Four months as of today

“She regained the street — happy in this, that though much had been forced on her against her will, though she had in fact heard the whole substance of Jane Fairfax’s letter, she had been able to escape the letter itself.” —Jane Austen, Emma

Bridge of Sighs, Millais

Dear friends,

My husband has now been dead four months: he died October 9th. I discovered that the YouTube video giving the viewer a sense of him through pictures across his life is now in the archives of the funeral home. You have to search to get to it. A new development slowly evolving is more than beginning to reinforce my shaking sense of desolation. My real problem here is I cannot get myself to face what this is and resolve to protect myself. Change letter in the above epigraph to email and Miss Bates and not make it pastoral (which Emma is).

I wish he were not cremated, that his body still existed. I knew he asked for it, and succumbed too because once set up, it was so much cheaper, but as the time drew near to his death, I regretted the decision. If his remains were in a grave, I’d visit it today. I’ve visit it regularly. It might give me some solace to sit by it. It’s odd I suppose but the ashes feel like nothing to me. Maybe if I manage to go to England and scatter them while scattering them I’ll feel something, but that urn just doesn’t hack it in my imagination. Too pottery like.

I’ve been reading Jacqueline Lapidus and Lise Menon’s new anthology, The Widows’ Handbook: Poetic Reflections on Grief and Survival. Since it does appear to me many or most or even all of these poets are people still alive, I won’t comment on any individual poem, nor quote any: I do want to say they bring home frankly to this reader what the prose works I’ve read thus far do not: how crazed with grief are so many widows, how wild with understandable despair. So verse does allow expressions published non-fictional or life-writing prose (apparently) does not.

So many recount entirely different situations: men die in so many ways; many of the women react differently — how various are the ways to express distress and sorrow, to mourn. One woman’s husband died a week before she gave birth. One unusual prose one is about a man, apparently a professor, who betrayed his wife utterly: after he died, she discovered they were worse than broke, they were deeply in debt, that he had had a mistress, and due to something she doesn’t tell, she loses her good job teaching. Just now striking to me is how many don’t tell of larger circumstances and other people around them – that’s also true of the books I’ve read thus far. Like biographers, they daren’t tell. One woman’s husband has been dead six years and her poem makes it feel like yesterday; she has not at all changed from the day he died, not moved on a bit.

The volume is introduced by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I knew she was a widow (and that like me she suffers chilblains in her hands and on her skin); but not that her husband, Martin, was cut off from his career as a lawyer (taught at Georgetown) by testicular cancer which metatasized.

As I read them, so many of my memories come flooding back as they recount similar experiences. For example, when I let two strangers come into the house and take him out in a winding sheet. His corpse looked stony by the time they came (there was a four hour wait altogether). I did — together with the nurse who was a kind woman — dressed himself myself. He had been nearly naked when he died.

I bring up an important issue. That a lot of people don’t trust those who write about grief: it must be they don’t feel it so deeply if they can write and publish about it. Others fear this kind of truth-telling; they are embarrassed by it; they would not give away ammunition about their weaknesses to anyone else. Some probably despise anyone who would write this way. Widows especially should shut up — one of the poems is about how widows are really regarded:

Widow
Dirtiest word ….

She speaks of how people avoid her. I see that in my neighborhood: neighbors say hello in a distant way lest you talk to them to tell them how it is. My license to drive has been suspended until May 17th — or some such date — that I was grieving and upset is no excuse — had I not been able to marshall several doctors from Kaiser they would have revoked it. This is how widows are treated. That this has hurt my mental health, has made it hard to sleep, makes for hardship (already today) is nothing to them. Maybe they’d like to resurrect the suttee and get rid of widows in cars infesting the roads.

I believe in the sincerity of the women writing more than initially and for some time to come because Vittoria Colonna spent decades — literally — writing some 600 poems, all of which in some sense came out of her devastating relationship with her husband and his death — and I translated them. She seems to have loved him intensely — though the marriage was far from happy as he did not love her physically, was not congenial with her though he came to respect her. There is a scathing letter from her to him. The other Italian woman’s poetry I translated is also an oeuvre partly of widowhood — far fewer come out of her grief, but she began to write the collection in the same spirit. Both of them were determined to justify their decision not to remarry; both were under pressure to remarry.

One way to regard the Renaissance Petrarchan tradition is as a poetry of grief: a number of the collections are about loss, sometimes someone did die — they are often melancholy and unlike (to me the shallow professors who say this) I do not think they are merely conventional exercises for most of the writers.

I have had a new insight and come to see Colonna’s poems in a new light since becoming widowed myself. They do suddenly appear to me odd in some ways: how she writes in the metaphoric way she does; what seems an obsession. I recently read a new study of her which I really must write a review of who suggests Colonna was a neurotic depressive (to put it bluntly) — maybe — but if she was, it was in the area of sexual life where women were mistreated in the era very badly and so what. I find it hard to cope wit how she colluded in that herself over other women in her family.

I’ve found of the books I’ve read thus far three that really helped and I felt utterly genuine: Joan Didion’s Magical Thinking, Donald Hall’s Without (very moving, about cancer as much as dying and death), and Sherwin Nuland’s How we Die — which reads at times like a modern moral sermon. But I agree such books can be unreal and made up: I think Joyce Carol Oates’s feels that way (I do know she re-married within a year). OTOH, fictional books can be more effective and feel more sincere: Susan Hill’s In the springtime of the year is heart-breaking: the story is of a young wife whose husband dies in a tree-cutting accident.

I have myself spent over 20 years translating the poetry of two women known as widows — it’s not accurate for Veronica Gambara but as I doubt anyone here knows enough about her so cares I won’t try to explain. I put it all online — and it took time and effort and takes time and money to keep it up. Actually if it hadn’t been for my husband creating the website and starting to do it himself for sometime none of it would be there.

My comments are meant to discuss the difficult subject abstractly and in general. The problem as I see it is people are pressured into shutting up about their grief after a couple of months. If they don’t, they find themselves yet more ostracized. People are told in public and scorned for carrying on discussing the details of the realities of what they experienced. Recently Lisa Adams was ridiculed by a married couple called Keller who thought it was just fine to despise her since they get into print and she’s just a blogger.

The topic became part of the list-serv Wom-po because Maxine Kumin, a well-known poet has just died. Someone offered a URL to a poem which seemed to be about her husband’s death. I asked for clarification but no one would respond: it seemed to me a poem about a man who killed himself. I’ve learned it was written after the suicide of Kumin’s friend-poet, Anne Sexton.

How it is

Shall I say how it is in your clothes?
A month after your death I wear your blue jacket.
The dog at the center of my life recognizes
you’ve come to visit, he’s ecstatic.
In the left pocket, a hole.
In the right, a parking ticket
delivered up last August on Bay State Road.
In my heart, a scatter like milkweed,
a flinging from the pods of the soul.
My skin presses your old outline.
It is hot and dry inside.

I think of the last day of your life,
old friend, how I would unwind it, paste
it together in a different collage,
back from the death car idling in the garage,
back up the stairs, your praying hands unlaced,
reassembling the bits of bread and tuna fish
into a ceremony of sandwich,
running the home movie backward to a space
we could be easy in, a kitchen place
with vodka and ice, our words like living meat.

Dear friend, you have excited crowds
with your example. They swell
like wine bags, straining at your seams.
I will be years gathering up our words,
fishing out letters, snapshots, stains,
leaning my ribs against this durable cloth
to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.

Kumin’s husband was Victor Kumin, and, admirably, after he learned that the atomic bomb he and others scientists had been asked to build in WW2 as a weapon to keep against Hitler’s getting one, that two of these had been dropped on two Japanese cities with horrible devastation and death, he refused to work on the project any longer. He apparently survives her so the poem cannot be about him. I remember that Richard Feynman was very depressed after the atomic bomb (he was on the team) was dropped and for some years afterwards thought some countries in the world would destroy the earth. He did not though refuse to work on; it was in the 1950s he publicly left the National Academy of Scientists for their politicized behavior (the McCarthy era of persecution). He also hated the way these people seemed to turn into tribes, a physicist wanting more positions for other physicists say and how some clubbed together to prevent scientists from other disciplines joining.

Kumin did write about death in general and thought about how one of a pair would die before the other.

Death, Etc.

I have lived my whole life with death, said William Maxwell,
aetat 91, and haven’t we all. Amen to that.
It’s all right to gutter out like a candle but the odds are better

for succumbing to a stroke or pancreatic cancer.
I’m not being gloomy, this bright September
when everything around me shines with being:

hummingbirds still raptured in the jewelweed,
puffballs humping up out of the forest duff
and the whole voluptuous garden still putting forth

bright yellow pole beans, deep-pleated purple cauliflowers,
to say nothing of regal white corn that feeds us
night after gluttonous night, with a slobber of butter.

Nevertheless, what Maxwell said speaks to my body’s core,
this old body I trouble to keep up the way
I keep up my two old horses, wiping insect deterrent

on their ears, cleaning the corners of their eyes,
spraying their legs to defeat the gnats, currying burrs
out of their thickening coats. They go on grazing thoughtlessly

while winter is gathering in the wings. But it is not given
to us to travel blindly, all the pasture bars down,
to seek out the juiciest grasses, nor to predict

which of these two will predecease the other or to anticipate
the desperate whinnies for the missing that will ensue.
Which of us will go down first is also not given,

a subject that hangs unspoken between us
as with Oedipus, who begs Jocasta not to inquire further.
Meanwhile, it is pleasant to share opinions and mealtimes,

to swim together daily, I with my long slow back and forths,
he with his hundred freestyle strokes that wind him alarmingly.
A sinker, he would drown if he did not flail like this.

We have put behind us the State Department tour
of Egypt, Israel, Thailand, Japan that ended badly
as we leapt down the yellow chutes to safety after a botched takeoff.

We have been made at home in Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland,
narrow, xenophobic Switzerland of clean bathrooms and much butter.
We have travelled by Tube and Metro o’er the realms of gold

paid obeisance to the Wingèd Victory and the dreaded Tower,
but now it is time to settle as the earth itself settles
in season, exhaling, dozing a little before the fall rains come.

Every August when the family gathers, we pose
under the ancient willow for a series of snapshots,
the same willow, its lumpish trunk sheathed in winking aluminum

that so perplexed us forty years ago, before we understood
the voracity of porcupines. Now hollowed by age and marauders,
its aluminum girdle painted dull brown, it is still leafing

out at the top, still housing a tumult of goldfinches. We try to hold still
and smile, squinting into the brilliance, the middleaged children,
the grown grandsons, the dogs of each era, always a pair

of grinning shelter dogs whose long lives are but as grasshoppers
compared to our own. We try to live gracefully
and at peace with our imagined deaths but in truth we go forward

stumbling, afraid of the dark,
of the cold, and of the great overwhelming
loneliness of being last.

But it’s not loneliness; that’s the least of it. It’s these terrible people with power over you and you don’t know in the least how to cope with them.

Ellen