Molly Peacock’s latest book is The Widow’s Crayon Box.
I lost it with my neighbour after my husband died. She had plugged in a vacuum cleaner and inadvertently blown a fuse. In the dark I screamed at her as if a bomb had destroyed my whole house. I lost it at the bank after my husband died. I burst into tears in the manager’s office as he instructed me to close three mystery accounts (my husband had managed them). I sobbed in the bakery looking at a chocolate cupcake with sprinkles. My husband would turn into a seven-year-old at the prospect of anything with sprinkles. Excuse me, my late husband.
As I lost it again and again, then very imperfectly found it, I did not realize that these outbursts were the raw material of a new self. I wonder if butterflies scream at a frequency unknown to us as they lose their cocoons? As I learned which of those weirdly numbered switches operated which outlet, and that those accounts each had a purpose, I was entering a zone of surviving mistakes.
My late husband rarely made mistakes. Over the 28 years of our marriage, I learned to rely on him for anything that had an account, or anyone called an accountant, or anything with a switch, a key, or long, black cord. I added fun to his life (sex, food, laughing – plus clothing advice). And he calmed me down. My inner engine, always on overdrive, quieted with him. The confusion of taking on too much work, too many projects, too many social engagements and too much debt cleared when I married him. With my husband, I could see a horizon. When his trust in reason and my trust in emotion combined, we became something so much larger than ourselves individually. It led us, two working-class kids, to tremendous success. Over the years, his work inspired me to research and write two biographies as well as my poetry, and my creative life inspired him to write a memoir as well as pursue his scholarship. Together we were a team in every way, including sports – the badminton Fred and Ginger of our gym.
Roll back almost six decades to our teens. Michael Groden, who became an internationally known James Joyce scholar and distinguished professor of English at Western University, was a high-school math whiz (it was only later that he switched to English) who stumbled into my booth at our high-school junior carnival. I was the arty girl who later became a poet. He took me to the junior prom! Then came the senior prom, then university – at two different U.S. colleges, very far away from one another. The distance broke us up.
Two decades later Mike read a review of my second book of poems in The New York Times. Almost at the same time, I met his ex-girlfriend – and begged his address from her. Unknown to ourselves, we had been travelling in each other’s orbit. It turned out that we had both gotten married in the same year, then divorced in the same year. But he had been very, very ill. In his early 30s he’d received a near-death sentence: Stage 4 melanoma. A disciplined scholar and marathon runner, he dealt with his illness crisply, precisely, like the math major he had been. His triumph? Living another 40 years.
Mike would wince when he made a mistake. It meant the world had wobbled in its orbit. And he winced when I made one. I dreaded that wince. It came when I had left a key in the wrong place. Or when I was running late. Or when I blew a shot on the badminton court. He didn’t yell. He was never mean. The wince was his mental pain. Because of his brushes with death, he needed things on track – always. As he became weaker, especially with his sixth and last recurrence, the wince became stronger. The worst one came at 7:20 p.m. on a winter night when I arrived with the dinner that was supposed to be eaten at exactly 7 p.m. on his drug trial. For him, precision was an act of love.
Michael Groden was a James Joyce scholar.Boris Ruvet-Thebia/Supplied
By then I had taken on most of the formerly shared responsibilities of our marriage, juggling finances, groceries, friends-and-fam, and helping investigate medical assistance in dying. Still, there was a surface perfection to the details of our life together. That shattered like a windshield at the moment of his death. And so did my composure. His passing left me without the calm I thought only he could provide.
Mike and the exigencies of his illness had been my emotional regulator for almost three decades. Now I was having to manage myself, wobbly and confused from the letdown after he died. I’d lost the mental muscle to do certain things, such as figure out the speaker system and turn off one of the televisions that kept mysteriously turning on. Not knowing how to manage made me shocked at my own incompetence, dejected at my surrender to our sexist division of labours (he drove, I cooked), despairing when I tackled multilayered insurance websites. As I whirled in self-blame, I started turning the wince toward myself. I was wincing for him!
This was the disintegrated state I was in when I screamed at my neighbour who blew the fuse.
I hardly recognized myself. Who was that woman who made the sarcastic quip with an eye roll at the postal worker, then whimpered that she was sorry? Who whined at the taxi driver refusing to use his GPS, then apologized? After I outright yelled at the bewildered kid who couldn’t make change at the farmers’ market, I slunk away in regret. Doesn’t this obliviousness to the burdens of others (just as I was emerging from an all-out, 24/7 consciousness of another’s needs) seem like teenage behaviour? Me against a world that should be serving my needs? Let me go back to the butterfly that might be emitting a scream of growth pain as its wet wings emerge. That’s a kind of adolescence. Perhaps adolescence isn’t a stage of life but a process humans go through as we emerge to new stages.
I write this 3½ years into my widowhood, which I realize now is also a process, not a state. I rarely lose it now that I know how to prepare for the accountant, turn off the TV mysteriously prompted by my neighbour’s remote control, and genuinely smile at my other cheerful neighbour, curious about her life – because I can be curious about my own. Where’s the wince? It still arrives. After all, I thoroughly absorbed my husband – he lives inside me now. But these days my inner wince comes close to a smile: A dormant girl inside me has come alive.
The woman I’ve become is very much connected to the 16-year-old who met my late husband. Widowhood has evoked my girlhood passions, all the enthusiasm and terror and bright interest I had before the serious partnerships of adulthood. Losing it opened a door to a kind of vulnerability that long-term caregivers such as myself learn to drop for the necessary efficiency of taking care of someone. And really, rather than losing it, I lost him – and to my surprise found a younger self that I’d abandoned.
Molly Peacock and her late husband, Michael Groden.Boris Ruvet-Thebia/Supplied
I’ve never been the best gauge of my own energies. I relied on Mike for that. But his sense of my limits was, well, limiting. Better to fall on my face a little, admit to someone I’ve taken on too much, admit to myself that I spend more money taking care of myself than I ever needed as part of a couple. It amazes me how many people it takes to replace a beloved husband! Tech advisers, handymen, physiotherapists, massage therapists and many dear, dear friends – I gather them in a new orbit around me. I am back to a crowded schedule I mostly thrive on. The bakery lady now saves me an extra goody. The bank manager’s become a pleasant, wave-to acquaintance. With the chance to luxuriate in bed with a morning tea, my weekly sonnet practice turned into a whole book of poetry.
I cancel things if I need to, transforming what I used to think of as a ragged, imperfect existence into something organic and shapely. Better to fall in bed at 5 p.m. and take that long nap – then look in the mirror to see my face refreshed. The virtue of losing it appears in that waking. There I observe the resting calm I never thought I’d achieve on my own.