1. IS THIS THE WIDOW?

Imagine a woman – blonde, slender, not young -- sitting at a writing table in her bedroom.  It is five-thirty in the morning and she is in her dressing gown, straight-backed, head canted, looking down in a pool of lamp light at the telephone in her hand.  She eyes the phone warily.

She is waiting for something.  While she waits, she jots some notes on a pad of paper.  Then she raises her eyes and through the open shutters, sees in dawn's first light the familiar muted shapes of the trees in her garden:  the gnarled, supplicating limbs of an old mesquite, the skirted fronds of a pepper tree sweeping the grass, the quivering fans of Mexican palms.  An Inca dove sings her sad little two-note tune -- "no hope!  no hope!" -- as she picks her way through a bougainvillea vine along the top of a whitewashed wall.  Beyond the wall rears a ragged range of mountains, bisected in the foreground by a tall aleppo pine.  A piercing shriek shatters the silence, a shadow plunges; there's a clatter of palms, a blur of bougainvillea … and the dove is gone, borne to her death in the talons of a Harris hawk, whose chicks clamor from their nest in the pine.  Death by predator is hardly a novelty in this southwest desert town where gunslingers prevail, coyotes on two legs or four roam the roads, and rattlers coil at the front door.  Nevertheless, she freezes, shudders at the casual cruelty of nature or fate, the gods or God, call it what you will, shrugs a shawl more closely round her shoulders, and, crumpling, begins to cry.  She knows her tears are not simply for the little dove, but for herself.

On the stroke of six, she makes her call.  In Washington, DC, it is nine o’clock.  In the personnel office of the State Department, a man’s voice answers and she says in a whisper as if she were afraid of waking someone (but who is there to wake?), “ I want to report a death.”

The personnel officer takes the relevant information:  name; age; date of birth; Social Security number; cause of death.  There is a pause while he enters these statistics into his computer, then poses a question.

“Is this the widow?”

Widow?

Surprised, she finds herself unable to answer.

Is this the widow?  Is this the widow? It is not merely the word that startles her, but what she reads in his tone.  His voice is uninflected, dispassionate, yet the sibilants seem to her to hiss through the silence with insidious condescension.  Why should this be?  Should her unsought status not elicit compassion rather than contempt?

Several seconds elapse as she considers his question and in that lacuna passes a lifetime.

Her marital history, as it happens, falls quite neatly into two parts:  unwed/wed.  No serial marriages, no stormy separations, no children, no messy divorces.  For the last thirty-five years she has been married to one man – let us call him “Em” – her mate-for-life.  His life, as it turns out.  Now, at six o’clock on a spring morning in April 2009, the disembodied, seemingly bored, satellite-borne voice of the State Department has laconically articulated what is said to be the most harrowing passage of one’s life, short of death itself – the death of a spouse.  The Voice of the Department has redefined her role, changed her label.  Moreover, it has, without license or leave, performed grammatical surgery on her identity – excising the pronominal “you” and inserting the objective “this.”  Is this the widow?  She has become an object. The marriage that took 35 years to construct has been razed.  In the missed beat of a heart, Em's heart, she has morphed from “wife” to “widow," from “you” to “this”...  from relict to relic.

 “Widow.” She hates the very sound of it.  The roots are as hardy as the word is wooden, thrusting back through Old Frisian (widwe), Old Saxon (widowa), Old High German (wituwa), Gothic (widuwo), reaching further back and farther afield to Sanskrit (vidhava), to Latin (viduus)... meaning void.  The label is one of historic derogation, of literary belittlement, connoting dependency, meagerness, penury, parsimony, impecuniousness (“widow’s mite”).  Visually, it calls forth bleak or satirical images … “widow’s peak” … “widow’s weeds”… those bows and bonnets and bolts of black bombazine shrouding Queen Victoria ( "The Widow of Windsor"), who for forty years after Albert's untimely demise, sartorially enforced her hysterical mourning on two generations of female subjects.

The word summons up sad visions of banishment:   to towers , to harems, to nunneries, to the purdah of worlds without men. The stereotypes (fashioned, often, by men) are sufficiently well-known:  The Rapacious Widow (Gertrude lusting after Claudius); the Avaricious widow (even Jackie Kennedy, so movingly elegant in her grief, was castigated for overweening greed when she married Onassis); the Mad Widow (poor deranged Mrs. Lincoln, whose sin was to grieve too much).  Then there are the Meddlesome Widows, Lady Auld Reekie and all the other old busy-bodies who trip and troop through the pages of Trollope; the Wily Widow, the Worldly Widow, (Madame Max Goesler, who is a bit too ambitious until brought to heel), not to mention the toothless Dickensian grannies drooling by the fire, the Dotty Widows, the Comical Widows, the Wicked Widows scheming to defraud the virtuous (see Mrs. Clenham in Little Dorritt).   Lastly, let us not forget the Constant Widow devotedly keeping her late husband's flame alight, and the Declining Widow, who, though she no longer commits suttee, withdraws from life, figuratively flinging herself onto the funeral pyre of her husband.  All these images crowd the New Widow's mind … flashing upon that inward eye which is the hell of solitude

Is she merely projecting her own weaknesses and insecurities?  Perhaps.  And do these thoughts not sow the seeds of a poisonous self-pity?  Probably.  But how to stave off such thoughts?  These are among the many questions that cannot be answered today, or tomorrow, or next week.  For thirty-five years, her roles have been largely defined by Em,  by his career and by his disease.  Now she has been cut adrift by death.  So be it.  She will honor him, love him, mourn and miss him to the end of her days, but she can not be defined by her dead husband, no matter how beloved, nor can she live as half of a defunct couple.  She will not wear the Black "W."  She is nobody's dead dove, yet.

But she can hardly enter into a philosophical dialogue with the Department.  “Yes,” she says, “I am the widow.”

Now what?

It is twenty past six and the sun is rising over the desert.  She hears the call of a quail and smells the sharp-sweet scents of wild creosote and citrus blossoms.   She opens the door, whistles up the dogs and walks out into the morning.