Whether it be the continual aloneness; how the new state and perspective brings home to me whatever are my relationships more clearly than they once did; my position when I come out into whatever world when he is not there to soften and veil it, not there for me to turn to as someone who values me and finds me of value; how I cover my face with my hands and cringe with distaste and feel sick with shame at the thought of another man; of never ending (until I die) uncertainty about so much, what to do, what not to do, how to judge this, think of that, gauge the other; of the cruel results of this license suspension (a job offer to teach a course in Loudon I fear I must not take up and thus I lose this opportunity to be part of this school forever); little things (being cheated for big and small amounts), big ones; exclusions, there seems not a day, sometimes not an hour goes by that does not gouge me.
I am keening today, my heart so desolated because I have had to not accept an offer to teach a course called “The Historical and post-Colonial Turn in Recent Fiction” for George Mason University’s summer session at OLLI because I cannot say for sure I will have my right (it’s not a privilege, it’s a necessity) to drive back by mid-June. I can hand the papers in again as of May 17th and I might have it back; my lawer is trying to get us a hearing where I will ask for a restricted right to drive back, but I cannot say for sure. I spent hours fruitlessly looking at the train and bus schedules, wishing they were otherwise; I had the boldness to ask a friend if he had Tuesday mornings off and could drive me six times for which I would pay him. He did not answer because it is too much to ask. Today I was rooked for $29 to go to a nearby (6 minute) hair-dresser; it would cost me hundreds to go to Loudon county back and forth six times.
Does the DMV want me to kill myself? No. But they would not care if I did and if I did would triumph over me that I am clearly not fit to drive. I will try not to just to show that they are wrong to treat me punitively and as a cripple, but if I should die (say a car runs over me as I try to cross roads not intended for pedestrians) I hope someone who may read this blog will write about this in some prominent place under the headings of DMV death and the cancer epidemic.
While away I thought about widows in literature and realized how until recently their grief was dismissed. In the 18th century until near the end, especially on the stage the widow is someone who is lascivious, will go with any man afterwards, is frustrated and wants sex from any man (the last thing in the world any widow would want), but especially young handsome ones; how hostile most depictions. Near the end not much better, rather made into figures who sublimate their supposed desires, who want power over others. Yes in the Renaissance you get widow poets mourning (two I translated now not ironically but in terrified anticipation, in some kind of dread), but it’s done in these formulaic ways. I tried and tried to think of empathetic portraits, and the best I could come up with was Shakespeare’s Kate’s speech after Hotspur’s death, Cleopatra’s after Antony’s, but these are all idealizations of the man. Jane Austen begins with Mrs Dashwood who is not provided for by a legal document beyond her original jointure, so when her husband’s uncle dies, she becomes dependent on a verbal promise which her step-son does not honor. This is the practical outlook. While away I bought myself an 18th century play, The Rival Widows, or Fair Libertine by Elizabeth Cooper, herself widowed young (as Cooper’s mother was before her); her play is about an intelligent young widow, Lady Bellair, who was coerced into marriage with an older man and then cheated of her jointure, and is pressured by Lady Lurcher, older widow (the usual nasty salacious type, greed-driven, hoarding) into marrying someone Lady Bellair does not want so the older widow can have the man Lady Bellair is (seemingly) in love with and who (seemingly) loves her (the two do not marry at play’s end): many women would not grieve upon becoming a widow if the husband was someone they were forced to go to bed with, obey, bear his children. And what goes down in the records are often women without money, widows as paupers, widows working at this or that to stave off abysmal miseries. This situation helps explain why so few women write of the experience of this loss and all it brings until the 20th century. By why a portrait of a vile older widow. I have now and again come across an article here on-line which recently tells of the pain and loneliness, but there is not much except for courageous widow poets before the later 20th century; in a few of her stories, Jhumpa Lahiri does tell, Bengali/US-style. Oh some of these are fearful.
To force myself to go on? That’s what Yvette says when I have asked her. Control oneself and pretend you find living quite bearable.
Anew I have understood why Clarissa’s choice near her novel’s and life’s end. How I have imagined her silently appalled as I read her correspondent’s supposed non-hostile letters to her. I have bonded and identified once again, on terms not so different after all.
Sylvia
Saskia Wickham as Clarissa
Under the Sign of Sylvia II 
Dear Ellen, I am so sorry for your grief. You were unusually close to Jim, and you are right, a widow’s grieving is underestimated.
I am so sorry you don’t feel you could teach in Loudoun. At first I read it as London, and I was so excited for you. Going to Loudoun is probably harder than going to London. Virginia is not a mass transit place, is it?
I hope your lawyer will be able to clear up this thing at the DMV. Just don’t think about it. It is too much on top of your grief. Just breathe and try not to worry. You can’t do anything else right now…and I want you to feel good!
I just received a condolence letter from the woman who runs the GMU program and of course she could not give me a course based on any kind of contingency. Nice as her words were they mean, come back in the fall and we’ll see. I can’t reach it, my friend: it takes over 2 and one half hours to get to Loudon from where I live by public transportation and that’s only if I make all the connections. The course was to start at 9:30 am in the morning. A car drive is 40 minutes.
How obstructing me from driving which means living in this way makes the roads safer is beyond me. If every day that went by from February 6th to May 17th, I was asked to take a test of my brain and each day all is normal is seen or or among them one day something abnormal is, then you have proved I am a danger. But to order me on pain of going to prison not to drive and ask me to on one day to go for such a test proves nothing.
All it does is make me suicidal/deeply depressed and making trips an ordeal in the cold and heat; they know they are doing this, they know they are isolating me and preventing me from doing useful tasks and occupations with other people. I not only have now lost an occupation for the summer which would have given me a goal for 7 weeks, a social time each week and satisfaction, I cannot go to a luncheon once a month with a group of women I was invited to join, and whether I can join a support group for grieving (not for loss of drivers’ license but spouses) remains unknown. Today I was cheated of $30 for 6 minutes of driving. Can I afford to hire a cab back and forth if this happens regularly.
And there is no one to help me. Ive hired a lawyer at an extravagant price but she is not a magician. No one protests against these egregious injustices of the DMV anywhere but the few very rich people who are directly punished and hurt by them and can hire lawyers and spend years fighting it.
Why is this? If people are afraid to drive and of other drivers, this is no way to make the roads safe. The speed limits are ridiculously high. Bringing down speed limits by 5 miles an hour would do infinitely more than killing people like me.
After Jim first died, say a month or so, I thought I could eventually build a new genuine life for myself and began to make what I thought were small efforts. Each one made things worse. Now I know the hope was false: when he died, all that was left for me is an impoverished maimed lone version of what I knew with him — if I’m lucky and my money lasts. I remember how Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories of widows presented them as thwarted and hurt by the society around them which everyone insists is simply indifferent: her texts know better.
Dear Ellen
I’ve been a member of your eighteenth century group for a while now, following along with interest even if I’ve not been able to contribute.
I just wanted to say a couple of things now, and I hope they’re not too crass or simplistic.
First, I’ve never been married. I’ve had relationships, and been hurt, well, that’s not relevant. I have also lost both parents. So I live on my own, and everything about living in this complicated world of ours I do myself. And within that context, I know exactly the panic, the anger, the desperation even when my car is unavailable to me. I move heaven and earth to get back on the road. I can say then that I believe I have some glimpse into your feelings regarding being able to drive. There is a loss of connection with the outside world and with automony that is somehow more dreadful than is easily appreciated by those who live with other means of transport close by. Panic and anger, of course, are extremely detrimental to one’s ability to find a solution, since they throw you back on what I think is called your “lizard brain” or something similar. And I am very sorry that the woman who made the job offer has done nothing (going by what you have said) to help you in one key area that is so distressing to you now.
May I ask – is it in any way possible to contact the place itself, see if someone who works there drives in from somewhere near you, and would be willing to car share with you? It is only a suggestion, and I realise from your blog that you feel all efforts to move forward are being thwarted at the moment – but is that not anger speaking? I have been troubled by depression myself, and I know that anger is sometimes at the heart of it.
You are still here, still writing cogently about your beloved subject, still have so much to offer the world.
I can’t say more – I’d be treading all over a subject I know far too little about, have only opinions about, and only know that in some circumstances I have hung on because I couldn’t hurt other people in the worst possible way, and that there are people who would be hurt – more people than I could imagine, really.
But that is quite enough of this ramble. Just know that there is a network of people around you who could help. A note to the friend who you asked for a lift – contact him again – does he know anyone who could? Perhaps he could do it once, gratis – perhaps the idea of payment was too much, not the request?
Oh dear – I’ll never stop with stupid questions if I continue.
I just wish you the very best. A year at least is needed to come to some kind of place of a more peaceful interaction with the world around you, but it does come, eventually. Getting to that place is the hardest job you’ll even have to do, but it can be done.
My very best wishes to you, and my true regard for your strength thus far – and please feel free to disregard everything I have said if it in any way is not what you need to hear at the moment. I feel reluctant to send this, in case it should hurt rather than help but I suppose that is the nature of interaction and communication in this world. So – here goes!
Catherine
No there is no one at Loudon as I know no one there and have never been there. It is three counties away from Alexandria. Why should not anger speak? Yes I am angry, fiercely over the way Jim died for a start, over the public lethargy about the cancer epidemic and the way nothing is done to prevent news media from control by corporations, and to come to the present topic how the average citizen who is not him or herself dismobilized so utterly by the DMV until such time as they deem one can drive again do nothing and suspect the person who is the victim of this. Among other things I did not include is this is done in large numbers to black people down south — where public transportation is a laugh.
Well, I frequently mistake what I say, but I do not believe I suggested that anger should not have a voice. You have a right to be angry about a great many things – indeed, there are many hundreds of thousands of things to be angry about, and for you some very specific things, including your husband’s death. I know I felt angry, and ill, and rudderless when my mother died, and it took me a long while before I could admit I was angry with her for dying, since that’s such a horribly irrational response. But it’s what can happen, and it has to be gone through; it is not a place to get stuck, or so I was told.
I’m sorry – I read your comment about the loss of your licence to drive several times but I think I just don’t know enough about the context to understand what you mean when you say “suspect the person who is the victim of this”. But I am sure that is my lack of understanding.
Well, I will leave you in peace – I’m sure I’ve said more than enough.
This is so unfair. I sincerely hope you regain your driving rights and are able to teach the course after all, if not in the summer then in the fall.
I think too that your work on widows is extremely valuable and hope you develop it further. Perhaps another course?
Regards,
Elaine
I have had an offer to pick me up at a train station and a drive to the EC/ASECS in later fall. So I can get there. Thus I will send in a panel proposal for a panel on widows in the long 18th century — in order to show some development and not be so very dismal as the depiction of widows in the central eighteenth century is to say the minimum misogynist, especially on the stage — it’s worse than that. Cooper’s play is actually much better than the average in this respect.
It is so grating when people assure me I’ll get it back. On what grounds? The DMV took it away on Feb 6th no rational grounds whatsoever, completely aribtrary (cited no code, gave no medical reasons) and their letters are cruel boilerplate. It takes great effort to get to doctors and get these documents together – and they know it. They deliberately want me to give up and just go away. (Please do whatever is the equivalent of dying.) No help is offered the person whatsoever to get these documents done. I did a large sheaf way back in December and January. Now I’m asked to repeat some of this. I fear the doctor will not write “fully” enough and that will be the “new” rational for them to write this is “unacceptable.”
WhAt a shame Ellen. This business with not being able to drive is really impacting on your life choices. I am so sorry. I just hope that it will all be over ASAP.
Clare
Clare, I’ve learned this suspension of license is done to black people down south a lot. They can’t afford cars and there is no public transportation. Imagine the results for a poor black person’s life. No wonder they end up in jail. And then if they ever get out (long sentences remember) they are felons without a right to vote.
It could be financially ruinous, if they are unable to get to their workplace.
Clare
Hello, Ellen, I’m still in New York. I’m sorry you seem to be having blow upon blow. I think Catherine’s advice is good, and my own advice would be to move heaven and earth to arrange transportation to GMU, even it does cost hundreds…it is that important to you. Perhaps making an arrangement with a driving company, might give you a discount by the month or something. You can do this during the period while you are without the license – even if it is a big expense. You rightly say, what if you don’t get the license back? In that case you will indeed have to completely reassess and rearrange your living situation. But it is OK to treat it as an interim situation now, until or unless it isn’t. I think it’s extremely important for you in every way to be able to do this job.
It is too late for the summer at GMU. But it is not for the fall. I got a tentative offer to teach at the GMU campus for sure (the way I’m at AU main campus for sure), an apology for suggesting Loudon (it is tremendously far – and the truth is the woman was seeing if she could push me into this) — and a meeting in later May just off GMU main campus. Then I will move heaven and earth to get there — i.e., take a cab if I must, but I know the route by public transportation and think I can do public transportation and then a cab.
Clare, of course it ruinous. That’s the point. They scare black people this way — they have to kowtow to police exquisitely. All of this — the long prison sentences especially — is called the “new Jim Crow.”
I sympathize with you on turning down the teaching position, and I totally agree with you about slowing down. The speed limits are much too high. We are all insane to go speeding down the road at 55 mph, much less 70, and yet people speed past me in blizzards and on ice, just waiting for an accident to happen. And we are such pompous humans to think the earth is ours and build these superhighways and kill who knows how many animals – deer, raccoons, rabbits, squirrels, dogs, cats – because of our belief we are so important. It’s sickening to me.
Tyler
As a newly-widowed woman on this day that would have been our twenty-seventh wedding anniversary, I can applaud your courage and understand what a thin reed it can be in what we now call our lives. I hope the fall at GMU works out for you.