as a big gentle bear of a man, though I certainly knew he wasn’t only that.
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
Putting John in the ground in a carefully chosen and beautiful spot at the top of a hill, not far from George Eliot, Karl Marx and Eric Hobsbawm, a friend who had also known John’s father, seemed not only crucial but an important marker. I selected the site with an eye to the fact that it was overseen by a stone angel. As importantly, we could push through brambles and stand on a ledge to see the grave from Waterlow Park, where long ago we used to take the children for walks. I thought once we had buried him on this familiar hill close to so many friends, my mind would be easier and his ghost calmer.
There was still a distance to travel, one full of potholes you could tumble into and never surface from again, without somehow acquiring a new, transformed shape.
One day, on my way home from a meeting in the Strand, I did literally tumble. It must have been April, by then. I was feeling just a little pleased with myself for having performed adequately, not fainted, managed sanity, or what passes for it, and even humour. Then, by some aberration, I decided to run for an approaching bus. I never take the bus. I hadn’t run for years. But I ran then along a crowded Aldwych, weaving between people, like some ancient rugby player toting a bright blue bag instead of a ball. The pavement wasn’t impressed. The ground under my feet rebelled. I fell flat on my face. A crowd gathered round. The pain, the shock, the humiliation were dreadful, but by some miracle, I hadn’t broken anything, not even, it turned out, my nose, though it felt distinctly out of joint. A nice young woman put me into a cab. By the time I got home my face had started to turn black and blue. The next morning, I looked like a victim of serious domestic abuse. The trouble was, I was my own domesticity.
And even then, in the midst of terrible pain, the tears didn’t come.
Nor would the ground quite hold John. A furry new revenant, a bear-like charcoal cat, silky to the touch, with a round face and intent yellow eyes, appeared. We had seen it here and there on the street for several years. I think he was a British shorthair. John had a fondness for him. Now the cat decided he really needed to move in with me. No sooner was the front door open than he would streak past and disappear into the house. I would look diligently in every room and under sofas. Invariably I would find him upstairs, curled up in pride of place on a plush red velvet armchair in John’s study, right next to his desk. I began to think he looked a little like the chair’s last incumbent. Had John been transformed into this unreadable familiar? I would carry Puss out, not wanting to leave him in the house alone. But I felt as guilty as if I were putting John, himself, out.
IN MAY, almost exactly six months after John had died, we held a memorial in Cambridge. A great deal of planning had gone into the event, not only by myself: his departmental administrator was key.
I had been looking forward to this ritual moment. Surely this would shift things, I told myself. The obsessive inner monologue would abate, the rage, the superstitions. I would no longer be quite so susceptible to the waves of grieving madness.
But I feared the event simultaneously. Universities are rarely altogether hospitable to those outsiders called partners. Close friends of ours had gathered from abroad, from America and Germany and France. His department, History and Philosophy of Science, of which he had been head for years, convened a day for students, former students and colleagues. A public memorial in the beautiful Great Hall at his college, King’s, followed, and finally drinks at the Whipple Museum of Science, which the department houses.
One-time students, colleagues and friends evoked a person I must also have known, since I had known John well, known his dedication, the breadth of his knowledge, his humour. Yet my mind kept wandering as soon as anything personal was mentioned, as if the only plot I could follow was the purely intellectual one. Everyone gave the impression of intimacy.
Neither did I always recognize the man evoked – had I so remade his image in myself that he could no longer be remembered, reassembled, reconstituted as other, outside myself? I struggled to recall half of the incidents at which I was purportedly present. I struggled to thank people graciously, even though I was so very grateful to them. I simply struggled. Remembering, putting the body and mind parts together again, seemed once more, and despite the passage of time, to reinvigorate shock and hostility. Only the Bach at the end of the proceedings, played by the talented Kryszia Osostowicz – the Sarabande in D from Partita No. 2, followed by the Largo in F Major from Sonata No. 3 – seemed to knit together ragged threads and provide peace. And the embrace of friends.
FROM THE OUTSIDE, she must seem like a thoroughly admirable, certainly a good enough widow, I thought consoling myself, after the memorial, about this other, often angry, person who was also me. Look how fittingly the memorial went. And look how hard she’s working not to die immediately even though she wants to; look how she’s struggling to make things right for her children and grandchildren so they won’t have to wade through tons of mess now or after she’s gone. Doesn’t she realize that they probably will, whatever she does?
A good enough widow.
I realized I hated the word. It was a box that might sport a small window, but it was very close to a coffin.
All those literary widows whom publishers and biographers feared and loathed came to mind, the ones who traditionally guarded the estates of their far greater (and often far older) husbands, like fiery dragons. With their children or executors, they burned letters and diaries, and were reviled for adulterating the historic record. Not that I shared their status, either social or historical, but I understood their need to control. Without those gestures towards order, towards keeping the dead in their preferred image, they themselves might easily tumble into visible madness, the tearing out of hair and shredding of clothes.
I was a contemporary independent woman. I had never – in the way of women and widows before the Married Woman’s Property Act of 1870 – been the legal property of my husband, a femme co(u)verte, turning over my identity and my earnings to him, depending solely on him and unable to recoup what might initially have been mine even after his death. No. Laws and customs had changed, but the word ‘widow’ still contained a whiff of sulphur, particularly if you weren’t young enough to be merry.
I could now definitely see the attraction of hoisting papers into the fire and not having to sort and sift, let alone finding or keeping for posterity what was best forgotten. If I hadn’t yet considered jumping into a pyre, practising suttee or sati, like those good Hindu wives of yore (‘good wife’ being what the word means), who purportedly thought of themselves as part of their husbands and certainly had no independent legal life or means, it’s because flames are not the way I want to go.
The archaic ‘viduity’, meaning widowhood, chimes with vide or ‘empty’, suggesting lack and want. In Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, the gloomy old protagonist, trapped in never-ending repetition, hears the word in an early tape of himself he is replaying:
The word ‘widow’ comes from the Indo-European word widhewo married to the Latin vide, all of which means ‘to be empty, separated or destitute’. It’s one of the few words in which the basic form applies to women, the suffix ‘er’ being
