Death Writing: A Widow's Story

This is more or less a continuation of earlier thoughts resulting from my reading program of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. The latest has been Joyce Carol Oates' A Widow's Story. This was another of those advance reader's copies sent to my wife, and the second one I've read recently by a woman author looking back on the death of her husband. I'm not exactly sure what attracts me to such reading. As I've told friends, especially in the case of Joyce Carol Oates' book, I find that I tend to identify with the corpse. Perhaps there is some morbid fascination in observing, however vicariously, the suffering of a widow, especially one who has also been a good wife.

Of course, Antonia Fraser's book, Must You Go?, while it tells the story of Harold Pinter's suffering and death, is, in fact, much more an upbeat memoir and celebration of their life together. Joyce Carol Oates' memoir is more heart rending. Her husband, the author and editor Raymond Smith, died suddenly, quite unexpectedly and perhaps, she imagines, even unnecessarily, the victim of an accidental but virulent secondary infection contracted in a Princeton area hospital while being treated for a bad case of pneumonia. And while Oates tells us quite a lot about their long marriage and life together before his death, the focus throughout is on what she refers to as her own posthumous existence as Ray Smith's widow.

Before I go further, I should admit that I am not a Joyce Carol Oates fan. I've read very little of her work, although I do recall making a strong case for including her short story "Stalking" in the fiction section of the introduction to literature text I co-edited for Harper & Row back in the mid eighties. There is something disturbing in her fiction, or at least I find it disturbing. It's just a matter of taste I suppose, but her stories have elements of gothic and melodrama and violence that I'm not attracted to. But none of that matters very much when reading A Widow's Story.

In this book Joyce Carol Oates lets us look inside her own life, the life of Joyce Smith, the widow of Raymond Smith, the woman who sometimes wonders if that other person she refers to as JCO is even real. The book is so brutally honest in its portrayal of grief and suffering that I found I could not read more than a few chapters at a time, but some morbid attraction kept drawing me back.Thankfully, I have not experienced anything like the grief she describes, but her reactions ring true to me: her recoil from contact even with close friends, but especially from the hordes of well-meaning colleagues and acquaintances; her desire to be alone when she is with other people, and to be with other people when she is alone.

Perhaps the most haunting aspect of the memoir is the presence of the mysterious basilisk, the threatening ugly lizard-like entity that seems to lurk in the shadows, just beyond her vision, mocking her efforts to carry on, to resume her life now emptied of meaning without her husband, and turning her thoughts toward the readiest means of escape and release from suffering, the hoard of pills she has gathered that could bring on the deep and eternal sleep she most desires. Oates ends her memoir with this advice to widows: "On the first anniversary of her husband's death, the widow should think I kept myself alive."

Joyce Carol Oates' stated theme throughout her memoir is survival, minute by minute, hour by hour, and day by day. Finding a reason to live and not give in to the temptations of the basilisk. But there is also an underlying theme of guilt: the guilt of the survivor, the guilt of the wife who insisted that her husband go to the hospital where he found death rather than healing, the guilt of the loving wife who discovers she did not know some of her husband's most profound and private fears and desires.

Both of these themes, guilt and survival, are intertwined and developed as Joyce Carol Oates confronts the simplest of all truths: in the midst of life, death is lurking. The widow sees this more clearly than those around her. The saurian monster lurking in the shadows is death, whose threatening presence seems to mock all human endeavor. What is the point of living when the end is so final. For a time JCO, the prolific creative author, can't bring herself to write anything more complicated than an email message. But with time she was able to craft from her own suffering this record of her recovery.

The book ends rather abruptly. One evening she finds she can fall asleep again without the aid of pills. One day she finds that she can imagine a future without her husband Ray, and in an image that is pitifully pathetic, she finds some personal treasures lying on the driveway amidst some spilled garbage, something she had lost, almost without realizing it, was found, almost by accident. And the great burden of grief and guilt has already begun to lift. At first, a reader might be disappointed, but then the truth of the discovery becomes obvious. The widow has survived. She has been able to forget about the basilisk and think about life again.

The best thing about this memoir is its honesty. At one point Oates exclaims: "There is no point to a memoir, if it isn't honest." Later in the book she adds, "All memoirs are journeys, investigations. Some memoirs are pilgrimages. " This one, she says, is a pilgrimage. Setting aside all of the other things one might say about A Widow's Story, this alone is reason enough to admire the book. I can imagine writing such an honest exploration of one's deepest emotional traumas. I can hardly imagine publishing such a work. I'm glad Joyce Carol Oates did. The truths she uncovers may be painful and mundane, but they are no less human for being so common and universal.