Not a Widow

The story I keep putting off writing has been rolling around in my head like a lopsided marble for months. Winter finally gave way to spring which warmed our days, brightened the Midwest landscape with a profusion of greenery and vibrant perennials, and also birthed a trillion strong double-brood of cicadas to make things interesting. The story-behind-the-story I want to write has changed over time in a devolutionary way. It’s not a pleasant narrative. The subject matter is guaranteed to wipe the smile off of any face, because it is a story about illness, old age, and the steady march towards death amid the bustle to sustain life.

The dying or maybe-dying character is a man in his mid-seventies. I imagine that for the purpose of my story, his name remains a mystery since his very identity is hijacked by death’s fawning, ruinous actions and intentions. The unreliable narrator is his wife, who is a sarcastic old broad with a heart of gold. Her name is Mary, a name I selected just because I latched onto the idea of titling the story “The Widow Mary.” Would people get the homophonic pun-twist on “The Merry Widow”? Who knows?

The couple’s life’s trajectory, which has always seen its share of kinks and erratic twists, is thrown wildly off course by the husband’s debilitating, life-threatening illness which strikes swiftly, or at least manifests itself with a galloping progress that is incomprehensibly destructive. So Mary is not a widow, she is a pre-widow, a beta-widow, hurtling along the speedy, jarring descent to widowhood. Or at least that is what she and her husband believe and grimly prepare themselves for. Death is a stalker, and in this mystery the reader impatiently awaits the final verdict. Will death successfully prevail, or retreat to await another time, a direr circumstance?

Mary’s misguided instinct, her “fatal flaw,” so to speak, is to throw a lot of bad humor at a bad situation. She’s really not a bad sort, but she sure can sound like one. Like most every human crowding the planet, she is too squeamish to peel away the hardened onion layers which protect her vulnerable core, so instead she relies on lame humor. She lobs one-liners worthy of the Catskills back in the olden days when contemptuous, bigoted wisecracking and lunchtime highballs were all the rage.

Mary just happens to be about my age. She is the mother of three adult offspring, and her toddler granddaughter is imbued with superhuman energy and a zeal for life that is highly contagious. Mary’s husband is eight years her senior. They retire from their long careers in Orange County, California (she a county library staff employee, he a white-collar Data Communications engineer) and in strict opposition to accepted retirement norms, relocate to the Midwest—traveling against snowbird traffic—where their granddaughter's family is settled. None of their kids could hope to afford California, so with autumn mists in their eyes, the couple puts the heart-stirring beauty of the mountains, canyons, deserts, lakeshores, and seashores behind them, along with their steadily growing climate anxiety. They always say, write what you know, but this is a story I have intentionally put off writing. Can you blame me?

Like me, Mary never has been able to go gently into that good night when it comes to aging. For my part, I was still enjoying the relative youthfulness of my fifties when my husband Cleve sailed past sixty. I cast him as the butt of rather insensitive, ageist jokes in a series of “humorous” essays on aging and even referred to him as “the canary in the coal mine of aging,” what with his requisite trifecta of reading glasses, stiff joints, and paper-thin skin serving as a cautionary tale. I was taking notes as I reluctantly followed along behind, looking for trip hazards and handrails. I intended to transfer all this real-life baggage onto the Mary character, who would justify her crass humor by insisting she’s only doing her human best to fathom the bizarre, transitional late-middle stage of life when time suddenly gains on a person. What’s more, Mary’s husband has rarely even had the sniffles; she assumed he would live forever anyway.

As I considered how best to write this story, I mulled over how to convey Mary’s struggles with the diminishing returns of growing old. After almost forty-five years of marriage, she would take a hard look at the confounding fact that she and her young hippie husband had blithely volunteered to press on with life until time turned them into their own parents. As if that wasn’t enough, they were then hustled forward, by sheer momentum alone— figuratively kicking and screaming the whole way—to take up their grandparents’ places in the family hierarchy. I wanted to write about how Mary freezes in front of the mirror when she sees her mother looking back at her, a familiar expression of sad bewilderment on the beloved face she’s missed for the last thirty years. Write what you know.

The inevitable has occurred in my own life. Cleve and I grew old, and illness has settled into our household like a rude guest who is messy, irritating, and demanding, and has no intention of leaving. We both are learning to live with it.

Like writers everywhere, I planned to neatly fold myself, my life, and everyone in it into my narrative. How better to process this drama? I am not sure why the subject of my husband’s health crisis seemed like a great writing project to begin with. The basic plot is a universal one, with the dangerous potential to be more bleak than experiential: when a potentially lethal disease seizes control of the Widow Mary’s husband's once-active, proudly robust senior body, the couple’s little planet tips on its axis and the gravity shift sends them into a free fall. They are both afraid, if for different reasons, and are predictably unprepared. When the husband is no longer able to perform most of his long-standing household duties, let alone recreational pastimes, Mary quips, “I always thought my husband didn’t do anything, until he couldn’t do anything.” She defends this Phyllis Dillerism by saying it's an honest observation gleaned in a moment of panic, when she feels overwhelmed by the domiciliary chores which she always thought she was accomplishing pretty much solo. Boy, was she wrong.

The more I thought about “The Widow Mary,” the more I struggled to figure out a way to write Mary’s conflicted response to her husband’s decline. I so wanted her humor to sustain her and to endear her as resilient and dependable, sympathetic and sentimental. More importantly, Mary needed to be respectful, a source of comfort to the compassionate reader. That’s when I realized I am not anything like Mary and never could be her. I’m just not that funny. The couple’s desperate and naive expedition into the disordered and uncompromising medical complex and the day-to-day challenges of frailty, pain, and helplessness is not about wisecracks and gently cynical observations, it is about marriage as a long game where illness and disability become shared traits, shared fears, and shared end-of-life struggles.

I wanted to write about the internal shifting of energy and drive I sensed when I more or less accepted the worst-case scenario for what it really is. I finally recognized I was facing a challenge that requires my exacting attention and the summoning of extraordinary internal and external resources. The problem is that I want to wrest control of the outcome somehow but there is no fallout shelter where I can hide my husband Cleve and keep him safe. The crisis is so well-removed from my sphere of influence and capacities that I could imagine what it must be like to transfer one’s anxieties to a higher power, just for some relief from the dread of certain failure and helplessness. I gave up searching for snappy, ground-breaking descriptions of the dark terror and weeping exhaustion that lengthens my nights into dark and lonesome weeks, leaving me zombie-tired during the day. I do my level best to do all of my crying in the privacy of my car, but sorrow wells up from the abyss without warning, and dramatic outbursts are selfish and reflexive things that come and go when they please.

A summoning of energies and preparation necessary to face the calamity are deceitfully exhilarating. I feel the same stirring in my gut that I always associated with the first cold snap of fall—when the worst of the hot weather has passed—or the thrill of anticipation when one of my adult offspring ricochets back from the greater world for a visit home. It is the urgent calling to prepare for a great event. But what event, exactly? A midnight visit by the EMT’s? One of the last conversations I had with my dying father, nearly fifty years, ago was about an Egyptian funeral he dreamed he needed to prepare for.

All I know is that I must be ready. I am seized with an urge to clean the house from top to bottom, rally the children to my side, and put all our affairs in order. I am determined to cast off any dead weight, as if we are preparing to launch an inadequate ocean vessel or airship. I compulsively rummage through the cupboards and closets for any nonessential junk which survived the recent move from California to the Midwest, a move which I can now see was an unnecessary strain on Cleve’s body.

It has taken time for me to realize that, on top of everything else, I feel guilty. It is a survivor’s-guilt, and it nags at me with a peevishness that accomplishes absolutely nothing. My days fly by in a rush of caregiving and household activities while my not-young body somehow powers through it all. Twice I am laid up by a back spasm, reminding me to slow the hell down. My own vigor is both a wonder to me, and a derogation to the suffering Cleve endures day in and day out. Lurking in the shadows beyond by my blindingly bright day-to-day anxieties is the realization that when my body starts to fail—a process that is not proud or dignified, not pretty or conveniently fleeting—I will probably be alone, reliant on busy adult offspring with their own full time jobs and full time lives. That inevitability is too terrible to focus on presently.

The more I think about it, the less I want to write “The Widow Mary.” The plot has certain potential as a candid and acerbic, yet poignant, look at illness and the imminent loss of a life’s partner. I am pretty sure that in these amateurish hands of mine, it would sink like a headstone. I am in no way prepared to compose a respectfully ironic perspective on death and dying. My story is not unique, but it is the only one I have.

There are excellent window narratives out there for the choosing. I am thinking of Joan Didion’s, and Joyce Carol Oates’ contributions. In surer hands, “The Widow Mary” could entertain, inform, and push all the right buttons where sentiment and heartwarming humor are concerned. “The Merry Widow” is a comedy, after all, but it’s more like a dark and greedy rom-com operetta than an existential perspective. I am not a widow, and maybe the man I married who rarely suffered a head cold in our forty-five years together—and had never spent a night in the hospital—will recover, against all odds. The Widow Mary in me is only too happy to wait this one out for as long as I can.

Bethia Sheean-Wallace retired from library services in Orange County, California and relocated to the prairie lands of the midwest where she is a caregiver for her husband and granddaughter.