A Widow's Story

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Also in my bathroom arranging pill-containers on the rim of the sink counter. Painkillers, sleeping pills, an accumulation of years. Did such drugs lose their efficacy? Would their power be diminished?

  I am thinking now I am so tired, I could sleep forever.

  But there is no time. Already it is 10:20 A.M.—it is February 20, 2008—I must put together a packet of documents for probate court in Trenton.

  “Good-bye, honey!”

  ***

  The Widow is consoling herself with a desperate stratagem. But then, all the widow’s stratagems are desperate right now. She will speculate that she didn’t fully know her husband—this will give her leverage to seek him, to come to know him. It will keep her husband “alive” in her memory—elusive, teasing. For the fact is, the widow cannot accept it, that her husband is gone from her life irrevocably. She cannot accept it—she cannot even comprehend it—that she has no relationship with Raymond J. Smith except as his widow—the “executrix” of his estate.

  A Widow’s actions might be defined as rational/irrational alternatives to suicide. Any act a Widow performs, or contemplates performing, is an alternative to suicide and is in this desirable however naive, foolish, or futile.

  Chapter 22

  Cat Pee

  “Oh Reynard! How could you.”

  It seems that our elder tiger cat Reynard has urinated on a swath of documents which in my desperation not to misplace anything crucial among Ray’s many papers I’d spread out on the floor of his study.

  A dozen or more manila folders, spread out on Ray’s desk and spilling over onto the floor—in block letters carefully designated MEDICAL INSURANCE, CAR INSURANCE, HOUSE INSURANCE, IRS DOCUMENTS (2007), BANK/FINANCES, SOCIAL SECURITY, BIRTH CERTIFICATES, WILL etc.—and sometime within the past several hours Reynard has surreptitiously defiled a copy of the death certificate and the IRS folder so that I must A) wipe the pages dry B) spray Windex on them C) wipe them dry again D) place them in our (unheated) solarium in the hope that by morning they will have A) dried B) ceased smelling so unmistakably pungent.

  “Reynard! Bad cat.”

  My vexed/raised voice provokes both cats to run in that panicked way in which domestic pets will run from irate masters on a hardwood floor—skidding, sliding and slithering—toenails scraping like cartoon animals. I feel a sudden fury for the cats—both Reynard and the younger long-haired gray Cherie—that they have ceased to care for me. In this matter of Ray’s disappearance they blame me.

  You would think that, with Ray missing, they would be more affectionate with me, and want to sleep with me—but no.

  Barely they condescend to allow themselves to be fed by me. Eagerly they run outside, to escape me. Reluctantly they return when I call them for meals and for the night.

  The defiled IRS papers are not the first evidence that the cats are taking a particular sort of feline revenge on me since Ray’s disappearance, but this is the most serious.

  Where grief couldn’t provoke me to tears, cat pee on these documents does. It’s the weeping of sheer despair, self-loathing—This is what I am, this is what I’ve become. This is my life now.

  Chapter 23

  Probate

  “Mrs. Smith? You can wait here.”

  And here too—Mercer County Surrogate’s Court, Trenton, New Jersey—is a place where memory has accumulated in small stagnant pools of tears. Almost, you can smell grief here, an acrid bitter odor.

  This high-ceilinged waiting room, inexpressibly dour! Rows of badly stained and uncomfortable vinyl chairs in which individuals sit impassively as in an anteroom of the damned.

  Unlike the waiting rooms at the hospital, this waiting room holds not even the delusion of a happy ending. For these individuals, the death vigil has ended. We here are survivors, “beneficiaries.”

  It’s evident that there are other widows here this morning. Several appear to be accompanied by adult children. Mostly these are black or Hispanic citizens, for this is Trenton, New Jersey. In their midst my friend Jeanne—in oversized designer sunglasses, shoulder-length blond hair spilling over the collar of her stylish winter coat—is a vivid and incongruous presence, drawing eyes.

  Jeanne has explained what we are doing here, what “probate” is—of course, I know some of this, or would know except I seem to be operating in a mist of incomprehension. Very tired, yet alert and excited—sorting through the documents I’d been instructed to bring which include the photocopied pages now only just faintly smelling of cat pee—in this new compulsion of mine, which began when I’d been visiting Ray in the hospital, of ceaselessly rummaging through a handbag or a tote bag to see if somehow I’d lost something crucial like car keys, or my wallet, or a death certificate.

  In fact, I have not misplaced the death certificate. Of several copies hand-delivered to me by Elizabeth Davis of the Blackwell Memorial Home—a gesture of kindness which I will not forget—just one was defiled by Reynard, and has been disposed of.

  (Though later, I will retrieve this copy of the death certificate from the trash. For I am fearful of running out of copies—so many parties seem to want one, as if doubtful that Raymond Smith is deceased. That one of the copies exudes a sour cat-smell is unfortunate.)

  Many times in a curious breathless trance I have read this Certificate of Death issued by the State of New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services. You would think from my concentrated interest that I might be expecting to learn something new, to be surprised. Like one digging at a wound to make it bleed I am drawn to reading the sparse information again and again, to no purpose since I have memorized it—

  Cause of Death

  Immediate Cause

  Cardiopulmonary Arrest

  Due to (or as a consequence of)

  Pneumonia

  A minimalist poem by William Carlos Williams!

  Now in the dour waiting room of the surrogate court as I reread the death certificate it occurs to me to wonder—is this true? Did Ray die simply of pneumonia, or were other factors involved?

  A secondary infection, I’d been told. There is no mention of a secondary infection in the document.

  I think that I remember having been asked at the medical center if I wanted Ray’s body autopsied. In whatever haze of confusion at the time quickly I’d said no.

  No! No.

  Could not bear it. The thought of Ray’s body being mutilated.

  I know!—the body is not the man. Not “Ray.”

  And yet—where else had “Ray” resided, except in that body?

  It was a body I knew intimately, and loved. And so I did not want it mutilated.

  Now, I will never know if these “causes” of his death are accurate, or complete. I will never know with certainty.

  For it’s clear—widow trumps all other identities, including rational individual.

  All that one believes of the “rational”—“reasonable”—“scientific-minded” life is jettisoned, when one becomes a widow.

  My wish was for my husband’s body not to be examined—opened and eviscerated like an animal being gutted. I think that there is something dignified in cremation—or I want to think this—something primal, even “holy.”

  Of course, I can’t bear to think of the circumstances of the cremation in the Ewing Crematorium. I was not there, I was not a witness.

  I had been advised not to attend. And so, I had not attended.

  My opportunity to see Ray for the final time had been at the Blackwell Memorial Home—in this, I had failed. I will not soon forget this failure.

  Ray’s wish had been for cremation, as he’d indicated in the document quaintly titled “living will.” As Ray had indicated in his remarks over the years.

  How casually people speak of such things!—Promise that at my funeral you’ll play Mozart’s Requiem Mass.

  In my e-mail to my friend Sandra Gilbert whose husband Eliot had died a wrongful death at the U.C. Davis Medical Center, as a result of negligent nursing care, I’d said
that Ray’s death was not wrongful death—but why?

  Why had I said this? How would I have known?

  What a widow says, a widow will often regret. Yet a widow must speak. A widow must say something.

  As a widow must smile, to assure others that she is all right.

  In the waiting room of the surrogate court, time passes with excruciating slowness. The widow will discover that often she is waiting in public places—this is her punishment, for having been a wife.

  In this new—posthumous—phase of my life such (questionable) epiphanies come to me frequently. Widowhood is the punishment for having been a wife.

  Vicious reviews, opprobrium of all sorts are the writer’s punishment for being a writer.

  When you sign on to be a wife, you are signing on to being a widow one day, possibly. When you sign on to being a writer you are signing on to any and all responses to your work.

  So we should tell ourselves, when we are hurt, devastated.

  When we regret our lives, that seem to us in moments of raw bleak unsparing illumination, to have been lived in vain.

  Grief will bring us epiphanies of various degrees of worth. But grief will not bring us much else.

  My brain is a snarl of such thoughts. A near-broken radio flooded with static. I am rummaging through my papers for—what?—can’t remember what I am looking for—oh yes, Ray’s will—for a moment I am panicked Did I leave the will behind at the house?—though Jeanne looked through the documents before we left my driveway; and here it is, always a smaller document than I think it will be—pale blue folded-over LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF RAYMOND J. SMITH AND LETTERS TESTAMENTARY.

  No one could guess why I’m surreptitiously lifting this crucial document to sniff at it. In my bag with the other papers, it has acquired a faint, very faint odor of cat pee.

  Suddenly I’m worried—that the will isn’t valid, or that my identity will be doubted. In my state of exhaustion I’m not able to think clearly, and could not defend myself or my interests.

  In this state of mind one can acquiesce to any sort of charge. The state of mind in which innocent individuals sign “confessions”—sickened with guilt, you surmise that you must be guilty of a criminal act.

  It is wrong to have outlived Ray. This is the fact you know, you have not acknowledged.

  A widow is susceptible to the most extraordinary thoughts. A widow cannot defend herself against the most extraordinary thoughts.

  For a widow has learned that the ordinary can so quickly turn extraordinary, and the extraordinary ordinary.

  My punishment began during the vigil. Now that Ray has died, the punishment will escalate. This seems only logical.

  What a desperate time I’d had, searching for Ray’s will! It wasn’t in the place I’d expected it to be—so I thought; so I looked elsewhere, through the house, with mounting panic, until finally I looked again in the first, most obvious place—in the file in Ray’s office in which I had looked initially—and there it was.

  How to explain this? Is my brain deteriorating, is this a particularly cruel form of the widow’s punishment?—losing things in plain sight, not being able to find things, always in a panic? I think in this case I’d expected the will to be an enormous document, and not so small, so—ordinary.

  Ray’s will—this usage is strange to me. Like Ray’s body, Ray’s remains.

  Our wills, drawn up some time ago, had been updated in May 2002. I think this had been a joint decision, but at the time, I’d been stricken with sorrow at the prospect of signing them as if foreseeing—but of course I could not foresee—a day to come like this bleak day in the Mercer County Surrogate Court.

  Ray had said Don’t be silly, we have to do this.

  But I don’t want to outlive you!

  That has nothing to do with it. Just sign, get it over with.

  And so I did.

  Not anticipating on May 10, 2002 how on February 21, 2008 I would be clutching this document in my hand, in a vinyl chair in the waiting area of the Mercer County Surrogate Court.

  “Mrs. Smith? Come with me.”

  I am led into an interior office. Jeanne accompanies me. A woman—her title is “surrogate court officer”—takes up my case, that seems to me overwhelming in its magnitude, to her utterly perfunctory.

  I am required to present numerous documents to the surrogate court in this matter of the “probating” of my husband’s will. Last Will and Testament of Raymond J. Smith and Letters Testamentary—Ray’s and my birth certificates—our wedding certificate—our passports—driver’s licenses—Social Security cards—2007 tax records establishing our residence at 9 Honey Brook Drive, Princeton, New Jersey.

  It can’t be taken for granted—of course, this is only reasonable—that I am truly the person I claim to be, the widow of the deceased Raymond Smith; nor can it be taken for granted that Raymond Smith is, in fact, deceased. (The sourly aromatic Certificate of Death is examined closely, as if the surrogate court officer has never seen such a document before.)

  The surrogate officer has questions to ask me. Some of them—how long had my husband and I resided at 9 Honey Brook Drive?—are upsetting to answer. As the interview continues, I become increasingly depressed. I am thinking How futile! What vanity! My friend Jeanne has been so very kind to accompany me on this errand of futility as she has accompanied me on other similarly futile errands since my husband’s death; for Jeanne’s sake, I am not going to break down. Yet, how I yearn to run from this terrible place and return to our house—the very house from which, that morning, early, after another sleepless night, I’d been so eager to leave. When I’m away from our house my consoling fantasy is that when I return home, I can swallow as many pills as seem feasible, to put myself to sleep; that is, to sleep forever; for truly I want to die, I am so very tired; it hasn’t been more than a few days yet already I’ve been made sick by widowhood, and I am sick of it; the prospect of another few weeks of this, let alone years, is overwhelming!

  Yet when I return home, I am so relieved—I think This is my home. This is ours. In defiance of all logic it is possible in this place to think Ray might be in the next room, or in his office—he might have stepped out of the house. When you’re living in a house with someone it is often the case that he isn’t in the same room with you—and so, when I am home, I am free to imagine that Ray is on the premises.

  In my study, at my desk overlooking a stand of trees, a birdbath (not in use, in winter), a holly tree with red berries in which cardinals, chickadees and titmice bustle cheerily about, I am free to tell myself Ray would not be in this room with you anyway. Your experience at this moment is not a widow’s experience.

  “Mrs. Smith? Sign these.”

  My signature is notarized. I sign—Joyce Carol Smith. For this is the widow’s identity.

  Chapter 24

  “Sympathy Gift Basket”

  “Mrs. Smith? Sign here, please.”

  My heart contracts at these syllables. Miss-us Smi-th. The name, in the mouths of strangers, stings like mockery.

  For there is no Mr. Smith. And how then Mrs. Smith?

  The sympathy-siege!

  As in a silent film accelerated for crudely comic purposes there appear in the courtyard of our house in the days following Ray’s death a disorganized army of delivery men bearing floral displays, crates of fruit, hefty “sympathy gift baskets” stuffed to bursting with gourmet foods—chocolate-covered truffles, Brazil nuts, honey-roasted cashews; smoked salmon, pickled herring, smoked pepperoni sausage; lemon cake, Key West Lime Pie, fruit tarts, chocolate-pecan fudge; “gourmet” popcorn, “gourmet” pretzels, “gourmet” mixed nuts; Vermont cheddar cheese, and Vermont jack cheese; “drunken” goat cheese; jars of peach butter, Russian caviar and pâtés of the most lurid kinds. “Mrs. Smith? Sign here, please”—on his way out of the courtyard the UPS man nearly collides with the FedEx man on his way in; both are followed by a clumsily waddling gigantic plant or small tree in a massive ceramic container—b
ehind it, a harried delivery man from a local Princeton florist—“Mrs. Smith? Sign here, please.” Seeing my stunned and exhausted face the delivery men aren’t certain how to greet me—Congratulations! isn’t appropriate for possibly this isn’t a festive occasion, but the parody of a festive occasion—Have a good day! isn’t appropriate for clearly this is not going to be a good day.

  Possibly, the UPS man and the FedEx man, who come often to our house, have begun to notice the absence of Raymond Smith.

  So often in these days—a nightmare of days—in my trance of misery in Ray’s office where I am seeking (yet another) misplaced or lost document—United Health, IRS, bank—I am interrupted by the doorbell ringing—propelled into a greater misery at the front door where I am obliged to smile at the delivery man and thank him for having brought me yet another massive floral display, fifty-pound potted plant, “Deluxe Sympathy Gift Basket”—useless, unwanted, invariably heavy vases, pots, baskets, boxes, cartons to be carried in my aching arms, shoved, kicked skidding along the floor into the dining room where wilted petals fallen from the floral displays of previous days lie amid Styrofoam packing pellets, torn wrapping paper, cellophane. On the dining room table is a mad jumble of things—vases of beautiful flowers, baskets of beautiful flowers and fruits, “gourmet sympathy baskets” adorned with special velvet “sympathy ribbons” in tasteful dark colors. What, have we won the Kentucky Derby?—Ray’s droll voice sounds in my ear.

  There does seem to be an element of mockery in all this—sympathy. Almost, one might mistake the siege for a celebration.

  Of all deliveries I have come to most dread those from Harry & David those ubiquitous entrepreneurs of fateful occasions—Sympathy Gift Boxes adorned with Sympathy Ribbons hurtled in all directions across the continent. Why are people sending me these things? Do they imagine that grief will be assuaged by chocolate-covered truffles, pâté de foie gras, pepperoni sausages? Do they imagine that assistants shield me from the labor of dealing with such a quantity of trash? This morning I am eager to forestall another delivery of sympathy baskets for I have dragged out all the trash cans I can find in the hope that the trash will be hauled away, I have just emptied the mailbox—so stuffed, I could barely yank out its contents—and this mail I am “sorting” by way of throwing most of it into the trash can—there arrives the UPS delivery truck—another Harry & David monstrosity?—“Mrs. Smith? Sign here, please”—crying bitter tears as I tear open the carton—tear open the cellophane wrapper—tear at the basket cramming into the trash can packages of chocolate-covered truffles, bags of gourmet popcorn, here is a Gourmet Riviera Pear—unnaturally large, tasteless, stately as a waxen fruit in a nineteenth-century still life—here is a jar of gourmet mustard, and here a jar of gourmet olives—whoever has sent me this, I have no idea—the card is lost—the label is lost—I am frantic to get rid of this party food—I am infuriated, disgusted, ashamed—for of course I should be grateful, I should be writing thank-you notes like a proper widow, I should not be weeping and muttering to myself in icy rain at the end of our driveway bare-headed and shivering in a rage of futility accusing my husband You did this!—you went outside in the freezing cold, I know you did, this is exactly what you did, when I was away in Riverside you did this very thing, you were careless with your life, you threw away both our lives with your carelessness contracting a cold, a cold that became pneumonia, pneumonia that became cardiopulmonary collapse—and here as if in rebuke to my raging despair is a Harry & David Miniature Rose—a delicate little rosebush that measures about five inches in height—which I think that I will keep—though, back inside the house in better lighting, pried out of its packing-case and set on the kitchen counter, the Miniature Rose appears to be already wilting, near-dead.