WIDOW'S WALK IS PUBLISHED

I  Have Always Been With You
Artist: Shiloh Sophia

WIDOW'S WALK, A NOVEL·FRIDAY, JANUARY 5, 2018

A sense of loss followed me like a shadow all my life. Real loss. Actual dead and gone kind of loss. Maybe it’s like that for everyone; who can know unless they tell you? From early childhood I knew I’d have to do something about this haunting or it would eat me up. There’s an old 16 mm film of me as a three-year-old circling the tiny grave of a bird that died--a tiny yellow chicken that my neighbor Minnie Osborn gave me from her coop. I’m performing a kind of ritual, like a priest circling the altar with incense. You can see the tears on my cheeks.

As life goes on we lose a lot of who and what we love, those people and things that make us what we are. Maybe every experience of love continues as a part of us. Maybe we are made of the bits and pieces of the content of every moment we’ve lived--all we’ve seen and heard and touched and smelled, every gaze, embrace, word, sound. Every tree we’ve leaned against has blessed us. Every breeze. Do you ever sit in your favorite chair remembering the look in the eyes of someone you loved for a lifetime or an instant just before they turned and walked away? Or closed their eyes that last time?

I tried a lot of things to preserve myself from these turnings, and later to save myself from their hauntings. In youth I tried holding tight to what I loved. Then I tried isolation. I tried dissolving into nature and when that was not enough I tried imagination. Then I turned to religion with all its symbols, rituals, and stories--with its gods. I tried varieties of those. I read thousands of books, and wrote a few myself. I gazed into many, many eyes.

Some were the eyes husbands dying. I was widowed twice. Two amazing men who loved me and I loved. Grief over the turnings in life can overwhelm. There are things no one tells a widow: secrets of the body, soul and spirit that are just too intimate to share. There are memoirs anyway--some raw and aching, not quite getting deep enough for the second turning. The re-turning to a new self always there but never before quite seen . I thought I’d write a memoir of each husband, but the story wasn’t so much about the husband as about the widow struggling in my soul. She couldn’t be accessed in memory. Only the spiritual leap to the edge of being, the novel with its daring kind of truth that transcends fact could spin the story into words.

One day I heard her voice deep, deep in me, and I put my fingers on the keys. She said:

“I woke alone, thinking nothing had happened, thinking the green curtains an ocean as they waved, forgetting where I was and why and with whom I might be living—a stranger I imagined I knew but never knew, pretending then, pretending now, constructing our reality on a breath, on a wave, and believing it...”

And the adventure of the WIDOW’S WALK had begun.

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