Widowhood: I seem to be going through another transition

Woods and Streams in Delaware, [early] Winter, 1916 (Edward W. Redfield)

“Alas, with all her reasonings, she found, that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing” (Austen, Persuasion Chapter 7)

Dear friends and readers,

I seem to be going through yet another transition in this seeming both long and short widowhood. I’ve stopped going out as much as I once did. Of course part of the cause of this is that I can no longer drive once the sky reaches dusk, but I could go out more during the day, and I could have recourse to Uber/Lyft
and ordering cabs ahead. I don’t. Part of this the effect of self-quarantining taken well past what I understand most or many others have done. It is so peaceful; I am no longer used to enduring the agonies, anxiety as I begin to realize I am lost and panic when I find I am not at all where I meant to be. Waze recently updated itself and now it is of no use to me at all. I can’t get past “save this destination” to “go now.” I’m telling myself I shall be reading more, and I think there’s evidence that I am already.

This is a matter of telling myself what I’m not quite following. I’m telling myself I’m giving over trying to write longer books and volunteering for talks and short projects. I’m not quite following this as I volunteered to give another talk to the Every-other-week online London Trollope Society group on (as I’m calling it) Anthony Trollope’s American Civil War Christmas Stories: “The Widow’s Mite” and “The Two Generals.” As a result of doing a talk on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin for an OLLI at AU class, I’ve thought of a course for spring 2024 that might actually attract enough people to dare to do it in public: I’d call it “Everybody’s Protest Novel” after James Baldwin’s famous scathing essay on Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Richard Wright’s Native Son. And I’d do:

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Louisa May Alcock, “Contraband;” John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath; Joan Didion, Play it like it Lays and El Salvador by Joan Didion, and James Baldwin’s short non-fiction story, “Stranger in a Village” and novel, If Beale Street could talk …

But this will be the last; after this I will stick with the new terrains I’ve carved out: Italian literature, Anglo-Indian memoirs and novels (British style fiction set in India is the longer phrase) and women writer courses. And 19th century masterpiece courses, mostly by Trollope as central and framing presence.

This means I will be alone more, and am teaching myself to accept being alone and this great loneliness since Jim died. I am tired of trying uselessly for what cannot be and what I am not sure I’d at all like. Go out with friends who ask me, but don’t chase, don’t be the one to suggest unless it is really a museum show, a play, a musical or concert you want to go to.

I do not mean to deny what joy or happiness I can feel when I’ve been out with others, spent good time with others. I knew such exhilaration and contentment when the class I had been teaching these past 9 weeks ended today.

One person had suggested we start at 1:15 to give us ourselves full time to cover all we wanted and watch film clips from the early 1990s BBC The Rector’s Wife, and the 1983 Barchester Chronicles. Eight of the nine people who have been coming steadily agreed and what a splendid class it was. I know they were enjoying it and so was I. It is so much better in person when there is a full enough class.

Yet I will not do it again until Spring 2024 since it is such a difficult thing to build a class of people coming regularly nowadays that I lose perspective, fret over how few may show up (an inappropriate response to an adult education or playful college class).

Can you understand this, gentle reader? Some new phase of calm is what I am feeling come over me, or wanting calm at long last. I discovered I lost weight when I went to Dr Wiltz a couple of weeks ago with a list of pains and complaints that he duly checked over, to tell me I am fine, just getting older yet. I’ve kept to my vow not to add sugar to anything and so I eat less.

18th century lady’s shoes

Every Friday until I run out I’m putting foremother poet blogs on Wompo — the only one. No one can bother post anything which is not about building their career. Last week it was Mary Jones, an 18t century chantress (as Johnson called her) who wrote these beautiful verses upon the death of her beloved friend, Miss Clayton; they are to her memory

Still, but for Thee, regardless might I stray,
Where gentle Charwell rolls her silent tide;
And wear at ease my span of life away,
As I was wont, when thou were at my side.

But now no more the limpid streams delight,
No more at ease unheeding do I stray;
Pleasure and Thou are vanish’d from my sight,
And life, a span! too slowly hastes away.

Yet if thy friendship lives beyond the dust,
Where all things else in peace and silence lie,
I’ll seek Thee there, among the Good and Just.
‘Mong those who living wisely — learnt to die.

And if some friend, when I’m no more, should strive
To future times my mem’ry to extend,
Let this inscription on my tomb survive,
‘Here rest the ashes of a faithful friend.’

A little while and lo! I lay me down,
To land in silence on that peaceful shore,
Where never billows beat, or tyrants frown,
Where we shall meet again, to part no more.”

Change a name and a pronoun and this connects to the way I feel about Jim, though I know I shall never meet him again, since literally he no longer exists, nor will I when I die.

This is what I have to report. This is what I have to come in the next two months. Lunch out with my friend, Alison tomorrow, two museum shows with Betty and one play (MAAN) and one musical (Into the Woods) with Betty in December. Lunch with Eleanor sometime in December: Zorba the Greek restaurant in Dupont Circle. One in person DC Trollope reading group meeting this Sunday — just outside Bethesda (Nina Balatka), and lunch with OLLI at AU SGLs one day in December. Laura and Rob with Izzy will take me out to dinner on Nov 27th as two days before my birthday. Christmas we’ll go with Rob and Laura to a good movie, and then back to their house for dinner at home and exchange of presents. I’ll tell you about these as they happen.

Now I’m evolving a reading plan for myself and I’ve begun with Italian studies (first up Grazia Deledda’s Cosima), Heroine’s books (Charlotte Gilman Perkins’s Women and Economics and Annis Pratt’s Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction), back to, beginning again Valerie Martin’s marvelous The Ghost of the Mary Celeste (a ghost story!). Then as I please beloved individual authors as I feel them (Joanna Trollope a new source of comfort and strenght, Next of Kin) and literary history (Joan Hedrick’s biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe).

Leslie Manville as Sue Ryelands (she’s also in Sherwood, The Crown, was Mrs ‘arris who went to Paris)

Evenings wonderful serials — I am actually enjoying Magpie Murders on PBS, which I’ll blog about with BritBox’s Sherwood and Karen Pirie (Val McDermid’s Distant Echo, set in modern Scotland. The year of Leslie Manville! Last blogs have been on Outlander 6 (1-4 & 5-8), seasons of processing grief, time of trauma; and upon the coming retirement of Judy Woodruff.

How much this house means to me I cannot express strongly enough. My refuge, my memories (Jim all around me), my beloved cats. I vow (like poor Gwendolen Harleth in Daniel Deronda, I’ve just finished) to remain more cheerful, open to others partly by drawing boundaries.

Here is the red berry bush on one side of my house: finally it bloomed and turned out to be the sort of bush I associate with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and beautiful middle English poetry

Late autumn, beginning my tenth year without Jim,

Ellen

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