by Becky Aikman
I balanced on the armrest of the chair, wanting her to feel someone close. Now the group formed a loose but wary circle, everyone protected by a different veneer. Denise was calm. Dawn was frothy. Marcia serious, Lesley chatty. My persona, I hoped, was confident. Tara was the only one who seemed to have shown up without a mask.
I could see how tricky this project was going to be. On the one hand, I wanted the group to find its own natural flow. I was determined not to play the part of social worker—no lectures, no compulsory recitations of individual tragedies. But on the other, the one bond that we shared was lurking in the dark recesses of the room as conversation trod safely in the daylight domain of home, work, children, weather.
“Let’s start with a toast,” I suggested, and fetched champagne from the kitchen. That got tricky, too, as everyone stood and fumbled over which of us knew how to pop the cork. It went unspoken—that had been a job for the men. Denise did the honors smoothly enough, and I poured.
We raised our glasses, and everyone looked to me. Whatever was going to go wrong tonight, I thought with mounting unease, the fault would lie with me. I hid behind my confident mask, forcing myself to smile and speak. “None of us expected to find ourselves in this strange situation, having to reinvent ourselves when we least expected it. But as long as we’re doing it, here’s to doing it in style, and here’s to doing it in good company.”
“Cheers to that.” Lesley took the first swig.
“Here’s to a great new year,” Dawn said brightly.
“For me,” Tara said, “it couldn’t be worse.”
The room grew hopelessly still as her words hung in the air. Everyone sipped and looked down at her glass as if contemplating a rare object. I was ready to write off the entire evening, maybe even the entire year, when a low, commanding voice broke the silence, and the taboo.
“How long … has everyone been widowed?”
It was Tara. She’d said the word. Not the word, widow, but close enough. No one had dared go near it up to now.
The silence stretched, and we sat back down, deflated. I felt the full weight of the moment, knowing we’d arrived at the point that would decide what this party, what this group, might be about.
“It’s been a year and a half.” Marcia, sensible woman of few words, spoke first.
The rest of us answered, everyone except Tara. A year and a half for Dawn. Five and a half years for me. Just over two years for Lesley. Only five months for Denise, our youngest.
“Ooh, yours is so new,” said Lesley, her eyes round, her voice tender.
“Yes.”
“It’s very different then,” said Marcia.
Tara still hadn’t spoken, holding her thoughts in reserve as the rest of us fell mute again.
“You know,” Dawn turned her sparkly countenance toward Denise, who was perched again on the floor, “people are going to tell you that time makes all the difference.” Her smile remained blistering bright. “And you just want to kill them.”
A couple of us laughed. Denise smiled, tucking her knees under her skirt and arching her back in a fluid motion.
“No, they’re not saying that,” she said placidly. “They’re saying, ‘You seem fine.’ That’s what I get. They say, ‘I’m glad you’re fine.’ ”
“Are you telling everyone you’re fine?” I asked.
“No, no, that’s just what they want to say. That’s what they want to believe. If I could tell people one thing, it would be, just acknowledge that this happened. Don’t pretend it didn’t happen.” She took a hasty swallow of champagne.
“Are you getting ‘You’re so strong’?” Tara asked.
There were knowing nods all around. Of course we were strong—what choice did we have? “I get that, too,” said Marcia. “But one of the things I’ve found is, even now, I get to where I feel strong, and then I go backwards.”
I hadn’t expected to hear that, the buttoned-up and—I’ll be honest—strong-looking Marcia with a hole in her armor. In fact, I was surprised that all these women who hadn’t known each other an hour ago were willing to share such thoughts.
“Yes,” Lesley said intently. “I still have that sort of day. I’m buying this new house, and I want to, I really do, but I keep thinking I shouldn’t be doing it by myself.”
Tara listened to her with sidelong remove. Finally and abruptly, she offered some information. “My husband died last February … so it’s coming up on a year.” She stopped at that.
Dawn rescued us from another silence with a loopy non sequitur. “I find that the only cure for sadness is happiness.” Everybody cracked up at the obviousness of the remark, but I couldn’t help recognizing that she seemed to have hit on the hypothesis for this group. Perhaps the hypothesis was loopy, too.
“No, really,” she said, trying to maintain some gravitas. “I figure out what will give me the most happiness, the most fun, and I go out, and I do it. I don’t always feel like it. But I force myself. Really, really, really force myself.”
“And you get lost in it,” Marcia said abruptly. “And then you say, ‘Gee, I had a good time.’ ”
Dawn and Marcia exchanged a brief jolt of recognition. Perhaps they had more in common than I thought.
“But back to my point,” Dawn insisted, her voice swooping with operatic dexterity. “People said to me that time makes all the difference, and I just wanted to hit them. I’d be like, Shut up! But, I have to say, now, a year later, it does make a difference. I was in a blur six months after my husband died.”
“A blur,” several women chanted, nodding.
We were beginning to engage with each other now, taking a real interest, finding patterns of similarity. Once again, Tara cut in and stopped us cold. “Were your husbands … ill … for a period of time?”
I could see that she had braced herself against the inevitable—what she didn’t want to hear, what she didn’t want to say—but still, she had asked the tough question. Tara was probing for what had to be everyone’s worst memory, the calamity that had set each of us off on an unfamiliar, lonely course, but I thought she was prodding herself as well, forcing herself to share what her instinct told her to conceal. I braced myself, too. I feared that her question would set off the same spiral of resentment I’d witnessed at my last support group washout.
No one seemed keen to follow where Tara was steering us, nor was I. But I had gotten everyone into this mess, I figured, so I took the lead. Okay—so go: the cancer, the four-plus years of caregiving—I didn’t feel the need for much elaboration. This group would know what those years had done to my husband, and to me.
When I finished, Dawn spoke up with none of her usual flourishes. “My husband died in an accident,” she said. “He went away for a weekend with his friends, riding all-terrain vehicles in West Virginia. He went over a cliff. That’s it.” She shrugged. “He went away for a weekend, and he didn’t come back. Yeah. So.” She looked from woman to woman, palms up, casting us a go-figure expression.
“How old was he, Dawn?” Lesley asked.
“Forty. Yeah.”
“So young,” said Lesley.
“He was … gorgeous.”
And he’d left two young children behind, children for Dawn to raise alone. There was barely time for us to register the stark tragedy of it before Marcia succinctly outlined her own: “Mine had cancer. He wasn’t sick for that long. Maybe five months. Not long. It was particularly difficult, though, because by the time he was diagnosed, it was stage four colon cancer. He opted for alternative treatment, so he never went through chemo. I don’t know how it would have turned out if he had.”
We waited, feeling the force of these revelations, to see who would go next.
“I still don’t know how my husband died,” Denise said after some hesitation. I’d been worried that these cumulative tales of loss might be too much for a widow of only five months, but she spoke with presence. “He went into the shower in the morning, and he came out and collapsed. I was with him. The
last thing he said was, ‘Help me.’ ”
He died in her arms. Five months later, she was still awaiting results from the autopsy.
“Mine was really … complicated,” said a muted voice. This time, Tara didn’t wait to go last. We leaned in toward her as she worked that silken instrument, slower and softer even than before, holding us captive as she curled her body forward in the chair, taking up as little space as possible. “Because … I lost my husband slowly … over stages.” She stopped, and I thought that might be all she planned to say, but she went on. “He was an alcoholic.” She gave a decisive nod, as if to confirm this to herself. “He was. So we watched him transform into something … entirely different from the man we knew.”
“Is that what he actually died from?” asked Lesley.
“No, he died of heart failure. But, you know … it pickles all the organs. He was fifty-six when he died.”
Without taking a beat, Lesley straightened herself from her spot on the floor and plunged like a swimmer into a cold lake, not allowing herself time to think. “My husband committed suicide,” she said abruptly. Everyone registered the shock of it but managed to maintain a level gaze. “He was the most adventurous, hard-working … He loved life to the fullest, and he was only fifty. And much like your husband, Tara, dying of a disease like alcoholism, I think Kevin probably suffered from depression.”
“And you didn’t know?” Marcia asked.
“No,” said Lesley. “Obviously, he had been thinking about it for a while, because he left all sorts of notes to help me through.” Her eyebrows went up again, her coquettish eyes grew rounder, and her voice recovered some of its chatty tone. “I was a little bit precious, you know. He did everything for me. He left us a three-page letter, a beautiful letter, the girls and me.”
“You have children?” Dawn asked.
“Yes. The youngest had just gone off to college two weeks before.”
Next to me, I could feel Tara unfold as she realized that Lesley, so capable of cheer, had weathered such a trauma. It must have placed Tara’s own ordeal in sharp relief. She sat up taller and looked at Lesley with new respect. We were all tempted to say it: “Lesley, you’re so strong.”
The stories were out at last, the rough outlines at least. They were almost too much to take in, let alone keep straight, the only common thread being in the telling, squarely, without embellishment, without self-pity. Perhaps that was why, rather than bringing everyone down, the disclosures seemed to open everyone up. Taut shoulders loosened, jaws relaxed. The rush of release that swept through the room was palpable. We couldn’t seem to wait to release our most closely held thoughts.
Dawn told us with some embarrassment that she’d been unwilling to hear the details of her husband’s accident. “I still don’t even want to know,” she said, her musical voice grainier but still emphatic. “The guys who were there would try to tell me, ‘We tried to do this or that,’ and I didn’t even care, really. It was too painful for me. I’m like, it doesn’t matter! As long as he’s not lost or missing and I should do something about this, what the hell difference does it make? He’s dead.”
This set off a wave of what-ifs from the others. Lesley revealed that she had found her husband in their home after what he’d done to himself—she didn’t say what. “I tried to save him, and for the longest time I thought, oh my gosh, he died because I didn’t do something right.”
“Yes,” said Dawn. “I was in this crazy place for a while where I thought that if he died, it somehow had to have been my fault. Somehow I did it. I was bad. It’s hard when your husband dies and it totally affects your whole life to think that it didn’t have anything to do with you.”
Widow’s remorse and widow’s guilt. The pangs seemed to be just under the surface, and everyone was mining them now. “It’s hard not to go over all the scenarios,” I said, in an effort at soothing. “To think, I could have done this differently or that differently.”
“You must have felt that, too,” said Lesley, turning to me.
“Me? Yes.” I was caught off guard. I had expected to keep my distance in this conversation—I was the organizer, after all. But I could hardly avoid answering. “My husband’s illness”—did I want to do this?—“was very long. We made hundreds of choices along the way. Do we do radiation? Do we do surgery? Do we do another chemo? It’s hard not to beat yourself up. You don’t know what would have happened if you’d done something differently. And he suffered so much, maybe we shouldn’t have gone to such lengths.”
I hadn’t planned to volunteer this information, wasn’t prepared to revisit it. Five years later, it still unnerved me.
“You can beat yourself up about things where you have some control,” Dawn said gently. “But I don’t think that life and death fit into that category.”
“There’s nothing you can do,” Lesley agreed. “My husband was the best thing I ever had. When I lost him, my life changed in an instant. But this has made me totally fearless. Because the worst thing that could happen has already happened.”
It was my turn to feel a jolt of recognition. That was my line! “Yes,” I said. “Anything less and you have to let it go.” I tried to steer the conversation toward the future. “That’s why we’re here. Now. Tonight. To let this go and head wherever we need to be next.”
The eyes of the others brightened with possibility. “It’s funny,” Lesley said. “We’ve all just met, but we’re already talking about things I don’t dare say to anyone else.”
We had polished off that bottle of champagne in less time than it took to pop the cork. I stepped into the kitchen to grab a new one from the fridge and held its cool weight for a moment against my overheated brain. A real rumpus was fulminating out there, the group jabbering away, talking all at once and laughing now, too. I was struck by the collective wallop of all that mortal experience assembled in one place, not sure whether what had happened so far was at all what I’d had in mind. I’d felt driven to convene this group to see if there was a better way, but I hadn’t intended to immerse myself so deeply. Already, I was beginning to comprehend that detachment wouldn’t be possible, that I’d be back in the soup. I’d be pressed to revive harrowing memories, to see them again in the light cast by the group.
Dawn’s remark—what was it? “The only cure for sadness is happiness”—was more the model I’d had in mind. I wanted us to have fun. But, clearly, it wasn’t possible to ignore the memories, dark or light. I weighed the option of bolting out the back door. The others were probably as leery as I was of letting dark genies out of the bottle. Maybe they’d go their separate ways in an hour or so and spare everyone, me included, from further revelations. On the other hand, who was I kidding? I wouldn’t have set this in motion if I hadn’t felt the tug to explore more myself. And it was too late to lose heart now. I felt no choice but to push forward, through the end of dinner at least.
I put my shoulder to the swinging door, back to the group. They were all standing now, forming a tight circle, a near-tribal connection around the appetizers, neglected up to now. Tara looked up and called to me across the room, that room that had seemed so wrong before they all came in. She looked like a different person from the one who had shown up an hour ago. The tension in her face was gone. I swear I couldn’t have picked her out of a lineup. She had taken on some of Dawn’s glow, Denise’s poise, Marcia’s certainty, Lesley’s energy, maybe my confidence.
“Becky,” Tara said, beaming now, “this guacamole is delicious.”
chapter
THREE
you could try looking in the Yellow Pages under Funeral.”
The nurse with the sugar-coated voice was back again. Clearly, she wanted to move me along.
My sister fixed her with a withering look, perfected over generations of bossy women in our family. “Do you have a copy of the Yellow Pages?” she asked.
“No, but maybe you could check around the phone booths? In the lobby?” The voice was taking on a synthetic edge, more
Nutra-Sweet than honey. It was a couple of hours into the evening shift at the hospital. I had been a widow for only an hour or so, and already it was going badly. Now it seemed I was expected to do something, but my brain was scrambled, and I couldn’t grasp what that something might be. Every ten minutes or so, somebody would pop into the room, avoid looking at the bed, and kindly suggest that I go home, go get something to eat, go. My inability to move was starting to make the entire staff of the hospital uncomfortable.
I’m sure the picture I presented to them was odd. I imagined a proper widow might have been weeping softly, tenderly clutching her husband’s hand. But there was so much equipment at that end of the bed—oxygen paraphernalia, a pole with an IV drip, a bedside table that held a telephone and my husband’s reading glasses, and all sorts of monitors that suddenly had stopped beeping—that there was no place for a chair. I was too drained to stand, so I’d planted myself near the bottom of the bed, dry-eyed, holding on to his foot.
Meanwhile, the nurses clearly wanted the room, the way waiters at Babbo want a table on a Saturday night. At first they assured me with big sympathetic eyes, “Take as much time as you want.” But now a different nurse stopped by every few minutes to give me a nudge.
“If you call a funeral home, they will arrange to come pick up your husband,” one of them offered.
Leave him here? To be picked up? Like the dry cleaning or the recyclables? I couldn’t do that. “I don’t know what to do,” I answered.
My mother, my sister, and three or four friends had gathered in the hallway outside. Someone asked if the hospital had a social worker who could speak to me. The hospital employed such people for situations like this, situations when the family had Failed to Plan Ahead. I liked the idea. The social worker would know what to do. I could sit there surrounded by the all-too-familiar fluorescent lighting and waxy linoleum floors and inert machinery until one appeared, but it was Friday night, and no one was answering the page.