Widowed—Almost Five Months In

A breakdown at the library and a decision to show up, to open the gate and navigate in the open.

I know me. Writing it out and putting even parts of this in the open will be a catalyst. I should have been doing this for the last twenty weeks. I know this about myself. Like so many, unless I open myself to the writing, even I don’t know what is there. But doing this in isolation and locking a schoolgirl diary up with a key won’t help me. I am not shrinking, but I am losing solidity. I am becoming translucent on the way to invisibility. The words though are black and white. Seeing them helps rebuild the cells and tendons and ligaments, adds color back into the stream. We won’t worry about filtration systems right now, or swelling, or signs of failure, or things that turn to concrete.

For now, let’s just capture the immediate moment.

This is a private post, and yet I am searching, too. There is a paywall tucked below. Most people do not need to see this full post, but I need to write it. The paywall is not intended to make you pay. This post is largely outside of my core Illustrated Life publication. For now, I am making the best use of the options that exist — and deciding to be more transparent in hopes of finding more solid ground or at least giving myself over to the swimming that is required.

My regular Sunday post for this week appears here. That post is about spirals and snails and hermit crabs and gratitude. This is not that and yet, in many ways, it is.

Widowed. Lesbian and widowed. 

It is important, I think, for me to say those things. To write those things.
I have trouble with the words.
I want to just tuck those things away, stray hairs, but the hairs continue to fall.
I need to desensitize myself to the words.
Both of them.

Widow.

The first time I checked that box was a shock. The first time I checked “single” was also a shock. I’m not even sure it makes sense that you go from married to single as a result of death. I never even considered before that, on paper, I now look as if my partnered life never happened. More than thirty years and two kids later, it is as if it didn’t happen, at least on paper. One senior rescue dog, now passed. One fat cat, now passed. A U-Haul to the swamp and then to the East and then to the West. Three apartments and one house. Years and years of doctor’s visits. 

The medical record was already locked and inaccessible the day after when I thought to try and download a copy.

It is almost as if it never happened, at least on paper. 

The ground continues to move under my feet.

“Can you explain these two prior addresses?” Yes…. we lived in those apartments between 1994 and 1998, there and here. The records must go back only twenty years, or the swamp address would have been included. Yes, we lived in the swamp. There were love bugs. Swarms of them. 

It is something I mentioned that final day, oddly, a stray detail that floated free as I looked at the life between us that was closing. 

The least favorite place we lived: the swamp.

I think of those years as love bugs, Wendy’s, Walmart, Sonic Rt. 44 drinks, and time looking at a map trying to figure out an escape route. But I know there was étouffée, which I wouldn’t eat, and beignets, which I would. I know there was Victorian literature and a dissertation finished, postmodern plays and creative nonfiction, and the reality that the program I’d been brought into was really just the shell of a drunken old professor. I know there were poetry readings and the sounds, endlessly, of a dialup modem. I know Hurricane Andrew came through. I know there was a stray cat named shadow.

So many of my memories have been stripped bare, just objective facts remaining, scattered bits and pieces, the texture lost. I can’t put myself back in any of those moments. I can’t hear conversations or see people.

Widow.

I’ve had trouble grappling with the word widow—and the archaic gendered counterpart, widower. I’m offended that there are two words. It isn’t that I’ve had to say the word out loud, but I’ve had to turn it over in my head, a word I don’t know how to form, a stone I am trying to understand. Like other words that have been mine and that felt too awkward, this one is a puzzle. I keep looking for marks on the sides, etchings, signs of erosion, a message left by time, hieroglyphics that hold the key to understanding. I think half-formed thoughts of being in Nantucket and being mesmerized by the history of rooftop widow's walks, the idea of women watching and waiting.

Lesbian.
Widow.

I don’t use many labels. There were some I didn’t like along the way. I carry my labels quietly. I wear my patches on the inside. It doesn’t mean that I don’t know who I am. I was always secure in who I was. But now so much has changed. The labels feel different and germane.

October 22

I pulled on a sweater today, grey, cashmere, not mine.

I am not seeing myself reflected anywhere. I don’t really need a mirror. I’m not one to look for mirrors. But I am more and more struck by the sheer absence of reflections.

Maybe I am writing now because in doing so, I hear the echoes, I hear my words bounce against the line of trees and drift back to me. We had a book when the boys were little about a beaver, I think, who would call out across the lake. (A quick search turns it up, Little Beaver and the Echo.) “‘When you are sad, the Echo is sad,’ said the wise old beaver.” In the story, Little Beaver is lonely and goes in search of the being who has echoed his cries. Along the way, he makes an assortment of friends.

I started this note as a moment of overflow. This is not an essay. Structure will come later, rise from the things I am not yet writing. This is overflow, something I have often called spilltide, a made-up word that has always made sense to me and fits now. It is important to me that this is not an essay.

No judgment.

There are rants I need to make before I will ever be able to line up the details, chart the timeline, and sort out the story. There are things I have to do this way, in threaded words, in partially public words, in woven pieces that help me unpack the piles of roving, prepare them to be twisted and spun.

Only in the writing do things break free, float into view in a way I can then gather, pile, layer, and anchor.

I don’t want to read about stages. When I first heard the stages of grief (and, yes, I heard of them with the disclaimer that they are not a prescriptive order), I turned away. I was disappointed. I hadn’t sought them out, but all along I knew the rubric was there. I assumed these stages would make sense when I finally saw them, but they didn’t ring true. 

Who has time for those stages when the avalanche that follows death happens?
I wasn’t able to just stop my life.

Within the first few days, I made a list of books I found listed online and checked out the book I saw recommended everywhere. I thought somehow I should approach grief and loss methodically, tracking with books. Within a few pages, I felt alienated because my loss, while unexpected in the moment, wasn’t a total surprise as the outcome of more than two decades of illness. It was an inevitable moment even though, ultimately, it surprised everyone. But in the terms of the book, my loss wasn’t sudden enough.

I closed that book and didn’t read any more. I am not interested in hierarchies of grief, but I sense they exist.

The vocal bird gets the worm.