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.
