Single ___
Married ___
Divorced ___
Widowed ___
Again the multiple-choice test. This time I’m at my ophthalmologist’s office. What is the difference between divorced and single, in ophthalmological terms? How does the distinction between single and widowed matter to my dentist? They both want to know, and I might as well tell them—again. I’m not married; in fact I had barely accustomed myself to the fact of being married when I suddenly wasn’t, and I am not given to the notion of marriage enduring beyond death. According to these categories I can’t claim to be single, although of course that’s what I am. I’m not divorced and therefore starting over. I’m the other thing, the final option, the sad story. When I check the box, I always see a figure in the corner of my eye, shrouded and silent. She is alien, the black fairy crashing the party. I don’t recognize her.
*
The morning following the night they dredged Bob’s body from the river, I scanned the universe, looking for something sufficient to hold together the shards of me for a while. But that force was unavailable—my mother, not four years gone.
In those hours of moving very slowly, pulling myself from one moment to the next, hand over hand as if time were a rope, I felt her absence as a roaring vacancy where the magnetic core had been. It came as another outrage, for on top of shock-lightning shooting through me and the maelstrom of grief, there was anger, waves of it that kept breaking over my mind: my mother was not on the earth.
She could and would have held it all with me, I was sure, as she had held me gently before her on my stomach in the water, floating backwards while I learned to swim. If ever I had needed her fund of compassion, the sense of endurance and hope she could convey, her practical genius for sweeping into a scene of chaos and setting it to rights, it was on that May morning as I stood alone in the violent light. But before too long, I would have hit a vein of cold steel. I knew this even in my longing for her. It would be a matter of days, maybe weeks, but not months before she would remind me of what she had survived, and it would come at once as command, dare, and threat. In short, the message would be: Do not be one of those women who crumble.
Or maybe I was wrong. Maybe this time she would have bowed to superior devastation. This thought actually veered across my mind: I’ve finally beaten her.
*
She was warned by her father that she would be a young widow. Her suitor was fifteen years older and maybe he appealed as a fatherly figure to a twenty-four-year-old who adored her own father. He was certainly paternal, my dad—paternalistic, patriarchal, pick your adjective. When I asked her why she married him, she said it was because he treated his mother so beautifully. An old litmus test, I guess, from the days when women didn’t get to know suitors very intimately: if you want to know whether a man will be a good husband, watch how he treats his mother. My father was a walking American Dream: blond, blue-eyed, square-jawed, Germanic, he left college when his father died and went to work in the steel mills of Chicago. A white boy with an unrelenting work ethic and a mother to support, he pleased the powers that be and his collar turned white for good. A self-made man, as they used to say. When they married he was thirty-nine, a well-heeled businessman selling steel in Detroit—not a bad line to be in as the city became the Arsenal of Democracy for the coming war. If his bride saw the rigidity and conventionality in him, she chose to overlook them or spun them into gold: He’s solid, reliable, principled.
When I asked her if she ever thought of leaving him, she reacted as if I’d suggested she go to the moon. “No one got divorced then!” Meaning no one of our class. “And I had no money; what would I have done? I would never have gone home to my father.” Never mind her mother: she would have felt ashamed to burden her father, financially and otherwise, with a daughter who had failed at the career women were permitted to succeed at: making a marriage.
By the time I was in second grade my father was dying of colorectal cancer. My memories of home are filled with his absences—stays at Mayo, trips to hospitals in Detroit—and with resentment of his presence, always severe, critical, chilling. To me he was generally gentle and loving, but it got him no points because I witnessed his effect on my mother and my brother. He died three days before Christmas in 1959, at fifty-eight. My mother was forty-four: a young widow.
His death came as a sad relief after years of caretaking. But now she found herself in a financial and legal wilderness. Her husband had kept her in complete ignorance about finances, one of those ancient patriarchal traditions in which “protection” is the veil thrown over a tangled mass of anxiety, pride, and the need for control. He had taken care of his mother; now he was taking care of his wife. Unexceptionable manly behavior. So she spent a year or so untangling accounts, interpreting numbers, consulting lawyers and bankers, figuring out whether she could keep the house, whether my brother could stay in college, whether I could go to camp. The nadir came when she had to petition the court for legal guardianship of her children. In those dark days this was not merely a matter of filing papers; she was required to demonstrate, before a judge, her moral fitness to care for us: “my own children!” as she always put it, outraged all over again, retelling this story regularly as both cautionary tale and exorcism. For my mother, widow meant warrior.
*
An odd word, widow. It seems to echo like a vault, its w’s closing around it like shutters or heavy wings. It is both noun and verb, but the transitive verb form—to widow—is all but extinct. The only form we use is the reflexive: to be widowed. To have something radical done to you, by a power not your own. To be changed, made different, by a death. To become not single again, or unmarried, but something else altogether. To be propelled into difference and cast into an outer darkness.
Widow has no synonym. It is also one of very few words in English whose masculine form, widower, derives from the feminine. That’s how deeply widowhood has belonged to womanhood and how powerfully it has affected a woman’s status. But what it lacks in synonyms widow makes up for in metaphors:
Widow’s weeds: the reverse bridal gown, the manless woman darkly revirginized.
Widow’s peak, said to derive from the cap or hood worn by mourning women, which dipped to a point over the forehead.
Widow’s mite, linking manlessness and impoverishment.
The widow hand in a card game: the superfluous hand dealt and set aside as an option for a player with a bad hand.
Grass widow: an archaic term for an unwed mother (no husband but the grass she lay down on).
Merry widow: the long-line bra-corset introduced by Maidenform in 1955 and named for the 1905 operetta by Franz Lehar. The woman delighted to be disencumbered of a husband, probably having inherited his money.
Five-fingered widow: a British soldier’s sobriquet for his masturbatory hand.
And of course, the spider with the telling red figure on her back who monstrously widows herself.
At the top of the house is the widow’s walk, where she paces off her scanty space, scanning a vacant horizon, waiting for her life to return.
Widow evolved from Sanskrit and Latin roots meaning empty, void. A woman unmanned: a nothingness.
*
My mother was what was known as an eligible widow—attractive financially and physically. As the 1960s blew away the dust of the ’50s, she met a man who presented the antidote to my father. Warm, funny, fun-loving, childlike in many ways, slightly irresponsible, he brought the party into every room he entered. Above all, he adored my mother. She was suddenly having an extremely good time—traveling, drinking stingers, going to the racetrack and out to dinner, dressed beautifully and colorfully. I remember her laughing more than I’d ever known.
Thirteen months after their wedding, one night early in January, his heart stopped. It turns out that his doctor had told my mother he had perhaps five years. She jumped in anyway, betting everything against the odds. But in the long winter months after his death I could smell the outrage roiling through her grief.
With this second widowhood she ascended into myth. She had suffered through my father with a relentlessly stiff upper lip in true devoted-wife style, and then the man who redeemed her heart had lasted just over a year—it was grossly unfair. From that moment until the end of her life, people regarded her with at least a soupçon of awe. The first adjective people used to describe her was strong. My word is formidable, French or English. She and her noble suffering significantly defined the story of our lives. Other people had mothers; I had an epic warrior queen.
It will perhaps seem paradoxical that she told me more than once that she was “a man’s woman,” despite my horrified protestations. “No,” she said, “no, I’m happiest with a man.” In any case, she wasn’t alone long. Within sixteen months she was married again, to the brother-in-law of #2, and this one stuck for nearly forty years, until her death. They made a rich, satisfying life together, and she did not have to bury him.
Yet even the satisfied calm of her third marriage did not quell the old outrage. What ignited her furious judgment seemed to be the struggles of a younger generation of women. Daughter, stepdaughters, daughters-in-law took the brunt. We had not suffered as she had; we were not bucking up and holding it together; we did not comprehend what life demands of women. If we brought her our dilemmas or sorrows, we never knew which of her faces would meet us: the earth mother or the imperious wicked queen of Disney’s Snow White. Sometimes they merged just at the point where her endless competence and good sense measured our fallibility.
Just once I got her to admit how much easier she was on men and boys. “Well,” she said thoughtfully, “I guess I always thought they needed it more.” This was a major epiphany for me: women’s lenience toward men, their willingness to make excuses for men and do their work for them—which had riled me since early childhood—came not from respect but from a sense of men’s weakness, their incompetence, their dependence (which, of course, it also serves to reinforce). Hers was a generation of women who saw men as requiring looking after, even though (or perhaps because) they were running the world. It was easy to extrapolate: she was hard on women because she thought we could take it—because we must be able to take it. She had had to woman up to get through twenty years of terrible marriage, two widowhoods, and a heartbreak; we were expected to do the same.
So when my first important adult relationship was shattered by infidelity, she was compassionate for about ninety seconds, and then time was up. “Don’t you think I’ve been hurt in my life?!” The question shot out from nowhere; neither of us had mentioned her or her life. Somewhere inside my anguish I was furious: how could she switch the subject from my life to hers and then make me out to be the unfeeling one—me, the sufferer in the present case? The mother I needed was gone, replaced by the Witch of the West.
I look back on that moment and wonder what my pain triggered in her. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest to know that she had endured my father’s infidelity. But the size of her response suggested more, as her responses to me tended to do. I think that of all female suffering, mine roused her to greatest combativeness because it drew on her deepest love and fear. I was not to be a woman who allowed my life—and certainly not the men in it—to damage me. For me to become anything approaching a victim was not an option, ever. She would burn it out of me with maternal fire.
So it was that on that May morning by the river, finding myself with no warning in the wasteland of sudden, outrageous widowhood, I wanted my mother, but wanted her with an edge of trepidation, of ambivalence. Something monstrous had befallen her girl. But what face would she have turned to me? Her compassionate stalwartness was the only thing that would have comforted me. Nothing else could have taken my destruction in its arms but her ability to convey that she was bigger than any catastrophe. But when I imagined her instead demanding that I consider her own suffering and toughen up, I began to implode.
*
I remember, when I was first learning computer language, seeing the phrase “widow and orphan protection” and laughing. Shades of Dickens, and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. But in fact, widow came into usage as a typographical term earlier in the twentieth century, when it was adopted to refer to a line of text that ends a paragraph but appears at the top of a new page. It is considered unsightly, messy, residual.
Of course it lends itself to personification. A 1936 article called the typographical widow “that awful slattern of the printed page.” Slattern: a sloppy girl, etymological aunt to slut. Nowadays the typographical widow is described with less censure than pity: “a word or short phrase separated from the rest of a paragraph and left sitting at the top of the next column or the next page”; “widows and orphans are words or short lines at the beginning or end of a paragraph, which are left dangling at the top or bottom of a column, separated from the rest of the paragraph.”
Sitting or standing, above all she has been left. The 2004 edition of The Elements of Topographical Style offers a helpful mnemonic for the distinction between widows and orphans: “An orphan has no past; a widow has no future.”
*
A future requires a past.
I wore my wedding ring for four months, eight days. It is a plain gold band with an inscription on the inside: Will to Mollie. Mollie was my father’s German mother, Amalia (the one he treated so well), and Will was his father. In addition to the ring, I inherited from my grandmother a set of ponderous old photo albums and a picture of a woman, set in a deep, shining wooden frame with a gilt inner margin. The woman is not young, but her very dark hair, pulled tightly back behind her head and caught in a decorative comb, reveals no gray. The expression in her eyes seems tinged with bewilderment, though it might have been a fleeting effect of the camera’s flash. On the back of the frame is penciled “Captain Griffin’s mother.” Captain William Griffin, Will’s father, my paternal great-grandfather, was baptized in Montreal in 1833 and became a merchant seaman on the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes. For years this was all I knew of the woman in the imposing frame—whose mother she was.
Then one day, in one of Mollie’s albums, I found an envelope containing two folded eight-by-five-inch pieces of scratch paper, browned with time, labeled “The Griffin Family.” Covering them are penciled names and dates. I had to read the pages over several times before the story began to emerge.
It begins auspiciously, at the top of the first page, with a marriage announcement:
Edward Griffin & Margaret Kelley Married in Montreal Oct 22nd 1832
Then a list headed “Births”:
William Griffin Born in Montreal Dec 1st 1833.
James Griffin Born in Montreal July 12th 1835.
Mary A. Griffin Born in Sackets Harbor Sept 23rd 1837.
John Griffin Born in Kingston June 11th 1839.
Margaret Griffin Born in Kingston June 5th 1841.
Edward Griffin Born in Kingston June 5th 1843.
Celia Griffin Born in Pt. Dalhousie June 5th 1845.
Next to young William’s name, Mollie has inscribed, in ink, “Capt.” The woman in the beautiful frame is Margaret Kelley Griffin, and these are her children: seven in thirteen years, a child every two years, according with nature’s merciless plan, the last three exactly two years apart to the day. At the bottom of the page the parents’ birthplaces and dates are supplied: Edward was born in 1808 in Montreal, Margaret in 1809 in St. John’s, Newfoundland. So at their marriage they were twenty-four and twenty-three. They moved a lot, from one end of Lake Ontario to the other, St. Lawrence to Niagara, and across the border to Sacket’s Harbor in New York, all at a time when the new Erie Canal had revolutionized traffic to and from what was known then as the “West.” They settled in ports, where ships of all kinds brought news and supplies, books and building materials. Edward, a journeyman carpenter, would have found ready work. No wonder their firstborn grew up to sail the waters that dominated his childhood horizon.
On page 2 the story turns. There are just five lines of writing, a terse denouement:
Edward Griffin 1st Died Nov 8th 1845 Age 37 years + 3 days
Mary A. Griffin Died Sept 24th 1837 Age 1 Day
John Griffin Died Jan 15th 1840 Age 1 year + 7 months
Margaret Griffin Died Sept 18th 1845 Age 5 years
Celia Griffin Died Nov 30th 1845 Age 3 months
How is this story to be told? The information shifts kaleidoscopically, arranging and rearranging itself. Look at ages and you’ll discover that the birth and death dates don’t match the ages in the cases of John, Margaret, and Celia—hardly surprising when family information traveled intergenerationally, mostly by word of mouth. But Mollie’s account of the children’s lifespans wouldn’t have been far off. Four of seven children lost before the age of six, a breathtaking percentage even in an era of high child mortality. Or look through a gendered lens: all three girls gone, when daughters were often their mother’s closest companions and most valuable help. A husband dead before he reached forty, leaving his young widow with what resources, what recourse? Or, finally, look at the particular constellation of dates: in Port Dalhousie, on the shores of Lake Ontario, in the autumn of 1845, Margaret Griffin, having already buried two children, lost her husband and her two youngest daughters in the space of eleven weeks.
Most probably, illness swept through the Griffin house on dark wings that fall. But who knows? Maybe Edward’s heart exploded while he was sawing a timber. Maybe little Margaret toppled off a dock, and baby Celia was born with a fatal defect. In any case Margaret was left to bury her dead. And perhaps to study the face in the mirror, suddenly older, with a permanent expression of wonder at what the river could bring to one’s door and what those on shore could be required to endure.
Those childhood morality rates would have led any woman almost to expect to lose children, or at least to chasten her hopes that all seven might live to adulthood. Did the knowledge of the odds make the loss easier? Historians used to argue that it did, offering as evidence the fact that the same given name so often reappears assigned to a subsequent child. But instead of indicating lack of attachment, might this practice not indicate the opposite—an attachment to little Martha that survived to fasten to the new Martha? That is, after all, part of why we name children after relatives. What data, really, will tell us how our great-grandmothers lived, inside themselves, bearing children relentlessly, and how they incorporated staggering loss into their own narratives of their lives?
So when Edward died, Margaret was thirty-six—a young widow. Six and a half years after that dreadful fall, in April 1852, she married one John Jones. Near the end of the century, city records find her living alone in Montreal, at least into her eighties. So she buried him as well.
*
Postscript: Margaret’s eldest, Captain William, grew up to sail the Great Lakes into a good old age. He crossed the St. Lawrence and married an American woman. They had two sons. The younger, named for his father and called Will, married Amalia, called Mollie, daughter of German immigrants, in 1898. They likewise had two sons, the younger of whom was my father. In 1920, when the sons were twenty and eighteen, Will died at the age of forty-nine. Mollie was forty-three—a year shy of my mother’s age when my father died. Another young widow.
*
I study Margaret across the years between us. Her photo hangs where I see it every morning and am reminded of the cruelest yet most salutary truth: one’s particular experience of shattering loss, the trauma that violently destabilizes one’s life, is ultimately as ordinary as joy. I have felt in my own eyes the thousand-mile look in hers. What would she have to say to her precipitously widowed great-great-granddaughter? Would she put her arms around me and sing a song she sang to her children? Put a firm hand on my shoulder and tell me there is nothing to be done, so get on with life? Turn on me and hiss, “Don’t you think I was hurt in my life?”
In the time after Bob, that last voice rises in me now and then. I know how suffering can shrivel and calcify the sufferer and turn her mean. I’ve had to swallow my mother’s words in the face of other people’s calamities, struggling to churn bitterness into compassion. I have better understood my mother’s rage, her impatience with the novice sufferer. I study her and all the widows in my family tree as if they were constellated stars. I try to discern a shape, a direction, a story that arrives at myself. I know I am not the conclusion. Stories only “come to conclusions” when we stop talking. Like starlight itself, the tale I have read in the lives of these women reaches me from the past but does not reach any conclusion. It becomes mine to imagine. I’m the one who carries it forward.
“A widow,” one source has it, “is a word or line of text that is forced to go on alone and start its own column or page.” This is the line I join: the ones who carry on, carry over onto the next page, blank and ghostly as it may be, and, with every ounce of imagination left to them, begin to write.