can’t do this alone.
And yet—what is the option? The Widow is one who has discovered that there is no option.
There is a plastic bag provided for me, into which I can put my husband’s smaller things. I am determined to carry everything in one trip and somehow, I will manage.
This determination to manage—to cope—to do as much unassisted as possible—is the Widow’s prerogative. You might argue that it’s a sign of her wish to appear to be—which is not the same as being—self-sufficient; or you might argue that it is a symptom of her derangement.
But then, in the early minutes/hours/days of Widowhood—what is not, if examined closely, a symptom of derangement?
These books Ray has been reading—which he’d asked me to bring from home—and his shoes—in the plastic bag these objects are strangely heavy, and unwieldy. One of the books is a bound galley in which I’d been reading intermittently at Ray’s bedside, and from time to time reading aloud to him an interesting passage from it—a book about the human brain by a Princeton neuroscientist whom I have met—the jaunty title is Welcome to Your Brain. The sight of the galley fills me with a sick, sinking sensation. . . .
I will take it home. I will hide it on a shelf. Never can I bring myself to look into it again.
“Honey? I think they want me to go now . . .”
My voice is thin, wavering. Perhaps it isn’t a voice but a faintly articulated thought.
Staring at Ray on the bed. It is not natural—instinctively you grasp that this is not-right—to see a person so composed, unmoving.
Yet there is the sensation—visceral, uncanny—that the person who is lying so still, not breathing, or breathing so faintly that it’s undetected, is well aware of being observed, and observing you through shut eyes.
Helplessly I am standing here, thinking—the thought comes to me—There will never be a right time.
Meaning, a time to leave the hospital room.
Meaning, a time to turn my back, and walk away.
To turn my back on Ray—my husband. How is this possible!
Awkwardly, and very slowly, in small steps like a blind person I back my way out of the room. Very clumsily, for my arms are full.
I am trying to carry too many things. So frequently lately I’ve been dropping things, surely I will drop something now. I am in dread of calling attention to myself. I am in dread of losing control in a public place. Suddenly it seems to me—I’ve left my handbag behind—I can’t quite see what I am carrying, in my arms. A wave of panic sweeps over me—though how trivial is this!—how ridiculous—at the possibility of losing my handbag, my car key, house key.
This is the terror: I will lose crucial keys. I will be stranded, marooned. I see myself at the side of a highway—in the dark—frantically signaling for—what?—headlights rush past, blinding. Or maybe this is a dream. Recurring dreams of being lost from my husband are my most frightening dreams but this too is very frightening, for it is so very plausible. Ray is likely to be in charge of keys—to know where a spare key might be kept, outdoors—but now I am obsessed with keys, searching through my handbag for keys a dozen times daily. The relief of finding a key, which might have been lost!
In fact I will lose some things. I will discover that a pair of dark-tinted glasses is missing out of my handbag. They must have fallen out when . . .
I will leave behind Ray’s glasses! I will be utterly unable to comprehend how I could have overlooked them, hadn’t I held them in my hand . . .
Ray’s wristwatch—this, I haven’t left behind.
At the brightly lit nurses’ station—near-deserted at the hour of 1:43 A.M.—I tell one of the nurses that my husband is in room 539, and he has died, and what do I do now? It is the height of naivete, or absurdity, to imagine that the nurses are not well aware of the fact that a patient has just died in Telemetry, a few yards away; yet, I am trying to be helpful, I am even asking with a faint smile, “Do I—call a funeral home? Can you recommend a funeral home?”
The woman to whom I’m speaking—a stranger to me—looks up with a frown. I don’t see in her face the sympathy I’ve seen in the faces of some others. She says, “Your husband’s body will be taken down to the morgue. In the morning, you can call a funeral home to arrange to pick it up.”
This is so shocking to me—so stunning—it’s as if the woman has reached over the counter and slapped my face.
It! So quickly Raymond has ceased being he, now is it.
I feel that I might faint. I can’t allow myself to faint. I lick my lips that are horribly dry, the skin is cracking. Though I can see that the nurse would far rather return to whatever she’s doing at a computer, than speak with me, hesitantly I ask if she can recommend a funeral home and she says, with a fleeting smile, perhaps it’s an exasperated smile, that she could not recommend any funeral home: “You can look them up in the Yellow Pages.”
“The ‘Yellow Pages’?”—I cling to this phrase, that is so commonplace. Yet I seem not to know what to do next.
Another time I ask if she can recommend a funeral home—or if she could call one for me—(such a request, such audacity, I must be desperate by this point)—and she shakes her head, no.
“In the morning, you can call. You have time. You should go home now. You can call a funeral home in the morning.”
Deliberately, it seems, the woman does not call me by name. It is possible that, though the Telemetry unit is not very large, she doesn’t know my name, and doesn’t know Ray’s name; it is entirely possible that she never set foot in Raymond Smith’s room.
“Thank you. ‘Yellow Pages’—I will. In the morning.”
How strange it is, to be walking away. Is it possible that I am really going to leave Ray—here? Is it possible that he won’t be coming home with me in another day or two, as we’d planned? Such a thought is too profound for me to grasp. It’s like fitting a large unwieldy object in a small space. My brain hurts, trying to contain it.
The nurse has returned to her computer but others at the brightly lit station watch me walk away, in silence. How many others—“survivors”—have they observed walking away in this direction, toward the elevators, in exhaustion, stunned defeat. How many others clutching at belongings.
In the elevator descending to the lobby I am seized with the need to return to Ray—it is a terrible thing that I have left him—I am filled with horror, that I have left him—for what if ?—some mistake—but sobriety prevails, common sense—the elevator continues down.
Returning to the lightless house beyond Princeton I feel like an arrow that has been shot—where?
The front door is not only unlocked but ajar. A single light is burning in an interior room—Ray’s study. When I push open the door to step into the darkened hallway it’s to the surprise of a sharp lemony smell—furniture polish. In a trance of anticipation I’d not only polished the
