A Widow's Story

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Somehow it has come to be April—nearly two months since Ray died.

  I feel that I should apologize to Ray. I feel stricken with guilt, that I am still here, and still more or less the person I’d been before he died—while his life has ended. All that was his, irrevocably lost.

  There is something shallow, vulgar—trivial—about this sort of survival, I am thinking.

  If you understand what I am saying, then you understand.

  If not, not.

  You, who are healthy-minded. You, imagining yourself safe on a floating island amid a Sargasso Sea of sorrow.

  I am not resentful on my own behalf—I am thinking that yes, this is what I deserve. But I am resentful on Ray’s behalf.

  At so oblique an angle to reason, let alone rationality, the widow speaks a language others can’t understand. Like the aptly named black widow spider, the (human) widow is best avoided.

  Gently I am being nudged awake—out of my Cymbalta-zombie state by the expectations of an audience here in Camden, New Jersey—on the Rutgers campus like a floating island amid the utterly depressing war-torn slum of this most economically depressed/crime-ridden of American cities.

  I am thinking of how, not far from this podium, in the small wood frame house he’d bought for himself, restored now as an arts center, Walt Whitman lived out the final years of what had been a life of surpassing exuberance—you might say, the most exuberant of poet-lives. Our greatest chronicler of the American soul in its expansive, outward mode, as his contemporary Emily Dickinson was the greatest chronicler of the American soul in its withdrawing, inward mode. Oh Walt Whitman—could we only believe you, as we admire you, and yearn to draw you inside us as our best, bravest, most optimistic self:

  The smallest sprout shows there is really no death . . .

  All goes onward and outward . . . and nothing collapses,

  And to die is different from what any one supposed, and

  luckier.

  —“Song of Myself”

  Earlier this evening, amid a buzz of voices, convivial laughter, a buffet dinner in a Rutgers-Camden dining hall with fellow participants at the festival, I experienced a moment of some distress—a precarious moment when the Cymbalta-daze seemed not to be adequate—finding myself rooted to the spot staring at slabs of blood-leaking meat on trays adorned with wilted lettuce leaves—and staring at the hearty convivial cheery individuals—as it happened, men—who were spearing this meat onto their plates, with no more hesitation at its bloody nature than a lion would feel tearing out the throat of its living prey; but there was a sister-mourner at the dinner, a poet/memoirist/translator with whom I could speak intimately and frankly; this woman in the cruel twilit state of being not-yet-a-widow—whose husband has been afflicted with early-onset Alzheimer’s.

  Rachel has written about this ordeal. It is not a secret, I am not violating her confidence. Amid the hearty carnivores in the dining hall we cling to each other like sisters. Terrible as losing a husband is, there is perhaps a worse predicament in losing the person he was; living with him on a daily basis as he deteriorates; feeling that you have no choice finally, as Rachel felt, but to arrange for him to be hospitalized, in the face of protests from his relatives and friends who have no idea what you are experiencing . . . Rachel is very thin, her skin is very pale, she too is one of the walking wounded. I would like to comfort her: “You’ve had a trauma. You must take care of yourself.”

  She’d known Ray, as an editor; I’d never met her husband but had heard of his exemplary career, particularly as a lecturer, at Columbia.

  Unvoiced between us is the question—which of us has been less lucky.

  To lose your husband suddenly, or—to lose your husband by slow excruciating degrees.

  To lose your husband amid a flood of sympathy, or—to lose your husband amid accusations and recriminations.

  I wonder—has Rachel glimpsed the basilisk, in the corner of her eye? In the corner of her soul? Has Rachel heard the basilisk perversely gifted with language, its cruel jeering voice?

  I dare not ask. I am afraid of what Rachel might say.

  Nor do I ask her, as I might, if she’s taking medication for her anxiety/depression/insomnia.

  How sympathetic I feel, for Rachel! Or so I think. For in my Cymbalta-zombie-state I am never sure if I am actually “feeling” much of anything or rather just simulating what a normal person might feel in these circumstances; as I have become adept at impersonating Joyce Carol Oates as some sort of post-Whitman beacon-of-light of exuberance and optimism.

  Joyce Carol Oates, author of . . .

  But maybe this is a mistake. This evening, in this place.

  Maybe this time, I will really break down. Maybe even the Cymbalta-haze will fail me.

  For this is—this was—Ray’s favorite restaurant in New York City. For we’d come here numerous times, in sunny weather; once or twice with friends, but usually alone. One or another of my birthdays we’d celebrated here, lunch in the Boathouse Restaurant in Central Park, at a table overlooking a pond upon which swans and other waterfowl paddled about companionably; and in the dark water, if you looked closely, you could see turtles just beneath the surface, surprisingly large turtles of a size and archaic appearance to suggest creatures of a primeval era.

  The occasion is a fund-raiser for the Autistic Children’s Association. I may have been invited to be the featured speaker because I have a younger, autistic sister but perhaps mostly because I am a close friend of a close friend of the organizers, and I am available.

  To heighten the air of the quasi-real, I am reading a poem I’d written years ago and probably have not read aloud to any audience in the past twenty years—“Autistic Child”: a short poem dedicated to my autistic sister Lynn who has been institutionalized in Amherst, New York, since the early 1960s . . . When the audience asks me about the poem, and about my sister, I tell them frankly that, in the 1950s when Lynn was diagnosed as autistic, it was a time when little was known about autism but much was speculated: a Freud-saturated era in which mothers of autistic children, like mothers of homosexuals, were “blamed” for their children’s aberrations.

  There’s a stricken silence when I say this. For blame is the most natural of responses, when one’s life has shattered.

  Blame whoever is closest, and vulnerable—a mother.

  This cold wet windy evening! It seems unbelievable that this rain-lashed place is the same Boathouse Restaurant that Ray and I so liked.

  It’s a pitilessly cold wet windy evening—April 27, 2008. I am thinking of a happier, sunnier time—Ray and me holding hands, at our table overlooking the pond.

  Should we rent a rowboat?

  Maybe—some other time.

  I am thinking of our own, smaller pond in the woods behind our house at 9 Honey Brook Drive which Ray stocked with turtles from a “wild-life pond-supplier” in Wisconsin. These turtles delighted us by basking luxuriantly in the sunshine on a fallen log Ray had dragged into the pond at an angle, for that purpose; eagerly I would look for the turtles to display themselves so that I could call to Ray Come look! Your turtles.

  Ray stocked the pond with tadpoles, too—very successfully. (When you approach the pond, in warm weather, dozens of frogs leap into the water croaking in alarm.) He had conspicuously less success stocking the pond with small, beautifully colored koi, that, within weeks, were devoured by a rapacious spindly-legged great blue heron descending upon their tranquil setting like a heraldic/demonic creature in a Bosch landscape.

  One by one the beautiful koi were devoured by the predator bird until they were all gone—and the bird flew away.

  Remember the koi?

  Remember the great blue heron?

  Remember how shocked we were? How naive?

  Remember how you [Ray] ran down to the pond to chase the heron away, shouting and waving your arms? How the heron flew into the trees a few yards away, unalarmed, waiting?

  So sad! Our beautiful fish!

  A
fter the fund-raiser, I am told that the evening was a “great success.” I am told that it “meant a great deal” for the parents and families of autistic children to hear me speak so openly about my sister and my parents and to answer any question they asked me. And I am thinking of a line of Anne Sexton which the suicide-obsessed poet had adopted as a kind of mantra—Live or die but don’t spoil the world for others.

  ***

  And now this morning, I am staring into the courtyard.

  Dimly I am registering There is something very wrong here.

  Where, pre-Cymbalta, I would have been anxious and upset now I am dull-anesthetized registering Ray’s tulips have been decapitated as if the statement were uttered by a computer voice, at a distance.

  It’s as if someone entered the courtyard with a scythe and cut off the tops of Ray’s tulips—you would not be able to identify these raw stunted green plants as tulips any longer.

  A long time is required for me to absorb this. Not that I am excited or upset—I am not—but in even my Cymbalta-daze state I understand that something terribly sad has happened here, and it is irrevocable.

  Deer entered the courtyard in the night. Deer nudged the gate open—no doubt, I’d failed to shut it tightly—and devoured Ray’s beautiful tulips in a matter of seconds chewing and swallowing as negligently and as mechanically as if they were devouring weeds.

  I would cry, except I have no tears left.

  For the first time thinking—“It’s just as well, Ray isn’t here to see this. He would be so upset.”

  Just as well. Ray isn’t here.

  This bad-headache morning I am at the front door calling for our elder tiger cat—“Reynard? Reynard!”

  In the night, Reynard seems to have vanished.

  Except that I seem to have no “emotions”—in the Cymbalta-daze I can barely remember what “emotions” are—I would be stricken with anxiety, and guilt.

  “Reynard? Where are you? Breakfast. . . .”

  My voice trails off in mid-air. How foolish and plaintive the word breakfast.

  Once a sleek young cat with a burnished-orange coat, a winning way of nudging his head against our ankles and cuddling close and purring when we sat together on the sofa, Reynard had been Ray’s favorite; Ray had been the one to choose him from a litter of kittens at a shelter and bring him home to surprise me.

  This might have been twelve years ago. How quickly those years have passed!

  Reynard hadn’t recovered from the loss of Ray—a presence he could not have named or defined but whose absence he keenly missed.

  In past weeks he’d begun to age visibly. So rapidly all remnants of kittenhood faded from him. His head seemed over-large on his body, his legs had grown spindly. Overnight it seemed he’d lost weight—his ribs showed through his fur, and his spine.

  His spine! Petting Reynard, I felt the vertebrae, with a shudder.

  The last time the vet had checked Reynard, in the fall, she’d said that Reynard was an “older” cat but “bearing up well”—it isn’t likely that she would say this now.

  From time to time lately he has seemed to be having difficulty breathing. Last night I carried him to the living room sofa—to Ray’s end of the sofa—thinking that he might sink into a deep cat-slumber and expire peacefully in my arms—but he did not.

  For a while Reynard lay panting as I tried to comfort him but then he began to struggle to be freed, feebly at first, then more actively, until at last his sharp claws began to scratch me, I had to release him.

  It was annoying to me, as it was upsetting, to see how eagerly Reynard wanted to escape from me. At the rear terrace door agitating to be let outdoors though it was a cold night, and raining. And so I slid open the terrace door and Reynard bounded out with surprising swiftness, for an elderly cat, and in the night several times I went to call him, at the rear door, and at the front door; but he never returned; nor was he lying on the front stoop in the morning in his usual position, patiently waiting to be let indoors to be fed.

  In the night, groggy in my Cymbalta-daze that never quite translates into actual sleep, I seemed to think that Reynard was lying at the foot of my bed, pressing against my leg.

  “Reynard? Where are you . . .”

  When I search for Reynard outside, I am horrified to discover him lying just a few yards away from the rear door through which he’d bounded the night before, stretched out against the side of the house in such a position that I could not see him from inside.

  As if he’d wanted to come back inside. But the door was shut against him.

  Now I am crying, now I am sobbing—“Reynard! Oh Reynard!”

  This is a sick sobbing grief like the kind that overcame me in Ray’s hospital room, the day before Ray’s death. At a time when it had not seemed that Ray would die.

  Another horror—Reynard is stiff, like a cat carved of wood. His teeth are bared, his eyes are half-shut, if there can be an expression on a cat’s face Reynard’s expression is one of extreme anguish, pain.

  This was not a peaceful slumber-death. This was an anguished animal-death, suffered alone.

  I am stunned by this death, my head reeling. I am so broken up, I think that I must be losing my sanity. Reynard was not a young cat! Reynard was an elderly cat! Yet, I can’t stop crying—not a normal sort of grief but ravaged, abandoned. Like a deranged child I am stroking Reynard’s coarse cold fur as if I could stroke life back inside him—I am stroking Reynard’s head, that feels bony, lumpy. The teeth bared in a snarling look—a fierce angry grin—disconcerting to see. . . .

  This too is your fault. You left him outside, in the cold. He has frozen to death. He has died alone.

  Carefully I wrap Reynard in one of our large bath towels—a thick green towel that, in the custom of our household, was Ray’s towel. With Cherie looking on warily, keeping her distance, I carry Reynard outside beyond the garden, and set him down amid tall grasses. Is this the proper thing to do? Is this a sensible thing to do? I am not feeling strong enough to dig a grave for Reynard, in this hard-packed soil. Somehow I slip and fall onto one knee and Reynard tumbles from my arms, stiff as if frozen.

  I am aware of myself as if glimpsed at a distance, a woman who has become a cartoon-figure, as in a Charles Addams drawing, carrying a stiffened cartoon-cat.

  Just as well, Ray isn’t here. Ray would be so sad.

  Chapter 73

  Taboo

  It’s a taboo subject. How the dead are betrayed by the living.

  We who are living—we who have survived—understand that our guilt is what links us to the dead. At all times we can hear them calling to us, a growing incredulity in their voices You will not forget me—will you? How can you forget me? I have no one but you.

  Most days—most hours—the widow dwells in a netherworld of not-here and not-there. Most hours of the day the widow yearns for the unspeakable oblivion of sleep.

  For the widow is a posthumous person passing among the living. When the widow smiles, when the widow laughs, you see the glisten in the widow’s eyes, utter madness, an actress desperate to play her role as others would wish her to play her role and only another widow, another woman who has recently lost her husband, can perceive the fraud.

  One widow glancing quickly at another—Is it like this for you? Are you dead, also?

  . . . it took me a long time to get beyond being stunned by [my husband’s] death, which was in fact quite predictable. (I see now.)

  Rereading my friend’s letter, I am struck by these words which I had not fully processed before.

  The author of these words is in fact a very well known writer whose memoir of her husband’s death and her own survival a few years ago was a highly acclaimed best seller. Rereading her letter now, I wonder if it was the fact of being “stunned” that propelled my widow-friend into writing the memoir, that so combines the clinical and the poetic—if she had understood at the time of her husband’s death that his death was “in fact quite predictable” would she have writ
ten the memoir? Could she?

  Now I am being made to think: is there a perspective from which the widow’s grief is sheer vanity; narcissism; the pretense that one’s loss is so special, so very special, that there has never been a loss quite like it?

  Is there a perspective from which the widow’s grief is but a kind of pathological pastime, or hobby—a predilection of the kind diagnosed as OCD—“obsessive-compulsive disorder”—not unlike washing one’s hands for hours every day, or hoarding every sort of worthless junk; on hands and knees “waxing” hardwood floors with paper towels and furniture polish, or vacuuming late into the night rugs that are already spotless . . . If only someone would publicly ridicule the widow, give the widow a good solid kick, slap the widow’s face or laugh in her face—the spell might be broken.

  At 4 A.M. such epiphanies rush at me like miniature comets. Such wisdom, that within a few hours will be lost in the groggy aftermath of insomnia and the low-grade nausea of the anti-depressant medication that never allows for full wakefulness as it never allows for full unconsciousness; never allows for any clarity of thought, and muddles even the most urgent of thoughts like radio static. This time, I have looked up my medication on the Internet and am not so surprised at what I find.

  Anti-depressant medication is indicated for individuals suffering from obsessive thoughts, insomnia, depression, suicidal fantasies; yet, anti-depressant medication may sometimes exacerbate obsessive thoughts, insomnia, depression, suicidal fantasies.

  Unmistakably, anti-depressant medication will cause urine retention, constipation, drowsiness, decrease in appetite and weight loss. In some, paresthesia, blurred vision, vivid nightmares, tremor, anxiety, palpitations of the heart, sweating, depersonalization.

  Is this medication helping? Is it—making things worse?

  I have no way of knowing. Since Ray’s death I have been transformed from a person who rarely thought about her “health” or “state of mind” to an ambulatory assemblage of symptoms like a skeleton rattling about in a loose gunny sack—some days, I can’t even imagine what personalization might once have been—I can’t remember having been a person.