs. The character is a convenient comedic device, somewhat of an innocent bystander caught by a random punch. In the film, she tries to pretend to be like the others, but it's no use. Her silent longing and remaining shock have no place.

I think I'll watch that film again, fast forwarding through the silliness to that scene. I'd like to see if the actress was directed to eat something from the ample feast of fattening food set in front of the four women. Anyway that's how I  remember it. I think she stuffed her mouth to keep from ruining a perfectly good scene.

Workmen II

I don't usually like to generalize, but I'm going to do just that as I talk about house maintenance, workmen, and delegation of responsibilities in a marriage. As I was visiting friends over the holidays, I noticed how the wives took for granted their husbands' responsibility for fixing things or, if the fix was beyond the husbands' capabilities, then their responsibility for finding, negotiating with, and hiring someone who could fix it (or claimed he could), and then overseeing the upkeep in their house.

I know that last sentence is a jumble. That's because my mind gets jumbled when I contemplate my own record of keeping up my house since Al died. He didn't consider himself "handy," and grew up in a series of rented apartment buildings in New York where supers oversaw the maintenance, but when we bought our house twelve years ago, he learned what needed to be done and how to do it. While I was busy feathering our nest with furnishings, pots and pans, serving pieces, and linens, he was making new meaning of being the man of the house.

I didn't understand all the layers of thought and energy that went into doing his new maintenance job well. Maybe he got tips and referrals from our male neighbors at parties. I remember hearing him raise the topic when we went out with other couples, but it certainly wasn't discussed at length. Or maybe it was, and I tuned it out as I did when he told me about the details of a project in progress. I noticed the same eyes-glazed-over look on the faces of my women friends during my holiday visits this year. Even my most authoritative friend, who I assumed took an equal role in keeping up the house, told me recently that her husband took care of those things. She wasn't being evasive; she was contemplating what life might be without her spouse since several of her friends were widowed this past year. I guess I'm no longer the aberration I was when I was widowed in my 50s.

I've noticed over the past few widowed years how evasive many of my male neighbors become when I ask for advice. They give referrals, which is a godsend since our handyman retired. But what I need beyond that is information on how to price a job and how to direct and supervise the work. I'm not a businesswoman; I'm a teacher. Furthermore, when I buy I'm used to comparing price tags in a retail setting; I'm a mess in a foreign bazaar on vacation. Bargaining? I'd rather not purchase the thing. Al was a great bargainer. He'd radiate with the fun and challenge of it. When I saw him start to glow with negotiation impulses, I'd leave the area so as not to cramp his style with my tenseness and cringing.

I think that Al and I were exceptions when it came to negotiating a price. We were at opposite ends of the spectrum, but we knew where we stood with each other. If he got a bargain, he'd brag about it in detail, which also made me cringe! With my neighbors, pricing could be more of a gray area, and maybe that's why they grow vague and mumble when I ask for some guidance on negotiating services. Maybe they don't even know how they do it and feel their way through it each new time. Or maybe they don't always do it consistently and don't want to examine their methods and results too closely for their own peace of mind. Or they might not be sure they do it well. Or if they do manage to get great deals, they don't want to broadcast it and ruin it for themselves the next time they need something done.

Somehow, I am learning how to be both the woman and the man of the house, but my self-awareness hasn't caught up with my new skills yet. Which is why I spent a sleepless night last night in fearful anticipation of a job I contracted with a new workman. My house has water stains in the wood skylight casings that have always bothered me but not Al, so we never did anything about it while he was alive. Fair enough. Since the  leaky skylights had been replaced, I decided to address the stains.

The only time I worked with this man, he did a decent job but squeezed me in among bigger jobs. What should have been a couple of days' work turned into more than a month. But this time he assured me that mine would be his major project and that he would see to it that he finished within the week. I tossed and turned all night, berating myself both for trusting him and for not trusting him. He had been referred to me by my retired handyman. I tried to talk myself down by remembering the chances Al took when he hired new people when we first moved here. But, I argued, Al had a forceful personality, and anyway men respect other men more than they do women.

But that's an oversimplification, I argued back at myself. I've observed the calm resolve of confident women. That's it--make a show of confidence. Act as if. The first thing I decided was to stay focused on my timeline concerns and make that the first thing I say to him in the morning and don't be afraid to say it again. Repeat yourself! I admonished, reminding myself of how Al tended to do that in order to be in command of situations. It's not a thing I do easily, having been raised to listen nicely and not take up too much psychic space in social situations. That's the second thing I told myself. This is not a social situation. Don't rush in to make small talk! I knew that I'd distract myself from my goal of effectively managing my project. Let the silences alone, I added. It isn't your job to fill them.

This morning when I greeted the man, I used my exhaustion and irritation to lend myself more of an air of gravitas. I probably sounded gruff, but I resisted the urge to moderate my mood to one that was more likable. I noticed that my voice had landed on a lower register, an unexpected outcome of my graver state of mind. When he made his suggestions for how he would carry out the job, I nixed something impulsively and in the next moment found myself moving towards my old familiar acquiescence. After all, what difference will it make? And isn't he the expert? But I nipped that impulse in the bud. I had drawn a line in the sand, and the important thing was to stick to it.

This project is in progress, and I might slip up with a thing or two before it's complete. I'll need to go easy on myself and try to keep the larger picture in view. What I'm writing now is true for the moment and for this new persona I'm creating. I imagine some people who read this might think I'm a fool for not already knowing how to negotiate shrewdly in the world and further for cultivating the bubble with which my protector husband surrounded me. Maybe not appearing like a fool was a deep motive for my neighbors' reticence and omissions. I certainly empathize with them, but I'm not following their lead on this one.