Saturday Night Widows (15 page)

Many assume that a widow who manages to move ahead and be happy again probably didn’t love her partner much in the first place—the Scarlett O’Hara syndrome. But when I met Professor Bonanno, he debunked that theory. One of the first studies he was involved in followed 1,500 married couples for a decade, and over that time, some of the spouses died. The study found no connection between the closeness of the marriage and the depth and duration of mourning. Those with healthy, happy relationships were well positioned to go on with healthy, happy lives.

In my case, though, there were a couple of years when I couldn’t make the leap. After all I’d seen, all I’d done and failed to do, I couldn’t imagine having the will again to take on responsibility for another person. The idea that I might stand before my friends in a white dress and pledge to love someone else in sickness and in health? Unthinkable.

Nevertheless, a little more than a year after Bernie died, I obliged a couple I was close to by joining them for an attempted
fix-up with a friend of theirs. The four of us met at a restaurant, the kind of boîte that serves real entrées instead of pan-Asian snacks. The couple had told me that the man was successful at his business; they had told him I was pretty.

My intended suitor was a suburban man with a pleasant face, a recent widower, so recent, it turned out, that he redirected all conversation toward paeans to his wife’s favorite pursuits—gardening, antiquing, shoe shopping—following up with questions about whether I shared her interests. It was like a job interview to determine whether I could fill the shoes, literally, of a valued employee. His wife had been a devoted gardener, and he was so befuddled over what to do with her vast beds of tulips and nasturtiums that he had hired someone to spread hundreds of cubic yards of mulch to put them into some kind of order. Unless I heard him wrong. It might have been hundreds of cubic
feet
of mulch. I had no idea the quantity of mulch one needs to do whatever it is that mulch does for flower beds.

“Do you like to garden?” the mulch man asked me, while the other couple at the table hung on my answer.

“I have window boxes at my apartment,” I answered with careful neutrality.

His wife’s antiques also needed to be repaired and polished, and she owned a lot of those shoes that he didn’t know what to do with. “Have you ever restored antiques?” he asked.

“I bought an old cabinet at a flea market once,” I said. “I think it may have been a fake.”

“Are you interested in shoes?”

I felt the anticipation of everyone at the table while the question led me astray and I entered one of those altered states that I
witnessed later when Denise lost the thread of a conversation. Was I interested in shoes? I was so interested in shoes that once when Bernie was in the hospital for a one-hour procedure, I busted out of the waiting room, ran outside, jumped into a cab, hightailed it to Barneys, whipped through the shoe department to ogle pumps and platforms and flats, and then repeated the whole escapade in reverse, no one the wiser, all before Bernie’s procedure ended, and all simply to remind myself that somewhere there existed a parallel universe where people concerned themselves with the delicious folly of placing something exquisite on their feet. It was a trip to the far side of Pluto and back, all in the course of an hour.

I realized that the mulch man was waiting for my answer. “Sorry,” I said. “Not interested.” I’d rather keep that room at the Marriott.

chapter
TEN

d
awn was the last to show up. Most people disappear into the bustle of the Metropolitan Museum, but Dawn’s arrival was more of an entrance. Heads didn’t just turn, they swiveled when she strode past, confident in a pair of black suede boots, jacked up on heels that few would venture to wear for two hours of tramping through some of the world’s most cavernous galleries. As we set off, visitors looked away from stupendous frescoes and statuary, Dawn’s flash of blondness too irresistible a distraction. If people come to museums to watch each other as well as the art, Dawn was giving them a helluva show. Her kinetic presence hijacked attention, and she was conscious of all the darting looks. But Dawn
paid
attention, too. She took in everything, making connections, making them hers. Dawn was a woman both fully engaging and fully engaged.

It was the lotus blossoms that brought her to a full stop.

Locking into those blossoms, Dawn lost any awareness of herself and redirected all her scrutiny to a collection of drawings and
watercolors that depicted them. A sound, like a purr from a Persian cat, came from somewhere deep in her throat.

The lotus blossoms were sequestered in their own room away from the crowds, but they were no dainty, ladylike flowers. As depicted by the Chinese artist Xie Zhiliu, they were strong, forceful blooms with palpable erotic power. Their colors, virgin white or red like the lipstick of a whore, emerged with muscular force from some murky depths. They were beautiful, too, of course. But these watercolors weren’t just for show. They had something more, something penetrating to say. Dawn looked at them like someone trying to work something out. Something, something
else
, was up with Dawn.

“I want to start here,” said our guide, Katie, a slender art history student with long, pre-Raphaelite ringlets of fawn-colored hair, “in part because it’s more peaceful than other galleries on a busy Saturday night, and in part because lotus blossoms are highly symbolic in many cultures.”

We stepped closer. The works captured fleeting moments in the lives of the flowers. Some bowed gracefully. Some stretched toward the sun on tender stems. Withered ones dropped their seeds. “The idea for the artist was that no one of these was
the
lotus blossom,” Katie said. “It’s necessary to see the various facets of the life cycle to understand the flower itself.”

Everyone in our group moved from one painting to the other, respectfully silent, drinking in the sinuous forms, the bold lines like calligraphy, the showy eruptions of color.

“Lotus blossoms close their petals at night and reopen in the morning, so there is also the idea of perpetual resurgence and renewal, of reinventing themselves,” Katie continued.

“Ahh … renewal,” Tara said, casting a meaningful look toward Dawn, who was still transfixed.

“That red is so vivid,” observed Lesley.

“And they can surge forth and be beautiful and pristine in a muddy, difficult environment.” Katie finished and stepped to the side, leaving us to soak in the essential qualities of the blossoms, their splendor, their drive, their strength.

Dawn could hold her silence no longer. “I can’t believe it,” she blurted out in a croaky rush. “It sits on my desk, that picture.”

“This picture?” I asked, pointing to the one in front of her, the most colorful one in the room.

“No, no, my own picture.” Dawn spun away from the painting toward the rest of us, lit up by the coincidence. “I have a photograph of a beautiful lotus blossom on my desk. I look at it every morning.” It was a gift from her husband, who took the photograph on a trip through the bush in Africa. “Sometimes Andries and I liked to go off and do our separate things. He liked to rough it as though he were in the army. It reminded him that life could be taken away in a minute.”

Dawn didn’t know anything about lotus blossoms when he gave her the photograph six months before he died. She asked him why, of all the glorious sights in the wild, he had chosen this image of a lotus, rooted in an inky swamp, for her. “It is because a lotus blossom will grow and perfume and flower,” he said, “even in the muck.”

Everyone made that same contented sound that Dawn had uttered before. We got it, all right. All of us—Denise, Dawn, Marcia, Lesley, Tara, me—we were blooming in the muck.

F
OR OUR
M
ARCH OUTING
, I had come up with this excursion, away from the everyday, like cooking, and into the sublime. The roast chicken train wreck had made me leery about my skill at planning activities for our group, so I consulted Camille Wortman, a research psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She had kicked off much of the new research about grief with an attention-grabbing paper back in 1989 called
The Myths of Coping with Loss
, setting the tone for others that followed. She recommended that people who are grieving throw themselves into positive experiences that fully engage their interest, what psychologists call
flow
. I told her that going with the flow at the cooking class hadn’t been so easy for everyone in our group.

“If I lost my husband, going to a cooking class would be very hard for me,” she told me when I visited her office. “I cook a lot. My husband cooks. It’s something we do together.” For her, she said, “Cooking would be a zinger.”

A zinger, Wortman explained, can be any unexpected reminder of loss, like Denise’s chicken or Dawn’s John Denver song. It can strike a person with spooky intensity, even causing difficulty breathing or heart palpitations. Obviously, we had stumbled onto this third rail of zingers with Denise and food.

I was chagrined, but Wortman was otherwise reassuring. Unlike Bonanno in his Hawaiian shirts, she had that precise appearance that you look for in a scientist, very neutral—short brown hair, pale skin, tan pants, tan shoes, a red and tan paisley blouse. Her work as a research psychologist involved interviewing thousands of couples before and after bereavement, for as many as ten years, to assess their ways of coping, and she had uncovered the benefits of positive experiences. Walking the dog, going shopping,
just about any activity that generates some enthusiasm, she said, can break the grip of negative thoughts and offer a respite from depression, anxiety, anger, or guilt. So she was all in favor of our planning these regular outings.

“But if you are sponsoring a group like this, it might be good to screen for zingers,” she advised. “Of course, it would be hard to know what they would be. They could be different for different people. They could be anything.”

W
HICH IS WHY
I nearly suffered breathing difficulty and heart palpitations when, ten days before our get-together, I found out that the museum had organized what I can only call an all-zinger tour for our group, a tour so lacking in positive engagement that Denise would be begging for roast chicken as an alternative.

Once again, I had come up with a plan deceptive in its simplicity. I heard that for a reasonable sum the Metropolitan Museum of Art would put together a private tour on the subject of one’s choice. I requested a survey of artworks that reflected on the subjects of loss and recovery, a tour for a group of young widows who were intent on remaking themselves; a Saturday night tour that would be positive, even inspiring in tone, revolving around rebirth, renewal, and change. Perhaps naively believing that the Met would understand what I had in mind, I thought my planning was done. I relaxed for a couple of weeks and reflected on how art was the ideal antidote to grief, how art in many forms had served that function for me.