When Things Get Back to Normal Read online

  When things get back to normal

  When things get back to normal

  M. T. DOHANEY

  Copyright © M.T. Dohaney, 1989, 2002.

  Foreword © Helen Fogwill Porter, 2002.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any requests for photocopying of any part of this book should be directed in writing to the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.

  When Things Get Back to Normal first published by Pottersfield Press, 1989.

  This Trade edition published by Goose Lane Editions, 2002.

  Cover photograph: Eyewire Inc.

  Cover and book design by Julie Scriver.

  Printed in Canada by Transcontinental Printing.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Dohaney, M.T., date

  When things get back to normal

  2nd ed.

  ISBN 0-86492-338-4

  1. Dohaney, M.T., date 2. Bereavement.

  3. Widows – Newfoundland – Biography. I. Title.

  HQ1058.5.C3D64 2002 155.9’37’092 C2002-900468-3

  Published with the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program, and the New Brunswick Culture and Sports Secretariat.

  Goose Lane Editions

  Suite 330, 500 Beaverbrook Court

  Fredericton, New Brunswick

  CANADA E3B 5X4

  www.gooselane.com

  For Walt

  I wrote this journal for you and for me

  and because my friend Anne said I should

  put my sorrow into paper words.

  FOREWORD

  Helen Fogwill Porter

  In my youth I read every book ever written by Lucy Maud Montgomery. Even today, in what I like to call my oldth, I still reread them from time to time. As I prepared to write this foreword, I recalled an incident in Anne of Avonlea. One stormy day early in Anne Shirley’s teaching career, she asks her students to tell her what they want more than anything else in the world. “To be a widow,” says ten-year-old Marjory White. She claims that if you aren’t married, people call you an old maid, and if you are, your husband bosses you around. If you’re a widow, there is no danger of either.

  In Dorothy Speak’s recent novel The Wife Tree, a seventy-five-year-old woman named Morgan Hazzard describes the widows in her neighbourhood: “[T]hey’re content to be released from cooking three square meals a day, from the smell of a man in their bedsheets. From Hockey Night in Canada, all the while enjoying their husbands’ pensions.” Harsh judgments, but perhaps true in some cases. I wonder about the bedsheets, though. Years ago an elderly widow told me she took her husband’s unwashed undershirt to bed with her every night. After I was widowed myself, I understood the need for that physical reminder.

  In When Things Get Back to Normal, M.T. (Jean) Dohaney has written a straightforward, moving account of her life in the year following the death of her husband, Walter. This book began as a journal. That’s why there’s such immediacy to every section of it. Walt died suddenly on November 22, 1986, after playing hockey. He was fiftyfour. Less than a week later, Jean wrote these words: “I have been daughter, sister, wife, mother. These labels covered only part of me, yet increased all of me. ‘Widow’ covers all of me and decreases all of me. I learned yesterday that the word widow is derived from the Latin viduus, meaning empty.”

  I first picked up When Things Get Back to Normal a few years after my own husband, John, died suddenly of a massive heart attack at the age of fifty-three. I read it compulsively. Here at last was somebody who understood my situation perfectly. This was no cloying self-help guide that talked about God’s will and a mystical eternal plan but a fearless summation of how it feels to lose the person you love most in the world.

  “You’re a widow now,” my daughter Anne said to me shortly after John was pronounced dead. For some odd reason that bald statement helped me more than all the platitudes I’d be hearing over the next several days. People mean well but find it difficult to put their feelings into words and often resort to the tried and true. I’ve done the same thing myself. Anne’s stark confirmation of my new status gave me a strange kind of comfort. As long as no one called me a relict! I’d had a horror of that word ever since I first read it in an L.M. Montgomery novel. In A Tangled Web, Aunt Betsy Dark, shortly before she died at eighty-five, announced that she was not to be called a relict. The dictionary defines relict as “a widow. Archaic.” It makes me think of someone left over and useless. Apparently it was never used in reference to a man.

  “The vultures are circling,” reads Jean Dohaney’s journal entry for December 3. “Will I be selling the house? . . . Am I interested in a monument? If I place an order before Christmas but agree not to have it installed until the frost goes out of the ground, I can take advantage of a special bonus: my name and age engraved for free.” I remember a similar offer. The gentleman I talked to at Muir’s Marble Works was more tactful. “You’re a young woman,” he said. (Was I? I was fifty-two.) “You could move away, make your home in another part of the world.” He didn’t say “marry again,” though I sensed it was in his mind.

  If he had coaxed me the other way, I might have given in. That was a vulnerable time for me. As it is, only my husband’s name and dates appear on the simple marker I selected, along with the three words “Love Never Faileth.” When I visit the cemetery now and read names and birth dates, with only the survivors’ death dates to be filled in, I’m glad I resisted an early impulse to bring myself as close as possible to my own burial. Caitlin Thomas, the wife of the famous Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, wrote a book after he died. She called it Leftover Life to Kill. That title has meaning for many widows, especially in the early stages of grief. Caitlin was probably feeling like a relict, or a relic, when she chose it.

  “My memory refuses to function,” Jean says on December 10. “I miss appointments, mislay documents and forget house keys and car keys.” I did all those things in the winter months after John died. I had never imagined that such mundane mishaps plagued people following bereavement. I had pictured widowhood as a sombre, grief-stricken time, but I had not foreseen the small, insistent irritations. I fell down a lot. Always a bit clumsy and uncoordinated, I had relied on John to keep me steady and would “link in” to him even if we were walking only a short distance. But it wasn’t just my congenital awkwardness. My mind wouldn’t stay on what I was doing. It had a life of its own. One night I tripped and fell flat on my face walking home from the corner store. For a while I looked almost as bruised on the surface as I felt inside.

  In May, “the merriest month of all the year,” Jean ran into an acquaintance she had not seen since Walt’s death. After offering her condolences, this well-meaning woman uttered the words Jean had been dreading – “Life goes on.” “I wanted to shout at her,” Jean wrote that day. “Maybe it does for you, but not for me.” Instead she replied, “So they tell me.” For a few weeks after John died, I hated meeting people who would feel that they had to express sympathy, or, worse still, who had missed the news of John’s death and asked about him as if he were waiting for me nearby. At times, going to a shopping centre with my daughters, I would stay in the car alone while they did my errands. Where was that gregarious woman my younger relatives had labelled “Step, step, chat”? At the same time, I welcomed friends and relatives who came to visit, especially at night. They knew that just being there with me, drinking tea, was enoug
h. Near the end of her first year of widowhood, Jean says, “I couldn’t have trudged the path without the constancy of friends.” I dread to think of bereaved people who don’t have that kind of support.

  “But Jean, you’re strong.” These were words Jean heard far too often. “They say this as though hard knocks don’t give me pain. I want to shout at them, ‘I’m not strong. I’m weak. I’m a pathetic creature. I hurt all over.’” My Grandmother Horwood used to say, “God fits the back for the burden.” We hear that kind of thing when a woman gives birth to an incredibly damaged child or someone suffers an unbelievable loss. “I’d never be able to handle it,” I once heard a friend say. “God must give extra strength to people who have to bear something like that.” I bit my tongue when I heard this. I lost my father, my younger brother, and my husband to sudden death within eleven months. My wish is that God had given me a weaker back and fewer burdens.

  Nine months after her husband’s death, Jean was walking across the university campus in Fredericton when an indescribable sadness enveloped her. She ordered herself to think of “something, anything” that could bring a little joy into her life. Among other decadent notions, she came up with the idea of having “an affair! A short but blazing affair.” She soon realized she couldn’t think of anyone to have an affair with. “Besides,” she asked herself, “where would I get the energy to go out and buy new lingerie?” Immediately after John’s death, a friend’s husband assured her that I’d marry again within the year. He was wrong. Like Jean, I’m still single. As a popular country song has it, “I’m not that lonely yet.”

  Toward the end of her journal and the year, Jean made up a set of rules for herself. One of them was, “Warm my own feet.” Right after John died, I began bringing a hot water bottle upstairs with me every night. The wide bed that I’d slept in with John for nearly thirty years could be awfully cold with only one body in it. And my big black cat Smudge knew enough to sprawl across my feet. The sex act is given such high priority in today’s world that we often forget the sheer bliss that comes from two bodies lying entwined. I know of several bereaved people who have rushed into new physical relationships simply because they couldn’t stand sleeping alone. I didn’t take that road, and neither did Jean, but we understand those who do.

  I first read When Things Get Back to Normal after I became a widow, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be appreciated by someone who’s still part of a couple. This book has clarity, compassion, humour and, above all, honesty. It’s a fact of life that a majority of us women will end up on our own. Things don’t ever really “get back to normal” after the death of a spouse. If we’re lucky, we find a new kind of normal that is made bearable by memories, good friends and relatives, involvement with others and a strong sense of self.

  Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak

  Whispers o’er fraught heart and bids it break.

  – Macbeth

  NOVEMBER 28 – Thursday

  This morning for a split second my life was back to normal. The radio alarm on your side of our king-size bed jolted me out of an exhausted sleep, and in that haze of half awake, I forgot you had died. I reached out to pull you close. My hand groped for your warm body and found only unrumpled sheets, cool against the flesh.

  I’m told I should be thankful you went in your health, so to speak, having skated your heart out at hockey. But like Hamlet, beggar that I am, I am even poor in thanks. I feel nothing. Not gratitude. Not anger. Not sorrow. I stagger through the days stunned by the swiftness with which my life has emptied.

  You left the house on Friday evening, invincible in shoulder pads and shin guards. When I saw you again, death had reduced you to the navy blue suit you kept for sedate occasions. I’m certain that, if you had had any say in the matter, you would have worn your paint-splattered jeans and your T-shirt with the threadbare elbows. My fingers ached to loosen your tie and let your shirt collar gape open.

  As my mother would have said, you had a lovely funeral, and I thought it a pity you couldn’t have witnessed the packed church. I’m told there was standing room only. Even the choir loft was filled.

  On the drive to the church, I saw people going on with their lives just as if the world hadn’t stopped. A young man wearing a radio headset stood on the sidewalk and absently watched the procession as he waited for the light to turn green. His arms kept time to the music that flooded his ears.

  I was so certain you’d be home by the time I returned from the service that I filed away bits of information I thought you’d enjoy: for example, how Steven, without my knowledge, smuggled your hockey stick to the cemetery and dropped it into your grave so you would have something familiar waiting for you there.

  I started searching the crowd for you the minute I got back to the house. I was so tired. So woebegone. I wished I could find a private corner where I could crouch into a ball and keen my misery away. But how could I escape when I had a houseful of guests and you hadn’t shown up to take over?

  As time passed and there was still no sign of you, I began to get angry. What was keeping you? How could you expect me to wake you, bury you and be a hostess as well? I wandered aimlessly through the crowd, making robotic conversation here and there, and feeling I should be apologizing for your absence. Even as I passed the sandwiches and replenished the tea, I kept an ear cocked for your footsteps on the back veranda.

  A woman remarked as she picked up a watercress sandwich that President Kennedy also died on November22. That night, when I lay wide awake in bed, I wondered how Mrs. Kennedy had felt on her first “after the burial”night. Did she substitute her pillow for his, hoping it would make the bed less lonely? Did she want to get dressed and go to the cemetery to keep him company in case he felt abandoned and lonely, surrounded as he was by strangers – dead strangers? Did she herself feel abandoned, the relatives and friends having gone back to their own lives and the fever of the last few days suddenly no more? And later, as the weeks and months passed, did she search the calendar for that significant date, saying, as my mother had said, her voice far away. “This day last month he was still here.” And still later, “This day last year. . . . ”

  NOVEMBER 29 – Friday

  I was called a widow today. “Sign here,” the girl in the office of vital statistics said when I went to pick up a copy of your death certificate. She pointed with a geranium-red fingernail to indicate the spot she had Xed for my signature. “Right here. In the block that says widow of the deceased.” The word pierced me like a lance, and my sharp intake of breath was audible even though the office was noisy with others seeking proof of beginnings and endings.

  Later, as I walked home, I tried to give voice to my new label. Widow! Widow! I mouthed the word over and over, and although I could hear it thundering in my soul,no sound would leave my lips. The letters bunched up on my tongue and clung there like soot to a chimney. Until two weeks ago, widow was only a word in the English language. Now it was me – a woman with a life as bleak as that sky on the day we lowered you into the half-frozen November ground. I have been daughter, sister, wife, mother. These labels covered only part of me, yet increased all of me. Widow covers all of me and decreases all of me. I learned yesterday that the word widow is derived from the Latin viduus, meaning empty.

  DECEMBER 2 – Monday

  Went back to work today. Farewell sabbatical leave! Walking in through those university gates alone, when for the past fifteen years we had gone together, took an act of strength I was convinced I didn’t have. (Yes, I said walking. You predicted correctly. The day did come when I wished I hadn’t turned the driving over to you.) When I got to my office, I closed the door (I wasn’t up to condolences) and attacked the piled-up assignments. I think I was lenient with my red pencil. What, I reasoned, signified a pass or a fail in technical writing when, with the swiftness of a pen-stroke, some higher force could snuff out a life? Maybe later such things as standards of excellence will once again be important to me.

  I�
�m told that going back to work is the best medicine for “taking my mind off it all.” People say this with such conviction that I’m sure they believe it. Don’t they understand that nothing – absolutely nothing – can divert my thoughts? The pockets of my mind and heart and soul are bloated with pain. The trouble with grief is that it can’t be viewed. If my arms were newly severed, would anyone suggest that I go to work to take my mind off my loss? My friend L. said she wished people could have a barometer in their foreheads for measuring pain of the heart. If others could see the extent of your suffering, they wouldn’t be so quick to ply you with platitudes.

  DECEMBER 3 – Tuesday

  They say I’m taking it well. They mean your death, of course, even though they can’t bring themselves to voice the word. I’ve cancelled your credit cards. I even registered the envelopes bulging with chopped-up plastic. I gathered your belongings into piles: to be thrown away, to be given to charity, to be passed on for memories – diamond ring, gold cuff links, new tuxedo, never worn, an anniversary gift from me in October when I still had expectations of a long and full social life. I know what I’m about to say is a cliché, and you know how I hate clichés, but it is so true that old habits hang tough. Before I threw your cast-offs into the green garbage bag, I got the scissors to snip the buttons from your shirts. I actually had a couple in my hand before I realized what I was doing. It was a really low moment when I came to grips with the fact that I no longer have any need to save shirt buttons. My sewing box already has a quart bottle filled to the top with small, white pearlized buttons, and, unless I intend to open a button factory, I now have enough shirt buttons to last a lifetime, however long or short that may be.