Not long after we were first married, my husband and I took a trip to southern Italy. One bright morning, on a quiet and narrow street, we chanced upon a funeral procession. Six men, the casket hoisted on their shoulders, walked behind a woman, presumably the widow. She was cloaked, head-to-toe, in black. Although we couldn’t see her face hidden behind the black veil, her body was clearly that of a young woman, slim and voluptuous in the way I associated with Italian movie stars, and her knee-length dress clung to her curves. She wasn’t notably tall, but she stood erect, strong, and proud. Most striking, however, were her stockings (fishnet!) and her high, spiked-heel shoes.
I turned to my husband and said, “If you’re going to die on me, do it soon. That’s the kind of widow I want to be.”
Knowing fully well that I did not want him to die soon — or ever — we laughed. After the procession passed, we crossed the street and walked in the opposite direction, our lives stretched out before us.
My husband did not die soon. He died 25 years later. The time for me to be that kind of young widow was long gone, but still I was too young to be widow.
Of course, not all widows are old women, but other than the widow in Sorrento, the widows I’d encountered were old. I’d divided them into two camps. Those from Mediterranean counties were professional widows. Gray hair, their dress code was forever black, and on hot days with their black stockings rolled down to their knees, they congregated like a murder of crows. American widows cropped their hair short, dyed it blond, wore pastel colored outfits and sparkling white sneakers. They lived in retirement communities where they played bingo with the other widows and competed for the attention of the comparably few widowers. Women, generally speaking, outlive men.
We all know that we will die someday, just as we know that, barring something like a plane crash, the death of one-half of a couple will precede the other. But that is not in the foreground of our consciousness. Why cower in the darkness of a future that is years down the road?
My husband and I had vague plans for the decades to come: retire from our jobs, do volunteer work, maybe buy a small summer house, take up bird watching. But otherwise our plans extended no further than the next year’s vacation to Istanbul. We’d have our apartment re-painted in the spring, and we had plans for dinner with friends on Thursday. The dinner plans we kept, but when spring rolled around, my husband was already sick, terminally ill. The apartment wasn’t re-painted. We did not go to Istanbul.
There is no telling if I will go gracefully into that good night, but I was prepared for my husband’s death. His illness was protracted and horrible. Difficult as it is to admit, I wanted him to die, to release us both from the excruciation of the ordeal. I wished for his death, but neither desire nor preparedness mitigated the shock when it happened. I was not prepared for the actuality that I would never again see his face, hear his laugh, feel the warmth of his touch, or indulge the impossibility of a miracle. I was not prepared to be a widow.
Irrespective of age, all widows come home to an empty house and sleep alone. There’s no one to hold you when you need to be held, or zip up your dress when you can’t reach around the back. You pretend that holidays are days like any other day. True, a solitary life is not confined to widows. I have friends who are divorced, or single by choice, or haven’t yet met the right person. But those are familiar circumstances. I’m not familiar.
Because my husband died during the height of Covid, there was no funeral, no memorial service, no traditional closure. We didn’t have children, nor family nearby. No one came to visit or bring food. There was no shoulder to cry on, no hugs. The condolences I received were brief and sent by email. There is no comfort to be had from email. When lockdown was over, everyone was deeply relieved and desperate only to go out, socialize, have fun. The empty seat at the table went unacknowledged. My husband’s death was old news, and no one wanted to go back in time. Not now.
It took a year for me to clean out his possessions, which I divided into three piles: Keep. Donate. Friends.
His watch I gave to his best friend, who said I should keep it, but I said no. “He would’ve wanted you to have it.” My dead husband’s watch disappeared into his best friend’s pocket, never to be seen again. One night when I’d complimented the watch he was wearing, he told me it had been his father’s watch, a family heirloom. I invented an excuse for him: He didn’t wear my husband’s watch when with me for fear it would make me sad.
It was the same with the other mementoes I distributed. His ties — okay, some people think it’s icky to wear another person’s clothes, even if that person weren’t dead. And his fountain pen — no one uses fountain pens anymore. Such were my rationalizations, but rationalizations are not truths.
Eventually it clicked. It wasn’t fear that premature death was contagious like Covid. It was because his death was like a harbinger. Mementoes trigger memory. To remember him would lead them to contemplate his death which, in turn, would lead them to contemplate their own mortality, something they were far from ready to do. I’m no longer angry, although I can’t say it doesn’t still sting.
When a friend suggested I sign up for a dating app, I told her about how back when my cat died, my mother insisted I go to the shelter tomorrow and get a new cat, and I’d asked her, “How would you feel if Dad died and someone told you to go out tomorrow and get yourself a new husband?” My mother got my point, as did my friend.
Some months ago, before heading out to teach my class, I stopped for a last look in the mirror. I’m one of those New Yorkers who dresses exclusively in black, but suddenly, somehow, my black dress, black tights, and black stilettos had morphed from New York black to the black of perpetual mourning, as if I weren’t going to work but to a village in Greece to sit on a bench with the others. I wasn’t about to buy a whole new wardrobe, just a few colorful things to break the mood. I went shopping, but neither the red nor turquoise dress nor yellow blouse felt right, as if they didn’t fit. And they didn’t fit — they didn’t fit me. I gave up, but then I spied the rack of tights in a vast array of colors. I bought two pairs in hot pink, one red and one periwinkle blue.
A black dress accented by the hot pink tights did the trick.
In the MFA program where I teach, the majority students are in their mid-twenties. A few of the women were congregated in the hallway where one of them complimented my tights. Thinking the circumstances of my sartorial switch were amusing, I related how from age 14 onward, I’d worn nothing that wasn’t black, but now that my husband was dead, it dawned on me that I looked like a professional widow. That I was widowed alarmed them. Eyes cast downward at their shoes, not my tights, one of them mumbled, “Sorry,” and I said, “No need to apologize. It is what it is.”
When a colleague paid me the same compliment, I was sure she’d find my explanation amusing. Unlike the students, she didn’t look down as if wishing the floor would open and swallow her whole, but after a moment of insufferable silence, she said, “Well, they look really nice,” and then scurried away.
At a party, I was chatting with a man who glanced at my hand. My wedding ring isn’t a traditional wedding band, not a clear-cut indication of my marital status. He asked if I were married, and when I told him I was widowed, his face froze. To put him at ease, I made a joke of it. “I didn’t kill him,” I said.
He took off.
Apparently, my belief that there is comedy to be found in tragedy is not a shared belief, and to be a widow at my age is like the difference between quitting your job and getting fired from it.
No one knows what to say.
I’m not at a loss for words. I want to talk about him, about how it is for me, but I’ve learned that such things make for awkward conversation. Had I been single by other means, we would’ve talked about how I’m better off without the guy, that he was a creep, no good. My independence would be admired, even envied.
Four years passed before I took my first real vacation. To Berlin. Not Istanbul. I’ll never go to Istanbul. I never got my apartment re-painted, either, but I have decided to move. My friends are thrilled because I live in a five-flight walk-up. Regardless of their age, by the time they reach the fifth floor, they’re short of breath. I have no problem with the stairs. My decision to move is predicated on my decision to move on. To move on is a distance taken in incremental steps. Not a clean break. I don’t ever want to, nor could I, forget him — or our life together — but it would be good to live in a place not haunted relentlessly by memories.
Unless, like my husband, I don’t reach full life expectancy, there are many years still ahead still me. I’m not dwelling on my mortality. This is my life. I’ll go on.
Binnie Kirshenbaum is the author of the story collection History on a Personal Note and seven novels, including Rabbits for Food, Hester Among the Ruins, An Almost Perfect Moment, and The Scenic Route. Her novels have been chosen as Notable Books of the Year by The Chicago Tribune, NPR, TIME, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Washington Post. Her work has been translated into seven languages. Her new novel, Counting Backwards, will be published by SoHo Press this March.
