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.