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Seeking Solace by Writingthrough GriefMarta BladekPublished online: 06 Apr 2012.

To cite this article: Marta Bladek (2012) Seeking Solace by Writing through Grief,Death Studies, 36:5, 477-483, DOI: 10.1080/07481187.2011.634662

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BOOK REVIEW

Edited byDAVID E. BALK

Seeking Solace by Writing through Grief

Reviews of A Widow’s Story: A Memoir by Joyce Carol Oates.New York, NY: Ecco, 2011. 432 pp. (ISBN: 978-0062015532),$27.95 and of The Long Goodbye by Meghan O’Rourke. New York,NY: Riverhead Books, 2011. 320 pp. (ISBN: 978-1594487989).$25.95. Reviewed by Marta Bladek.

Joyce Carol Oates, a prolific author who has written more than 50 novels, isthe Roger S. Berlind Professor in the Humanities with the Program inCreative Writing at Princeton University. She won the National BookAward for her novel Them (1969, Vanguard Press) and has been nominatedseveral times for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.

Meghan O’Rourke, a native of Brooklyn, NY, is a poet. She waspoetry co-editor for Paris Review from 2005 to 2010. Since 2001 she haswritten for Slate. Her book Halflife (2007, W.W. Norton) was a finalist forBritain’s Forward First Book Prize. In February 2011, O’Rourke and Oatesengaged in a dialogue about grief that the New York Times published (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/weekinreview/27grief.html).

Marta Bladek is Assistant Professor and Reference Librarian at JohnJay College of Criminal Justice. She received her PhD in English in 2009from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She wrote‘‘Literary Returns to Eastern and Central Europe’’ published in TheHolocaust: Essays and Documents. (2009, The Rosenthal Institute forHolocaust Studies at the Graduate Center of CUNY).

‘‘[W]hen you sign on to be a wife, you are signing on to being awidow one day, possibly,’’ (p. 103) points out Joyce Carol Oatesin A Widow’s Story, a memoir describing the first few months afterthe death of her husband Raymond Smith. A Widow’s Story isOates’s attempt ‘‘to see what can be made of the phenomenon of‘grief’ in the most exact minute of ways’’ (p. 407). With painstakingattention to detail, she shows what it means to become a widow

Death Studies, 36: 477–483, 2012Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0748-1187 print=1091-7683 onlineDOI: 10.1080/07481187.2011.634662

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and contend with the knowledge that ‘‘the ordinary can so quicklyturn extraordinary, and the extraordinary ordinary’’ (p. 103).

When Raymond Smith died of pneumonia complications onFebruary 18, 2008, he and Oates had been married for 47 yearsand 25 days, a period whose length, precisely recorded by Oates,had made living without one another seem unimaginable. The lit-erary couple—Raymond Smith was the editor and publisher of TheOntario Review, a journal, and Oates is the prolific author ofprize-winning fiction and nonfiction—shared ‘‘the most exquisiteof intimacies’’ (p. 146). They were rarely apart, working side byside in their Princeton home on most days, writing and often seek-ing each other’s editorial feedback. Their close professionalrelationship notwithstanding, Oates cherished their marriagebecause it allowed her ‘‘not [to] think of myself as a writer pri-marily, or even as a writer, but as a wife’’ (p. 8).

As a consequence of their mutual devotion and dependence,Oates experiences her husband’s passing as a ‘‘terrible loss’’(p. 407) that plunges her into ‘‘inhabit[ing] a free-fall world fromwhich meaning has been drained’’ (p. 64). Starting with themoment she is told by the hospital staff that her husband is dead,Oates diligently describes the wide range of emotions and moodsshe experiences in the months that follow. Her grief starts with‘‘[p]re-widowhood,’’ as Oates calls the early stage in which ‘‘theWidow hasn’t yet ‘got it’’’ (p. 64) that she must now live alone.The initial shock and incomprehension temporarily shield herfrom the realization that her life has been irreversibly altered. Dur-ing this period Oates manages to save herself from confronting theunbearable by focusing on ‘‘countless death duties’’ (p. 416), thesmall tasks she is charged with as the surviving spouse. She collectsher husband’s belongings from the hospital and informs family andfriends of his death. She speaks with the funeral director, chooses acemetery plot, obtains the death certificate, and consults with alawyer about her husband’s will. Later, she attends to his corre-spondence, reassigns the title to their car, clears his closet, anddonates his clothes to charity. ‘‘[T]hese meaningless but necessary tasks’’(p. 416, italics in original), Oates remembers, offer distraction andcomfort; following ‘‘the Death-protocol’’ (p. 64) she is able to navi-gate the hitherto unknown territory of grief.

The short-term refuge she finds in widow’s tasks, however,does not protect Oates from feeling the obliterating force of her

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grief. She suffers from insomnia, loses her appetite, wards off suici-dal thoughts daily, and comes down with a severe case of shingles.She is nevertheless determined ‘‘to manage—to cope—to do as muchunassisted as possible’’ (p. 74, italics in original). She continues towrite, teach, and guest lecture. ‘‘[W]ork,’’ Oates explains, ‘‘is, ifnot invariably sanity, a counter-insanity’’ (p. 355).

Still, her resolve to take care of herself and be in charge of her‘‘posthumous life,’’ as she calls her ‘‘life after Ray’’ (p. 171), oftencollapses under the weight of the despair she struggles to diffuse.Feeling abandoned and lonely, Oates frequently gives in to theacute sadness her husband’s absence inspires. ‘‘I am thinking thatnever have I been alone so much, so starkly unmitigatedly alone, as Ihave been since Ray has died; never, since our marriage in January1961’’ (p. 110, italics in original). Unable to forget their morningritual of reading the New York Times together, she cancels theirthirty-year subscription because going through the paper alone isjust too painful. The news that two of her books have been nomi-nated for National Book Critics Circle award upsets her deeplyafter she realizes that ‘‘there is no one to share this with. There is noone’’ (p. 249, italics in the original).

The loss of her husband’s companionship is not the only lossOates mourns. His death, she discovers, has also made her feelhomeless. Their home, ‘‘the place of refuge, solitude, love,’’ Oatesexplains, ‘‘no longer exists’’ (p. 224). Instead, it has become a coldand empty house to which she dreads coming back. Once inside,she retreats into the bedroom and stays in the bed she has con-verted into a ‘‘nest,’’ a living and working space beyond whichshe rarely ventures (p. 135).

A Widow’s Story is not a narrative that outlines grief’s trajectoryfrom the disavowal of to acceptance of loss. Oates ends her mem-oir at a seemingly arbitrary moment. She simply stops writing inJune, four months after her husband’s death, just as she is beginn-ing to be able to sleep through the night. A brief epilogue, datedAugust 2008, follows, and in it Oates alludes to meeting a manwho would soon become her second husband. The memoir endswith a short paragraph titled ‘‘The Widow’s Handbook’’ statingthat ‘‘on the first anniversary of her husband’s death the widowshould think I kept myself alive’’ (p. 416, italics in original).

A diary of survival, A Widow’s Story is more a loosely orga-nized journal than a carefully composed memoir. It reads like an

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unmediated, or unedited, account of Oates’s grief as she is experi-encing it at the time of writing about it. This writerly strategy effec-tively conveys the depth of emotional turmoil Oates confronts; atthe same time, the narrative occasionally loses its focus and coher-ence because of it. Oates’s desire to articulate the emotional inten-sity of grief is discernible in her overreliance on italics, dashes, andexclamation points. ‘‘I know—I know!—my husband is no longerliving. He doesn’t require a blanket, nor even a sheet. I know thisand yet—I am not able to understand that he is dead ’’ (p. 71, italicsin original), is but one example of a passage that comes closer toevoking affectation rather than capturing distress.

And yet, precisely because Oates does record the momentswhen she gives in to ‘‘the most maudlin sort of self-pity’’ (p.222), the mindset she wishes in vain to be able to transcend, AWidow’s Story poignantly conveys grief’s ‘‘sheer vanity; narcissism;the pretense that one’s loss is so special, . . . so very special, thatthere has never been a loss quite like it’’ (p. 333). Grief and widow-hood, Oates acknowledges, are commonplace. Aptly titled AWidow’s Story, Oates’s narrative offers an intimate glimpse at herown reckoning with loss, an experience that is no less personalfor being lived through by many others.

Whereas ‘‘[w]e have a word for the wife who’s lost herhusband—widow,’’ observes Meghan O’Rourke, the author ofThe Long Goodbye, ‘‘we don’t really have a word for having lost aparent—except when we speak of children who lost both parentsas ‘orphaned’’’ (p. 17). To counteract this ‘‘privatization’’ of anadult child’s grief, O’Rourke’s ruminative memoir endeavors tobring the ‘‘unmothered’’ daughter’s experience into the publiceye. Describing the final two-and-a-half years of her mother’s lifeand chronicling the year after her death, The Long Goodbye is a vis-ceral account of O’Rourke’s grief—the raw pain, deep sorrow, andsudden unmooring she confronts following her mother’s cancerdiagnosis and eventual death. At once an intimate portrait of aparticular family’s loss and an insightful critique of contemporarysociety’s unease with death and dying, O’Rourke’s narrative illumi-nates and complicates our understanding of what it means tomourn and live in loss’s aftermath today.

Barbara Kelly O’Rourke was first diagnosed with colorectalcancer in 2006. ‘‘There is our mother, and then, suddenly, thereis her cancer,’’ O’Rourke remembers the shock of the diagnosis

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(p. 21). As a result of aggressive treatment, the cancer had tempor-arily gone into remission but ultimately metastasized. When shedied at home on Christmas Day of 2008, Barbara O’Rourke wasjust 55.

O’Rourke had always been close with her mother, but sherecalls the period before her death as the time during which ‘‘Igot to know my mother as never before’’ (p. 10). The Long Goodbyepoignantly renders the urgency of this new mother–daughter inti-macy in which the customary roles of the caretaker and the onetaken care of have been reversed. An extended eulogy for hermother, O’Rourke’s memoir is an affecting testimony to a bondtransformed—but not severed—by illness and death.

Although her mother’s passing was not unexpected,O’Rourke finds herself stunned by the loss that had, until the veryend, ‘‘seemed implausible’’ and ‘‘resisted belief’’ (p. 139). Realizingher mother is no longer alive was ‘‘like waking up in a world with-out sky: unimaginable’’ (p. 10). In the weeks immediately followingher mother’s death, O’Rourke struggles to maintain a semblance ofnormality. She wills herself to perform ordinary tasks, but the effortexhausts her. She manages to inform friends and acquaintancesabout her mother’s passing, but she does so with ‘‘the floating sen-sation that I was acting out a part in a movie, trying the words on’’(p. 121). The well-intentioned condolences O’Rourke receivesstrike her as insensitive cliches, and she grows impatient with herfriends’ misguided attempts to console her. Newly distant fromthe people she has been close to in the past, O’Rourke also feelsweighed down by ‘‘a terrible, insistent truth about the imperma-nence of the everyday’’ (p. 11), a realization that challenges herlong-held assumptions about the world and her place in it. Thisnew understanding of life’s fragility, she understands, sets her apartfrom those who have never lost a loved one. It is only in the com-pany of acquaintances whose parents have died that O’Rourke’sloneliness becomes less acute; together, they form ‘‘the club’’ ofmourners who offer one another comfort and empathy (p. 129).

Not ready as she is for her mother’s death, O’Rourke is evenless prepared for the intensity of her grief. Like Oates, she isstunned by the force of her distress. ‘‘What was most difficultwas that I myself didn’t know what to expect. How long would Ifeel like this? Would this yearning pass? And—did I want it to?’’(p. 125). To better comprehend and manage the emotions that

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consume her, O’Rourke sets out to research grief, the commonexperience that, she points out repeatedly throughout her memoir,has been relegated to the private realm. As a result of death’sabsence in the public sphere, new mourners, including O’Rourkeherself, lack the emotional resources and communal support thatwould carry them through the arduous process of coming to termswith the loss of a loved one. Because ‘‘grief remains strangelytaboo,’’ she posits, ‘‘we have so few rituals for observing and exter-nalizing loss’’ (p. 13).

O’Rourke diligently reports the new knowledge she hasgained from grief-related books and research. These drysummary-like sections markedly differ in tone from the evocativepassages that describe her own mourning. All too often, O’Rourkerefers to a study but fails to directly relate it to her own experienceand explain how the findings help her orient herself. As a result,these information-heavy portions of the memoir break up themeditative rhythm of the narrative and add little to O’Rourke’sparticular story.

Interrupted—but not diminished—by the heavy-handedinclusion of scholarly explications of grief, the emotional reson-ance of The Long Goodbye comes from O’Rourke’s ability to showthat ‘‘If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactionsare exquisitely personal’’ (p. 57). Grief’s trajectory can be mapped,O’Rourke comes to understand in the course of her research onthe subject; her memoir, like Oates’s A Widow’s Story, however,reminds us that for each individual stricken with loss the processof coming to terms with it is singular. Among the manyheart-rending passages in The Long Goodbye that tell of O’Rourke’sdaughterly grief there is her memory of the first Thanksgivingwithout her mother. As she is baking a pie, a task that used tobe her mother’s, O’Rourke cannot recall the exact temperatureto which she is supposed to set the oven: ‘‘I reached for the phone.And realized—I couldn’t’’ (p. 236). The impulse to call her motherjolts her into remembering that she is dead; unexpectedly, how-ever, she also finds comfort in realizing that she is now doing, byherself, what she has watched her mother do many times in thepast. As her family gathers for Thanksgiving and they are ‘‘cookingthe same things we always cooked, creating the same smells we’dalways created’’ (p. 237), they simultaneously mourn Barbara’s lossand celebrate the life they had all shared together by allowing the

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past to be a part of their present without her. ‘‘[M]y mother’sdeath,’’ as O’Rourke notes the shift in her grief, ‘‘no longer seemeda bleak marker of ‘Before’ and ‘After.’ I felt her absence around usbut I also saw how, too, she was embedded in us’’ (p. 237). In con-trast to A Widow’s Story, The Long Goodbye concludes on a note ofreconciliation with the sadness and sorrow that linger after thedeath of a loved one. O’Rourke knows she will always miss hermother, but she also understands that she will be able to hold onto her through remembering and cherishing the life they onceshared.

Eloquent and moving, A Widow’s Story and The Long Goodbyeare attempts to understand grief and thus alleviate the sorrow ofloss. And yet, as Oates and O’Rourke eulogize their lost loved onesand mourn their passing, they come to understand that, althoughits intensity lessens over time, grief does not come to an end. Thosewho survive the death of someone they loved, A Widow’s Story andThe Long Goodbye suggest, will always have to live with their loss.

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