by Gail Griffin
So it was that on that May morning by the river, finding myself with no warning in the wasteland of sudden, outrageous widowhood, I wanted my mother, but wanted her with an edge of trepidation, of ambivalence. Something monstrous had befallen her girl. But what face would she have turned to me? Her compassionate stalwartness was the only thing that would have comforted me. Nothing else could have taken my destruction in its arms but her ability to convey that she was bigger than any catastrophe. But when I imagined her instead demanding that I consider her own suffering and toughen up, I began to implode.
*
I remember, when I was first learning computer language, seeing the phrase “widow and orphan protection” and laughing. Shades of Dickens, and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. But in fact, widow came into usage as a typographical term earlier in the twentieth century, when it was adopted to refer to a line of text that ends a paragraph but appears at the top of a new page. It is considered unsightly, messy, residual.
Of course it lends itself to personification. A 1936 article called the typographical widow “that awful slattern of the printed page.” Slattern: a sloppy girl, etymological aunt to slut. Nowadays the typographical widow is described with less censure than pity: “a word or short phrase separated from the rest of a paragraph and left sitting at the top of the next column or the next page”; “widows and orphans are words or short lines at the beginning or end of a paragraph, which are left dangling at the top or bottom of a column, separated from the rest of the paragraph.”
Sitting or standing, above all she has been left. The 2004 edition of The Elements of Topographical Style offers a helpful mnemonic for the distinction between widows and orphans: “An orphan has no past; a widow has no future.”
*
A future requires a past.
I wore my wedding ring for four months, eight days. It is a plain gold band with an inscription on the inside: Will to Mollie. Mollie was my father’s German mother, Amalia (the one he treated so well), and Will was his father. In addition to the ring, I inherited from my grandmother a set of ponderous old photo albums and a picture of a woman, set in a deep, shining wooden frame with a gilt inner margin. The woman is not young, but her very dark hair, pulled tightly back behind her head and caught in a decorative comb, reveals no gray. The expression in her eyes seems tinged with bewilderment, though it might have been a fleeting effect of the camera’s flash. On the back of the frame is penciled “Captain Griffin’s mother.” Captain William Griffin, Will’s father, my paternal great-grandfather, was baptized in Montreal in 1833 and became a merchant seaman on the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes. For years this was all I knew of the woman in the imposing frame—whose mother she was.
Then one day, in one of Mollie’s albums, I found an envelope containing two folded eight-by-five-inch pieces of scratch paper, browned with time, labeled “The Griffin Family.” Covering them are penciled names and dates. I had to read the pages over several times before the story began to emerge.
It begins auspiciously, at the top of the first page, with a marriage announcement:
Edward Griffin & Margaret Kelley Married in Montreal Oct 22nd 1832
Then a list headed “Births”:
William Griffin Born in Montreal Dec 1st 1833.
James Griffin Born in Montreal July 12th 1835.
Mary A. Griffin Born in Sackets Harbor Sept 23rd 1837.
John Griffin Born in Kingston June 11th 1839.
Margaret Griffin Born in Kingston June 5th 1841.
Edward Griffin Born in Kingston June 5th 1843.
Celia Griffin Born in Pt. Dalhousie June 5th 1845.
Next to young William’s name, Mollie has inscribed, in ink, “Capt.” The woman in the beautiful frame is Margaret Kelley Griffin, and these are her children: seven in thirteen years, a child every two years, according with nature’s merciless plan, the last three exactly two years apart to the day. At the bottom of the page the parents’ birthplaces and dates are supplied: Edward was born in 1808 in Montreal, Margaret in 1809 in St. John’s, Newfoundland. So at their marriage they were twenty-four and twenty-three. They moved a lot, from one end of Lake Ontario to the other, St. Lawrence to Niagara, and across the border to Sacket’s Harbor in New York, all at a time when the new Erie Canal had revolutionized traffic to and from what was known then as the “West.” They settled in ports, where ships of all kinds brought news and supplies, books and building materials. Edward, a journeyman carpenter, would have found ready work. No wonder their firstborn grew up to sail the waters that dominated his childhood horizon.
On page 2 the story turns. There are just five lines of writing, a terse denouement:
Edward Griffin 1st Died Nov 8th 1845 Age 37 years + 3 days
Mary A. Griffin Died Sept 24th 1837 Age 1 Day
John Griffin Died Jan 15th 1840 Age 1 year + 7 months
Margaret Griffin Died Sept 18th 1845 Age 5 years
Celia Griffin Died Nov 30th 1845 Age 3 months
How is this story to be told? The information shifts kaleidoscopically, arranging and rearranging itself. Look at ages and you’ll discover that the birth and death dates don’t match the ages in the cases of John, Margaret, and Celia—hardly surprising when family information traveled intergenerationally, mostly by word of mouth. But Mollie’s account of the children’s lifespans wouldn’t have been far off. Four of seven children lost before the age of six, a breathtaking percentage even in an era of high child mortality. Or look through a gendered lens: all three girls gone, when daughters were often their mother’s closest companions and most valuable help. A husband dead before he reached forty, leaving his young widow with what resources, what recourse? Or, finally, look at the particular constellation of dates: in Port Dalhousie, on the shores of Lake Ontario, in the autumn of 1845, Margaret Griffin, having already buried two children, lost her husband and her two youngest daughters in the space of eleven weeks.
Most probably, illness swept through the Griffin house on dark wings that fall. But who knows? Maybe Edward’s heart exploded while he was sawing a timber. Maybe little Margaret toppled off a dock, and baby Celia was born with a fatal defect. In any case Margaret was left to bury her dead. And perhaps to study the face in the mirror, suddenly older, with a permanent expression of wonder at what the river could bring to one’s door and what those on shore could be required to endure.
Those childhood morality rates would have led any woman almost to expect to lose children, or at least to chasten her hopes that all seven might live to adulthood. Did the knowledge of the odds make the loss easier? Historians used to argue that it did, offering as evidence the fact that the same given name so often reappears assigned to a subsequent child. But instead of indicating lack of attachment, might this practice not indicate the opposite—an attachment to little Martha that survived to fasten to the new Martha? That is, after all, part of why we name children after relatives. What data, really, will tell us how our great-grandmothers lived, inside themselves, bearing children relentlessly, and how they incorporated staggering loss into their own narratives of their lives?
So when Edward died, Margaret was thirty-six—a young widow. Six and a half years after that dreadful fall, in April 1852, she married one John Jones. Near the end of the century, city records find her living alone in Montreal, at least into her eighties. So she buried him as well.
*
Postscript: Margaret’s eldest, Captain William, grew up to sail the Great Lakes into a good old age. He crossed the St. Lawrence and married an American woman. They had two sons. The younger, named for his father and called Will, married Amalia, called Mollie, daughter of German immigrants, in 1898. They likewise had two sons, the younger of whom was my father. In 1920, when the sons were twenty and eighteen, Will died at the age of forty-nine. Mollie was forty-three—a year shy of my mother’s age when my father died. Another young widow.
*
I study Margaret across the years between us. Her photo hangs where I
see it every morning and am reminded of the cruelest yet most salutary truth: one’s particular experience of shattering loss, the trauma that violently destabilizes one’s life, is ultimately as ordinary as joy. I have felt in my own eyes the thousand-mile look in hers. What would she have to say to her precipitously widowed great-great-granddaughter? Would she put her arms around me and sing a song she sang to her children? Put a firm hand on my shoulder and tell me there is nothing to be done, so get on with life? Turn on me and hiss, “Don’t you think I was hurt in my life?”
In the time after Bob, that last voice rises in me now and then. I know how suffering can shrivel and calcify the sufferer and turn her mean. I’ve had to swallow my mother’s words in the face of other people’s calamities, struggling to churn bitterness into compassion. I have better understood my mother’s rage, her impatience with the novice sufferer. I study her and all the widows in my family tree as if they were constellated stars. I try to discern a shape, a direction, a story that arrives at myself. I know I am not the conclusion. Stories only “come to conclusions” when we stop talking. Like starlight itself, the tale I have read in the lives of these women reaches me from the past but does not reach any conclusion. It becomes mine to imagine. I’m the one who carries it forward.
“A widow,” one source has it, “is a word or line of text that is forced to go on alone and start its own column or page.” This is the line I join: the ones who carry on, carry over onto the next page, blank and ghostly as it may be, and, with every ounce of imagination left to them, begin to write.
A Creature, Stirring
It is Christmas night—or, more accurately, 2:00 in the morning of December 26. I am on the small porch at the side of my house. My cat is on my lap. The door to the living room is closed. Every window inside the house is wide open because the house is full of smoke—a vile, stinky smoke. The porch is winterized, but I have opened one window about six inches because of the smoke escaping from the house. And what I am saying to myself is Well, at least the temperature’s up in the twenties.
The cat is unusually docile. He knows that something fairly strange is going on, and he is cold. I murmur to him over and over that we’ll be all right. With sudden crystalline clarity I know that I am absolutely alone in the universe, except for this small animal.
Will it reassure you or just make the whole scene weirder if I tell you that the smoke is from burnt cat food?
*
During the first year after Bob’s death, a member of the Widow Society told me that for her, Year 3 had been the turning point, and so it was for me. The book I had been working on when Bob died was finally published, and people wanted to talk about it, giving me a sense of solidity. The feelings of fragility and endangerment lifted and I walked on firmer ground.
During the fall of that third year, I noticed that when I came downstairs in the morning to feed Scout, his dish was empty. Totally clean, crumbless. This was unusual. He was never a huge eater, possibly because he dined sumptuously outdoors, at least during the warmer months. He had always left a little kibble in the dish overnight. I was mystified: he didn’t seem to be gaining weight; I concluded that he’d simply decided the Science Diet he’d been lackadaisically consuming for eleven years was tastier than he’d realized.
Then one day I happened to turn on my oven. When you live alone, you usually use the stove or the microwave. Cranking up the oven to 350 to cook one pork chop just seems grandiose. So I hadn’t turned the beast on for a while. As it heated up, smoke began to curl from the lip of the door and the opening between the burners. Now, I’m not conscientious about cleaning the oven, which is to say I hadn’t done it in years. But the smoke filling the kitchen didn’t smell like the smoke of a dirty oven. It was a dank, burning smell. The smoke was rolling out into the dining room when I shut the oven off and threw open the windows.
When the oven cooled down, I opened the door. Around the oven floor were little blackened piles of what looked like dollhouse-sized charcoal briquettes. Or like burnt cat kibble. One pile in each corner, like ritual cairns. When I pulled out the warming drawer beneath the oven, more of them clattered down into the drawer or out onto the kitchen floor.
I looked down at Scout, who was sniffing the putrid air. Don’t ask me, he said. I was wondering where it all went. What, you think I crawled into the oven? I was a little freaked out: something was afoot in my house (my safe harbor, my refuge) that I couldn’t explain, something that obviously involved a living—
Ah.
The previous summer, I’d had a swinging pet door installed in the screen on one of my porch windows, an antidote to the cat’s incessant demands. At first, it seemed like a wonderful improvement—I was freed from constant doorman duty. But within weeks, a downside made itself apparent. I had to carry outside a number of feathered or furred creatures that were either dead or soon to be so. One summer day Scout brought home a tiny brown field mouse, quite alive, which quickly shot under a small cabinet. I quarantined the mouse on the porch and made several vain attempts to catch it in plastic containers. Eventually I propped open the cat door to give it a means of escape and went on about my day.
And forgot about it.
I think of myself mostly as a responsible person who looks reality in the face. But in fact we contain multitudes, as Uncle Walt used to say. Among my multitudes is a person who occasionally, when faced with a frustrating problem, closes the door on it and walks away. And keeps going. When I didn’t see the mouse again, I happily concluded that it had gone out the same way it came in.
I now understood that as autumn closed in, the mouse had found in my oven the perfect winter lodging. Since it was never turned on, it was simply a large, dark, warm, dry, and undisturbed place to store the endless supply of nutriment that magically appeared across the room in the white ceramic dish every day.
I moved the oven. I banged on it. I shone a flashlight behind the adjacent refrigerator. I swept and vacuumed cat food from the oven. And once again closed the door and walked away. Of course, a day or so later, when I opened the oven door to check, there were three new cairns, and the warming drawer was rolling with pellets.
With a bolt of grief, I thought how much Bob would have loved this situation, or rather, loved attacking it. Like most men, he enjoyed an adversary, however tiny. I grew accustomed to the firecracker sound of mousetraps going off in his relentless war against rodents at the cabin. I would wince, feeling the little necks snap. When I protested that they were welcome to their share of the rice and Cheerios, Bob raised the stakes: they would eat through our electrical wiring! I used to watch conspiratorially as the odd mouse snuck across the living room, with Bob six feet away, absorbed in the newspaper. He insulated me from real moral choices: I could align myself with the victim while he shouldered the responsibility for eliminating the threat.
Now it was all on me. I thought of this little critter tearing around the house, tiny and alone and terrified. Was I anthropomorphizing, projecting my own feelings onto a rodent? Of course I was. But I simply couldn’t buy the snap trap. Instead, I got a more expensive black vinyl tubular item that used leverage and peanut butter to trap the mouse, who could then be transported outdoors. Of course the peanut butter disappeared and the mouse was nowhere to be seen. Again I swept, again I vacuumed. Again, again, again.
Doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result is said to signify insanity. Why didn’t I just call an exterminator? That this option never occurred to me suggests that I was in fact a little crazy. I’d like to blame it on my postmortem state, but I was dealing with much more complicated problems than mice at work every day. So I must confess that among my multitudes is another person who, when the rock keeps rolling down the hill, switches off her brain, puts her shoulder to the boulder, and makes like Sisyphus. From Sartre’s perspective, that’s the essence of Absurd. But from the rock-pusher’s point of view, what she’s doing looks like survival.
*
The encompas
sing cosmic aloneness I was feeling on the porch that Christmas night had irrupted into my days with some regularity in the last three years. Before Bob’s death, I had felt alone often, powerless sometimes, and truly terrified maybe once. But the night he died, the unholy trinity came to me united, unmediated, unmasked, and when you look them in their empty eyes, they enter you and lodge for good.
From the first, I had been especially on guard as The Holidays approached—hence the disastrous Jamaica trip that first Christmas. I just wanted life to go on without me. The thing is, life keeps calling you back. People want to take care of you. They want to make sure you’re not alone—as if that weren’t exactly what you are. They want to include you among the living. Above all, they want to make sure you’re covered during that ghastly six-week ordeal we call The Holidays.
Intellectually, you can deconstruct them all you want. Morally, you can disdain the orgy of excess. You can roll your eyes every time Andy Williams insists that it’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year. But The Holidays is a tenacious and hydra-headed beast. Deep below the tinsel and overkill, formidable forces lurk, powerful tropes: childhood, the communal feast, the return of the light. If you are painfully alone in December, everyone else is a Who down in Whoville, joining hands with the others to sing, while you lurk up on your frozen precipice, pretending to despise them.
Now, add to the mix the fact that New Year’s Eve is your anniversary. Which you never got to celebrate, not once. So what you want to do from mid-November on is to sit under a fleece in front of the TV with a bottle of Dewar’s and a cat on your lap, watching Johnny Depp movies and calling for takeout until the bloody year has turned and everybody stops shouting. But your beloved’s beloved sister insists that you join her crowd for Christmas Day. You understand—distantly, as one hears the doctor’s voice through anesthesia—that human connection is necessary. In spite of yourself, you go about the grim business of continuing to live.