“Widow, widow, you’re a widow” we’d taunt our mother, playfully. She would chase us around the table waving the wooden spoon, an insincere threat, laughing, at once offended and amused.
Widow was a meaningless word to my brother and sister and I. We were young, still in primary school. We thought it might be rude, we knew it described an undesirable state for a woman. “She’s a widow.” The words were spoken in solemn tones and uttered as a complete statement. Apparently it said everything about a woman and needed no further embellishment. Without context we hoped it was it was rude, cheeky more than coarse.
“She’s a widow.” my mother would say in a knowing serious way that excluded us from understanding it more. So we called our mother a widow, hoping it was naughty and thinking it was not naughty enough to be a punishable offence.
“Widow, widow” we’d call tempting fate, but not knowingly calling on fortune to curse her with widowhood. Did we summon my fate, conjuring up my widowhood with childish taunts? We didn’t anticipate the loss that lay in the distant future or the unspeakable loneliness of being widowed. We couldn’t have…
Twice, in different houses in different suburbs, Mottsu and I had a widow for a neighbour. Mary and Olga, even now, I recall them as one archetypal widow, each with her buttoned-up hand knitted cardigan, tweed skirt, thick heavy ankles and fur trimmed slippers warming bunion afflicted feet.
Each had lost her husband more than 30 years before the happy couple I was a part of, moved in next door. Each felt compelled to disclose her widowhood in our first neighbourly over-the-fence conversation. “Hello I’m a widow”, it couldn’t have been revealed as baldly as that. Memory plays tricks and husbandlessness might have been stated almost that simply.
Was it a claim on respectability, a statement of loneliness, or just a fact that defined them in the world?
I was sad for both Olga and Mary, a little haunted by our widowed neighbours. Frightened for myself? “Could you imagine me living for 30 years after your death?” I asked Mottsu, disquieted “How lonely I would be?” It was almost too horrible to contemplate and yet we talked about death and the dread of being left behind, each expressing a wish not to be the one left alone, both hoping to go first perhaps held in the arms of the other (ha – wishful thinking that was).
I’ve invested in top-brand ultra-concentrated, photo-ageing preventive skin care and high heels, actually they’re a little low to be real high heels but higher than sensible widow-shoes. Its part of the disguise, I don’t want to be recognised as a widow, but ultra-ultra treatment cream with a scientifically developed delivery system isn’t enough. I’m sure the wear and tear of grief gives me away. The unattractiveness of loneliness is not readily concealed. I feel messy and incomplete, tears spill out uninvited and unexpected. In my lowest moments I’m unravelled and fraying at the edges.
In the criminal justice system a life sentence is 15 years of jail. If I live as long or Mary or Olga my windowed state will stretch across more than two life sentences.
Now I’m the widowed neighbour of the happy couple next door, who hates herself when she gets this self-pitying erk, erk, erk, argh blaaah… despises feeling like an incomplete widow…