Yesterday was the eighth anniversary of my wife’s death. I remember the day well, even though through a fog, as if I were watching from a distance what was happening only an arm’s length away. Other people — mostly family — took charge of things I couldn’t have handled. The funeral was lovely, with friends coming from all over. My younger daughter wrote the obituary, swinging for the fences; a version even made it into the Boston Globe. My wife’s ashes have spent the last eight years in a granite urn (younger daughter again) beside the big unused TV set in my bedroom, where I occasionally make a few comments to her about what she’s missing, but more frequently cuss as I lean on the cabinet for support while pulling on my pajama pants, an operation that grows ever more difficult and dangerous.
If your spouse’s death has been in the usual progression — increasing debilitation and finally nursing home — you’ve already become accustomed to shifting for yourself around the house: changing the bed, doing the laundry, cooking, taking care of the dog, paying the electric bill. So there’s no sudden shock of responsibility. You just keep on doing what you’ve already been doing, perhaps even for years.
What’s different is your social and emotional status. You’re now a widow or widower (hereinafter widow), and the other person in your life, upon whom you leaned for conversation and company, for stimulation and affection, for reassurance that, in spite of all your faults and shortcomings, you were still all right — even lovable at times — was gone. And this time it was no vacation or business trip; they were never coming back. You begin to understand the impulses and wishful thinking that lead many of your friends and family members to assure you that in time you will be together again. You won’t. It’s over.
Well, in many ways it’s not. My wife was a kitchen designer, for example, and left me a really great kitchen, with cabinets and countertops just as I’d have them if I ordered them myself. She liked electric stoves with downdraft exhausts; so do I. Late in life, she added a conduction cooktop for its speed and energy savings. But she set it on top of one side of the electric stove and on two occasions, to her dismay, inadvertently turned on the stove burner under the cooktop, in short order melting it and filling the house with a really bad smell. I finally solved the problem by removing the knobs from the stove controls, and still think fondly of her whenever I notice the control stems sticking out from the stove beneath.
Like many widows, I had to deal self-consciously with the loneliness that likely would last the rest of my life. I took to naming household objects and speaking to them in their native languages. Mister Coffee, who has for years been my faithful supplier of my day’s coffee, is French, so is either Monsieur Café or Henri-Pierre, depending on my mood. The washer and dryer are clearly German (Maytag), so are Hans und Franz. And so on.
That kind of foolishness can take you only so far. Every so often I had to come to grips with the fact that, after almost sixty years of marriage, I was alone. My little terrier, Kiki, is the best companion imaginable, but she’s a bust when I want to talk about Heidegger or Sartre. She’s more of a Benthamite.
There’s an unspoken and undefined line between mourning and moving on. It varies with cultures and religious beliefs. Some folks never get there. All I know is that I woke up one morning a few months past my 83rd birthday, Kiki snuggled up against my legs, the white granite urn gleaming beside the defunct TV set, and the sun flooding the yard, and wondered, “Is this it? What if I live another fifteen years? I wonder what old Bea’s doing.” I hadn’t seen or heard of her in fifty years.
She wasn’t hard to find; she’s on the university’s website. (Email is, as far as I’m concerned, a gift from the gods at least the equivalent of fire and sliced bread.) And it happened that her husband had died only a few months after my wife had.
Lunch halfway between our houses. Weekend visit. A hike up a small mountain. Great conversations. Heidegger came up; she sent me a small biography and précis of his work, and is still amazed that I actually read it. So am I. And thus have I moved in several years from the numbness of widowhood to the joy of looking ahead. There can’t be too much left to contemplate. But the key word is joy.
