On widowhood

It was early summer in London: the trees were pale green clouds, the lilacs were out. Because the Chelsea Flower Show was in progress, the arches and doorways of hundreds of shops were decorated in floral splendour. I had an Art Nouveau-style apartment in Lower Sloane Street. In the mornings, fifty horses, perhaps more, were ridden past by uniformed men from the Royal Stables.

During those weeks, I met people, talked, gave readings, laughed feverishly. I did interviews at the BBC. I was also in the first season of widowhood.

When someone close to you dies, an undertaker may send you books about grief. The one who organised my husband’s funeral did. The little booklets, written by two women who had been widowed, were called The Colour of Grief. At first, I was angry when they arrived, as if nobody could access my state of mind, as if my grief was different from that of everyone else who had been through a similar experience. I threw a couple of them away. When I think about that now, I see I was wrong; there was a lot of sensible advice in those booklets. I still have the last one, about the approach of the first anniversary of the death, and recognise how much common sense it contains.

One of the things I like is that the writers acknowledge that people who are grief-stricken can be angry. They might not have liked that I threw their books away but I think they would have understood. Some bereaved people have told me that anger was the last thing on their mind. Others, like me, have felt a sense of rage.

I think it has something to do with powerlessness. Death is not interested in what you want; it gets on with its business and you can’t stop it from happening when it’s ready. My husband died from an accident at home and it seems, from everyone I’ve talked to, that sudden death is a likely trigger for what looks from the outside like an unseemly response. That, and medical misadventure.

Men often appear to deal with bereavement differently from women. They either fall apart in an inconsolable way and die. Or they get married again very soon. They are sought after. They get asked out to dinners. People don’t refer to them often as widowers. People say, Oh, his wife died, poor chap. Of course, there are exceptions and I hear myself being accused of generalisations straight away. In his memoir, The Only Story, the writer Julian Barnes describes the grief of his wife’s death in a very intense way. He allowed it to show. But a lot of men don’t.

Because I understand widowhood from a female perspective, through the simple fact of being a widow, I chose to talk to other women in the same situation. There are a lot of us around. Even the Queen is one now. Not that widow is a term I care for. It puts a stamp on you. Not in service. Use-by date passed. Or, in a worst-case scenario, huntress on the prowl.

Around about a year after my husband died, I was attending a gathering. A man I knew slightly sat down beside me. ‘Found yourself a husband yet?’ he said. I nearly fell off my chair. He was an educated man, in a good government job. I think he was sober but you can’t always be sure.

‘I’m not looking for one,’ I said, and it was true.

‘Oh, that’s what they all say,’ he responded, turning away. ‘You’ll find one.’

I felt a sense of outrage then, of violation, not just of my husband’s memory, but of me. I had no interest in finding a husband, and nor have I in the years since. There are pleasures in solitude and the freedom of the single life. They are not exclusive of the company of men, but marriage for the sake of it has not been for me.

What I might have said, that confused evening, was that I had already had some overtures from men who were hardly an advertisement for their kind. One of them clearly wanted a roof over his head. It hadn’t occurred to me that I had such financial cachet.

On the make. On your bike, I had said in effect.

Then the question of sex arose, a certainty from others about what I needed, and I was undone by this too. I took astonished, diffident trips to the mirror. It was years since I had considered my appearance in this way. Wasn’t I already old? I thought of myself as interesting rather than sexy, when it came to men. An interesting friend. It wasn’t that I was averse to the notion of sex for older people, but at that moment I had no wish to be touched.

There is a contrariness here, I suppose. What I have missed since my newly single state arrived is touch. Age might have contained desire, but there is a terrible longing for the simple acknowledgement that the two of you exist as living bodies – the hand held, the touch on the back when you are out together, knowing there is someone there when you reach out at night. In the beginning, the loss of touch is a near-inconsolable grief, an ache that dulls with time but doesn’t go away. All the same, I knew that whoever might touch me in any way at all had to be of my choosing. In that first bewildering year I felt vulnerable and afraid.

Finding a husband? Not likely.

Yet, in my several male friends, the ones who had been in both Ian’s and my lives seemingly forever, I found the same level of tenderness and support that came from my women friends. In our regular conversations and exchanges, they reminded me of who I was and who I am, and who I could trust. My situation might have changed but I had not.

All of this would take time. In the first year of widowhood, I acted in some crazy ways. I mean, I think I was crazy but I persuaded myself I was acting normally. The second week after the funeral, one of my grandsons suggested a trip to the theatre, something he and I had often done together. The following day he was due to return to London where he now lives; it seemed a nice way of saying goodbye. The play was The Father, which was later made into a remarkable movie, starring Anthony Hopkins. But the play was sombre, not the right one for the way I was feeling. In the middle of it a man fell off his chair and rolled down the stairs. I screamed loudly; the play faltered and carried on. The man, it turned out, had simply gone to sleep, for he got up and returned to his seat.

Not long after this, I booked a flight to Europe. I left seven months later. I came back, had a new book launched, toured New Zealand with it, talking all the while, bursting into sudden tears now and then. I expected other people to take care of my feelings. To echo Jennifer, one of several friends I interviewed for this essay, I tried to accept kindnesses from others, which is harder than it sounds.

It’s been eleven years since Jennifer’s husband, Allan Thomas, died from leukaemia. Jennifer is a dancer and a teacher of dance. Allan was a musician and taught music at the university. In the years and months between his diagnosis and his dying, he showed a quiet and unswerving courage. He had studied gamelan music in Amsterdam, then in Cirebon, Java. In the mid-1970s, he brought an ensemble of antique gamelan instruments to New Zealand, and taught courses using it for the next thirty-five years. That is what he kept on doing until the end. Jennifer kept on dancing.

I shared a good deal of time with Jennifer in the weeks and months after Allan’s death, but her grief belonged to her. I remember that she got manuscripts Allan had left published that year, but I asked her to remind me of other things she had done. She told me that she:

sat and stared out the window

replied to the cards and letters

bought a push mower to keep the grass down

planted a tree

survived an encounter with a bullying bank manager

hugged the cat and sorted photos

learned how to check the oil and water and windscreen wiper.

I did most of those things too, although the bank manager was kinder. I keep finding more photographs that have to be sorted. I am still a coward about the oil and water. But acquired helplessness doesn’t get you anywhere.

I also kept a message Ian had left on our voicemail, until the phone company cancelled it a year or two later. Something about some shopping he was doing at the supermarket. I liked listening to this message.

The first time I went to London, nearly forty years ago, I stayed in a mean bedsit above Eccleston Square. I wrote about that experience in a story called ‘The Tennis Player’, and the character, so clearly myself, was called Ellen: ‘In London she lugged her huge suitcase up five flights of stairs and found herself in a bedsit under the eaves of a building that looked elegant from the outside and was a dump inside. There was a fire escape out to the roof just like in The Girls of Slender Means.’

I was using that bedsit as a base while I researched The Book of Secrets, vacating it from time to time to make journeys to and from Scotland. I was dreaming that some day my work might be discovered further afield than New Zealand. Alone in that room, I drank German wine and ate imported avocados and fish and chips out of paper bundles. The woman in the next room banged on the wall at night when I turned over in bed. This was the nearest to being on my own that I had been in my entire life. I made collect calls home to my husband nearly every day, wrote letters, sent telegrams. That time remains with me.

And now here I was, back in a bedsit in London, only this one had every kind of creature comfort, and my dreams had long been realised. I knew people all over London. I had a publisher nearby. What I didn’t have was a husband back in Wellington. I think it no great coincidence that I had chosen to flee to the other side of the world to relive that early experience of aloneness. In my beautiful apartment in Lower Sloane Street I lived it in a new way, one that no letters, or emails, or phone calls could reach. Two of my grandsons lived in London by then; they came and went, took me to concerts and art galleries and to clubs. They treated me like the invalid I was.

I came to live in Wellington when I was a young woman. In the suburb where we settled, there were several Greek families. On the street I saw widows dressed in black, their heads covered by scarves. I had been to tangihanga up north, where Māori women who had been widowed dressed in black, with green wreaths or pare kawakawa on their heads. But few committed their lives to wearing black as these Greek women did. The traditional period of mourning was forty days, but older women usually donned black for good. My friend Eirini remembers from her childhood her ‘great-grandmother and her sister sitting side by side on old wooden chairs outside my great-aunt’s house in Strathmore, dressed in that widow’s black, knitting and crocheting. They always had a smile.’

At the time when I first came here, I remember thinking how lonely it must be, in a foreign country, to be without a husband, and to identify your solitariness in this way. I thought of Queen Victoria and her long solitude, the way she too wore black for forty years, from the time of Prince Albert’s early death until her own. Eirini tells me that it is not the same now, that very few Greek women here wear black forever; they have moved into the new world. But, back then, this cultural distinction announcing their permanent bereavement struck me as profoundly sorrowful.

At the Cambodian Buddhist temple where Ian worshipped, and I frequently visited, I saw widows who wore either white with black scarves, or black with white scarves. Some shaved their heads. This period of mourning would last for around three months. But for older women it often went on for longer, even for life. Some of the women, who were collectively known as ‘the old ladies’, had come via the refugee camps after Pol Pot and the scourge of the Khmer Rouge; their husbands had died in the camps or soon after their arrival. They sat on the temple floor, intermittently pouring cups of tea for one another and for visitors, and praying. There was no going back, they were stranded by death in a community in which their identity and status was signified by their mourning garments. They must spend the rest of their days chanting in a land far away from home. They are comforted by the certainty that they will be reunited with those they have loved. Meanwhile, they have one another.

And in a different way, that is what I have too, that shared experience. Friendship is what has kept me going in recent years. My mother barely mentioned her bereavement after my father’s death; her sister, my aunt, not at all, although her widowhood lasted forty years. It wasn’t done to mourn publicly. But that wouldn’t work for me. The partner of a close friend died a month almost to the day before Ian. Our intimate and seemingly endless conversations have sustained me, our experiences of grief and our interactions with the world outside often mirroring one another.

Beth Darroch, another friend, was fifty-nine when her husband Paddy died after a short battle with acute leukaemia. He was a policeman, a couple of years older than her. That was sixteen years ago. She lives now in a beautiful restored villa, full of light and charm. She is serene, the way I’ve always known her. When we first met, she was the nurse at my doctor’s surgery, where she worked for years, a strong presence upon whom people in our community depended. As it happens, and perhaps that is why we turned instinctively to Beth, her life has been one of service. Her mother died in a car crash when she was twenty-four and already had two children of her own. Beth took on much of the responsibility for her eight younger siblings. And then her sister-in-law died of a sudden illness and left six young children, and their lives merged into hers. All these children. But the church supported and helped them, she told me. There was nothing they wouldn’t do to help.

I said to her at the surgery one day, not long after Paddy died, how desperately sorry I was, how I had no words to express this. She said, with customary stoicism, ‘It’s not the worst thing that could happen.’ I didn’t then know about the earlier part of her life. The back story. Thinking over that day, I see that it was as bad as it gets, but carrying on, showing a brave face, was what Beth had always done, how she survived.

Nor did I understand the strength of the faith she and Paddy shared. Paddy went most days in his lunch hour to Mass at St Mary of the Angels in central Wellington. Beth is still a regular churchgoer.

‘Do you believe you will see Paddy again?’ I asked her recently.

She gave me a slightly puzzled look. ‘Of course I will,’ she said.

If some widows put their faith in what is to come, others assert their place in the present, perhaps even more firmly than when their husbands were alive. A friend reminded me of a film where the widow puts her wedding ring into her husband’s coffin. She reckoned that was a brave acceptance of ‘till death do us part’, marking the start of a new existence. I couldn’t have parted with my wedding ring like that. But the day would come when I did remove it. My wedding ring finger had swollen and I eased the ring off. At first, I couldn’t think what to do with it. In fact, for a week I went back and forth to check that I hadn’t lost it and attempted unsuccessfully to jam it back on. If I saw anyone, I tried to hide my hand, as if I was being unfaithful to the past. At that point, I began to ask myself if I wanted to have the ring enlarged so I could continue to wear it or, on the other hand, to wonder about the significance of leaving it off for good.

I had first received the ring when I was twenty, in a wedding ceremony in the Māori Anglican church of St Faith’s beside Lake Rotorua. Steam rose outside from underground thermal streams, the rain pelted down, I wore a cream satin gown modelled on Princess Margaret’s wedding dress (she had married Antony Armstrong-Jones three months earlier). I made my vows, promising to love, honour and cherish – but not obey: I was prescient about that – till death did us part. I accepted the ring, a thick gold band, surrounded on each rim by a milled pattern, expecting that I would never take it off. Rings for men were not fashionable then, and so Ian did not get one. It was later, when we had been married for several decades, and he was gravely ill, that he asked for one. I measured his finger and bought him a wide chunky ring that I gave him in hospital. He wore it until he died, years later.

The thing, of course, is that death did part us in the end. You don’t think about that when you are twenty. It can’t happen. Or so you believe.

At some point, widowhood becomes less about grieving and more about living. Living as well as you can, not just about survival. There is more to life than that. Nobody can tell you whether to wear your ring or not. There is no time frame for taking a ring off. But I did discover some interesting views on the subject. I was told that keeping it on implied one was unavailable for new relationships. This hadn’t occurred to me. I did still feel as if I was married, even if my husband had died. When I thought about that, I asked myself if leaving it off might be a step towards my life as a single woman. Besides, the ring is so worn and thin, the milled rims long vanished, that I couldn’t see how it could be successfully altered. Another option was to move it to my right hand, which is apparently a universal sign that you are a widow or widower. But my right hand is larger than my left. And, I’m told, it indicates that you may be interested in dating.

That hadn’t occurred to me either. Some of my friends have turned to dating apps, looking for companionship. I can’t tell you anything about this. I didn’t think it would suit me, any more than a second marriage.

In the end, I chose to put my ring in a silver box inside the circle of my husband’s wedding band. The weight and heft of that ring places mine inside a safe space.

Where my ring once sat on my finger there is a deep indentation, a permanent mark, almost like a scar.

Brigitte Blakemore said, ‘Whatever you put in this story, tell people not to get married in a hurry.’ It’s hard to imagine her as anything but the dynamic person she is now, an easy talker, overflowing with energy. But, as she tells it, it becomes clear that the way has not always been easy since she became a young widow.

She was thirty-seven when Kevin, her builder husband, died of a degenerative illness. There had been a misdiagnosis, then two years of being in and out of hospital. Even though there were long warning signs, his death in a hospice came as a shock to her and her two children. Kevin was an incredibly hard worker, a man popular with their friends, an optimist; this wasn’t supposed to happen to him. They had met when she was sixteen, barely out of school, teenage sweethearts – he was the great love of her life. When he died, she had cried for days on end, until her eleven-year-old son begged her to stop. You’re torturing me, he said. She’d thought about ending things; nothing made sense to her any more.

Brigitte is a person with natural resilience and she did get a great deal of support. Besides, there were the two children who needed her. The opportunity for a new career presented itself; she took it with both hands and has succeeded ever since.

Some acquaintances had been dismissive, especially those who were divorcd. You get all the flowers and the sympathy, they said, we get nothing. It shocked Brigitte at the time. But, looking back, she takes their point.

She has learned to question situations more closely. Her second marriage, four years after widowhood, lasted two years. It still troubles her, in the sense that she doesn’t want to see other younger women in the same situation. ‘My doctor told me at the beginning, whatever you do, don’t rush into marriage. Take your time. My chemist said the same thing. Friends said it. But you know, there were men out there who were interested in me and I was lonely. I never sought them out, never did dating sites, nothing like that, and I thought the man I married was all right. But he wasn’t.’

She learned from the experience and has found a rich life. These days, as I do, she lives in an intergenerational household. Hers includes her daughter, son-in-law, grandchildren. Her laughter is quick, her optimism bubbles; the next adventure is just around the corner.

In London, I often walked along Ebury Street to the offices of my publisher, Gallic Books, in Eccleston Street, with the bookshop Belgravia Books under the same roof. I had three books on the go that year, the one that was due to be released in New Zealand, which I had already started promoting from afar, an earlier title that had just appeared in London, and a still-earlier one that my Paris publisher had recently released. When I arrived over there, I would begin a French bookshop tour. There was plenty to occupy my thoughts. I liked to walk past No. 182 Ebury Street, the early home of the writer Vita Sackville-West and her diplomat husband, Harold Nicolson. Vita was also famously the lover of Virginia Woolf. The house has a deep-red door with a brass knocker, set in a white façade; black wrought-iron fences. It made me think of unusual marriages. I hadn’t had one like theirs, a gay man and woman who somehow made their unconventional lifestyle succeed. But I had had a marriage that was different in its way, one in which we offered each other freedom to come and go when we needed. Now the freedom came without permission. I was responsible only to myself. I determined to make a trip to Sissinghurst to see Vita’s famous white garden.

My grandsons took me there one day, driving in the older one’s aged Mercedes. We got lost on the way, we laughed and FaceTimed with their brothers back in New Zealand, until we eventually made it through the sunlit Kent countryside to the most famous garden in England. If the grey, white and silver garden is Vita’s creation, the whole vast garden is hers and Harold’s. Irises nestled in the grasses, white tulips swayed between the paths. I climbed the stairs in the tower of Sissinghurst Castle to Vita’s room, where she wrote her poems and plays and love letters to Harold and other people besides Harold. Her desk was covered with deep sultry red leather, books and paintings crowded the walls. Here was the world of a writer who had surrounded herself with beautiful things, but whose life was conducted in a way that contradicted all expectations of order. Had we, Ian and I, been as different in our way as these two were? Ian had said more than once that we were different. Is it the fate of the woman writer to be seen as different? I can’t tell you that either. But people are curious about this. What I think now, is, that, in our life and in our marriage, it was the difference we made together.

On that early summer’s day, the perfume of roses drifted up and around me. I remember gasping with pleasure. On the way out, my grandsons bought me a tiny white jug painted with violets; it’s on my kitchen windowsill, one of those treasured precious bits of clutter that adorn my house and remind me of perfect days. This was one of them.

It was a revelation to me, that it was still possible to have one. There have been others since.

On the plane on the way back to New Zealand, I recorded, at last, what had befallen me over the previous months. It is all written down in a blue notebook.

As I have travelled over the years, the question of eating out alone has arisen. Often, there isn’t much choice. I made the first leaps in Crete, decades ago. I remember eating fish, with side dishes of green beans tossed in olive oil and lemon, in a seaside taverna, stray cats moving between my feet waiting for scraps, drinking a small beaker of wine and, astonishingly, thinking I had never been more grown up or quite as happy. Joan Didion wrote somewhere that a woman who was afraid to dine alone still had a long way to go towards maturity, or words to that effect, and I agree. Whenever I go to Paris, on my first night in the city, I invariably race to the Café Neo in St Germain, to eat an omelette and drink a glass of wine, and watch the world go by and feel that I am part of it all.

But widowhood takes lone dining into a different dimension. It’s not just about dining out, of course; it’s what happens every day. The choice has been taken away. Every evening, Jennifer told me, she asked herself if making dinner for one was worth the effort: one schnitzel, one potato, one carrot, silver beet from the garden – his garden. My mother did it, she told me, I can do this.

Anne Else’s husband, Harvey McQueen, a poet and educator, died on Christmas Day eleven years ago. I knew Anne and Harvey as a couple for many years. Ian and I went to their wedding in the eighties. It was a second marriage for both of them, a joyful occasion, surrounded by friends who stayed close to them, and to Anne after Harvey died. Just a week after their wedding, I found myself in the bedsit in Eccleston Square, on that first ever visit to London. I remember how I walked through Pimlico Station where, in a piece of strange synchronicity, I ran into one of the wedding guests with whom I had chatted days earlier in New Zealand. That mutual friend guided me through those first uneasy days away from home. These are the ties that bind, a close reminder of how I stepped late into the world beyond, Eccleston Square a lifetime away from family, friends and my house in Hataitai.

I sat and talked to Anne recently, in the large living room of the townhouse where she and Harvey were living when he died. I could still see him in his armchair, almost a presence in the room, which looks out onto trees and the birds he loved to watch. He and I would sit in there and talk about poetry and literary gossip of one kind or another, Anne and I about issues of the day. She is a forthright feminist writer and commentator.

One of her and Harvey’s shared passions was cooking, until Harvey developed a rare degenerative condition that would slowly waste away his muscles and his power to coordinate them. Even so, his death came suddenly, during a trip to hospital following a fall. He was too weak to come home, but there was no hint that his life would end in the early hours of Christmas Day. Anne recalls sitting numbed in the afternoon, surrounded by friends who had planned to join them for their usual celebratory meal. They ate the ham she had bought before he died – her friends brought everything else.

Like me, Anne had never lived on her own. In a memoir she later wrote she said:

On January 4 I went to the supermarket for the first time since Harvey died. Ever since I had started shopping and cooking when I married at nineteen, I’d had at least one other person to cook for and eat with. Now all that had vanished.

There were so many things I no longer needed to buy, but when I tried to think what I should buy I had no idea. I wandered round slowly, trying to work out what to do.

She found herself engulfed by loneliness. ‘My friends are wonderful and indispensable,’ she wrote, ‘yet no matter how close they are, or how much I enjoy their company, they can’t fill the gap left by the loss of a man I not only loved but, perhaps more importantly, really liked and got on with so well for so long.’

As she drew on her inner resources, she convinced herself that she should not betray the tradition of cooking and eating good food that she and Harvey had built up together. ‘People don’t change because somebody’s died,’ she said, when we talked. And with that resolution in mind, she continued to serve delicious meals to friends, blogged about food, wrote her successful book on the subject, came to terms with her new life alone.

That is what most of us do. We come to terms with it. There are all kinds of widows whose experience is different from mine and that of the women I have talked to. Where are the ones living in poverty, you might ask, those who cannot support their children, the ones who have been abandoned with disability or sickness of their own? Those who do not have families, as I do. These are fair questions. I have talked to women whose husbands have died through suicide, and to those who have been partnered for most of their lives with men they have not formally married. We are equally bereaved. Only one of these women has remarried and that was ill-fated. Nor have I included any who have happily started over again, though it’s not to say that none of these women have found new and satisfying relationships, without vows and commitments. We still have the capacity to love. If I identify with these particular women, perhaps it’s because we have all made new lives with meaning and intent. We had large, significant lives with our husbands; those lives are complete in themselves. Now we must forge new ones that belong just to us. All of us have in common a belief that our husbands would have wanted us to make the best of things. As my mother and my aunts would have said.

Is it true that as a widow you no longer get invited to dinners? There is an element of that – being part of a couple fits into the jigsaw around a table. I suppose I get invited less to people’s houses, but no less to restaurants where there are couples. What I do know is that there is a subtle shift in status. I said at the beginning of this piece that the word widow doesn’t please me much. We are not the leftovers from a marriage, we are people in our own right, in the same way as divorced women or women who have never married. We do not need a label that sets us apart. I think of myself now as a single woman. I’m still here, still doing my life.

Granted, there are days when that life feels a bit flat. You never forget the other life. And sometimes the dead return. Our lives can fill with illusions and dreams. Who is to say what is true and what is not? Ian had a shed at the bottom of our garden where he made things, model aeroplanes in particular, but all sorts of other things too, like copper jewellery, small artworks. After he died, I had it fixed up so that I could let it as an artist’s studio, but family have found other uses for it. Perhaps it was never a good idea to think about someone else in there. Anyway, one day, without thinking, I went to tell him that lunch was ready. It didn’t occur to me that he wasn’t there. And, for a moment, he was, his outline silhouetted in the shed window. I waited a moment or two to take his measure. I saw him move away, taking his time, the way he had not done when he died. Then he was gone.

And, here I am now.

So far, for now

(for Ian)

Hokianga’s shy hills, the poet

wrote, and, Cilla, you got it right:

a skein of sand, a sleeve of trees

above the water beneath the dunes

a girl bringing a fish and chip

bundle, her cigarette, and

a stab of gold in her nose,

a baby under the black

dress, the hills diminishing

into the collapsed world

of evening. Oh, you know

that you are going, that

you have already gone

far along the journey

when you sit here, just the two

of you at a rough wooden

table in this dusk light,

eating with slow care, not talking

about anything much, having said

enough, sometimes more than enough

for as long as you can remember,

not needing to say it all again.

In the morning

there is mist, the hills

have taken fright.