A Widow's Story: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Joyce Carol Oates' heart-wrenching memoir "A Widow's Story" is about Raymond Smith, her husband's unexpected death at age 77 after forty-eight years together. Admitted with pneumonia he died within a week from a hospital acquired virulent infection. Part pilgrimage part widow's handbook she illuminates with powerful prose and acute perception the stunning reality of widowhood. The shock, the anguish, the grief, the disorientation, the denial and the guilt amid the nightmare of "death duties." She raises important questions about the legal and medical systems, the absurdities of commercialized forms of mourning and the painful impersonal vocabulary of illness and death. Her distress gives readers the opportunity to think ahead about the 'death duties" before the shock of loss.
At her husband's deathbed in the middle of the night she had to call a friend from the hospital, decide against doing an autopsy and gather his belongings. When, in her haze of confusion, it later dawned on her that her husband may have died a "wrongful death" it was too late, her husband had already been cremated.
Feeling widowhood is the punishment for having been a wife she experiences Rays' death as series of appointments, duties and bills - viewing the body, funeral arrangements, the cremation, buying an urn to bury his ashes, medical bills and insurance, his will and death certificate, automobile titles and insurance, house insurance, IRS documents, banks and other financial statements, passports, social security documents, birth and wedding certificates. All are needed to "probate" her husbands will.
Her last chapter titled "The Widow's Handbook" Joyce says: "Of the widow's countless death-duties there is just one that matters: on the first anniversary of her husband's death the widow should think 'I kept myself alive.' "
She found strength teaching her university students. She said for two lively and absorbing hours she was able to forget her radically altered life. She called it her life line - something she could do that has value. However her biggest solace was taking over her husband's garden and planting it in a new way. She used Ray's gardening gloves and implements and planted hardy perennials, perishable annuals, flowers, including wild flowers, not vegetables. Her resolution to discontinue her anti-depressive came while in the garden. Although she feared addiction she took pills for depression and insomnia and was proud when she discontinued them after six months.
Joyce's vivid depictions made me feel as if I too were in the depths of grief, guilt, depression and despair. She says that she's no longer convinced there's any value in grief and if wisdom springs from the experience it's a wisdom one might do without. I'm glad she didn't follow her own advice. Grieving is natural. This book would not exist if she hadn't allowed herself to grieve.
I appreciated her many glimmers of hope. Feeling a new intimacy with her husband while reading his unfinished novel "Black Mass." She said she knew his daily, domestic, social selves but not his imagination. It was like being inside his head. Something she didn't have while Ray was alive.
At the end of her book she talks about three small "sightings:" Feeling Rays' presence in the garden, sleeping without aide and finding lost earrings among the garbage. She wrote, "If I have lost the meaning of my life, and the love of life, I might still find small treasured things amid the spilled and pilfered trash."
My only criticism of Joyce's book is that it is too dark, long and repetitive. She's clearly in the process of finding a new normal. I hope for her sake that it's filled with more self forgiveness and acceptance, love, joy, peace and gratitude.

It's impossible to adequately review this memoir without comparing it to its bestselling predecessor in both form and topic, "The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion. The circumstances of both authors's widowhood are remarkably similar: Oates, a well-known and bestselling author, lost her husband of nearly 50 years, Raymond J. Smith, a respected writer and editor, unexpectedly when a hospital-acquired infection killed him; Didion, a well-known and highly successful author and screenwriter, lost her husband of 40 years, John Gregory Donne, also a well known and highly successful author, when he died of cardiac arrest at their dinner table. Both women had had close, work-together-at-home relationships with their husbands. Both writers use the memoir form as a way of exploring, expressing, and understanding their grief and the grief process. Oates's approach, however, unlike Didion's, is intensely focused on herself, her understandable grief, but also her feeling of helplessness and hysteria, her near-constant suicidal ideation, her rethinking of her marital relationship, and, finally, her way of finding help through her grief by taking over the everyday, ordinary household obligations that she had left to her husband for 48 years.

Initial disclaimer: I enjoy reading Oates's non-fiction essays and reviews, and occasionally her short stories, but am decidedly not a fan of her longer fiction, which I find bizarre, dark, and violent. I was drawn to this book, however, by the excerpt published several weeks ago in The New Yorker, and I still find the opening scene, which was included in that excerpt, to be stunning. In it, we learn much about Oates and her situation: she has come from visiting her husband at the hospital, where she continues to be baffled both by his treatment for pneumonia and the hospital atmosphere. She returns to her car to find that she has parked it askew, tires well over the white line in the street -- her upset and burgeoning hysteria resulted in an unfocused drive to the hospital and a botched parking job. She sees something under the windshield wiper, and, relieved to find that it isn't a parking ticket, she reads the scrawled note: "Learn to park stuppid bitch." Oates comments at this point that her "situation, however unhappy, despairing or fraught with anxiety, doesn't give her the right to overstep the boundaries of others," and we find as the memoir develops that this is a pattern of her grief: helpless and hapless, internalized, hysterical, while insistent on maintaining the privacy of her grief and on showing her best side to the world.

Throughout the memoir, Oates refers to herself primarily in the first person but also, frequently, in the third person as "the widow," as in this passage: "What the widow must remember: her husband's death did not happen to her but to her husband. I have no right to appropriate Ray's death." Oates searches for the "meaning" of grief, the reasons why she feels ill, has heart palpitations, has intractable insomnia. Her fears of being alone in the unusual, glass-walled house she and Raymond Smith shared, with its "ghosts" around every corner and outside every window, are only surpassed by her unease being away from the house, which she says she "yearns" for whenever she leaves. Oates's grief is internalized and compartmentalized when she leaves her home to continue teaching and lecturing, keeping commitments she had made months and years before. When she is at home alone, her grief is all-encompassing, sadness and regret mixed with rage, but also self-indulgent and, as she says in the memoir, bordering on insanity. She spends many of her wakeful dark hours counting out a collection of medications and sleeping aids to use in a suicide attempt, an attempt she researches but ultimately decides against. Oates says that her "survival" of the first year of widowhood is due to the fact that she is fortunate in her friends -- they guide and chauffeur her through the necessary post-mortem miasma of probate, etc., and are careful to call her, invite her to dinner, and encourage her in what is finally her salvation --learning to take ownership of the numerous aspects of her life that she had ceded to her husband over the years.

Didion's experience of grief was compounded by the serious, continuing, near-fatal illness of her only child, a recently-married daughter, who was hospitalized in a coma at the time of Donne's death. The focus on Quintana, a major character in the memoir, expands the memoir beyond Didion's own, beautifully expressed internal grief, and gives it an other-directed accessibility that Oates's memoir lacks. In the end, Oates is not an attractive widow. Her story is valuable and compelling in many ways, but her distracted, almost willful, helplessness and hysteria are wearying. Everyone has their own way of grieving, certainly. But it's hard to sympathize with someone as determinedly fragile as Oates. Indeed, much about the memoir feels off, and reads like a work designed to sell books.

Ultimately, this reader's inability to sympathize with Oates is confirmed, in a way: barely a year after Smith's death Oates remarried, to a professor colleague at Princeton.

Didion, we know, soldiered on, even enduring the death of her beloved daughter several months after the memoir was finished. Again, different people grieve differently, but Didion's memoir comes across as much more honest, devastated indeed, but also heroic. No one can predict if the reading public will find Oates's book as irresistible as Didion's, but to this reader, the comparison leaves Oates's memoir the lesser work of the two.

One year and six weeks before her husband's death, Joyce and Raymond were lucky to walk away from an automobile accident that could just as easily have killed both of them. Joyce Carol Oates and her husband, publisher and editor Raymond Smith, would look upon each day after that accident as a gift, bonus time granted them on their time together. That would all change on February 18, 2008, when Oates would so suddenly be thrust into widowhood that she would be left reeling from the shock for months to come.

Joyce and Raymond Smith had been married for forty-seven years, and they expected to be together for a good many more, on the morning Joyce awoke to find her husband feeling poorly. Because she could see that his illness was more severe than he believed it to be, Oates convinced Smith to let her drive him to Princeton Medical Center. There he was admitted with pneumonia, but the couple expected that he would be treated and released in only a few days. Up until the early hours of February 18, when Oates received an urgent phone call from the hospital, that seemed to be exactly what would happen.

Technically, Raymond Smith did not die of pneumonia or its complications. He died, instead, from a secondary infection he picked up inside Princeton Medical Center, and his was a death for which Oates was completely unprepared. One minute she was feeling optimistic about her husband's homecoming; the next, she found herself trying to make it back to the hospital before he died.

Suddenly, her life seemed to lose all meaning. Gone was the man around whom she centered her world and, staggered by her grief, Oates lost all desire to go on alone. She could not sleep, had no desire to eat, and felt even her spirit fading away as the thought of suicide more and more appealed to her. What kept Oates going in those early months was her ability to lose herself in her "JCO" personae; she became a Joyce Carol Oates impersonator, an author with commitments that allowed her to travel from reading-to-reading across the country. She did not have to be Joyce Smith, widow, until she returned to her lonely New Jersey home.

A Widow's Story will remind many readers of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), in which Didion explored her own reaction to sudden widowhood. Like that memoir, A Widow's Story can, at times, be disturbing in its frankness about the effects of the despair and grief that follow the loss of a longtime spouse and companion. Most disturbing to me, personally, was the realization that even someone like Oates, with her vast network of friends, colleagues and well-wishers, essentially had to weather the storm on her own. Good intentions and simple kindnesses did little to relieve her of the pain that crushed both her spirit and her will to live.

Oates is a survivor now, as is Didion. What she tells us about her experience is not pretty, and it is not particularly inspirational. But it is real, and that, after all, is what Joyce Carol Oates is all about. This woman pulls no punches in her fiction, and she pulls no punches here.

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