~a column by Colleen O’Brien
Writing, for me, is an inquiry into what I think. When I write, my thinking clarifies. I learn things I didn’t know I knew. I can even get well, writing.
I therefore think that writing is magic. I think writing not only can get the story out of me but reveal to me why I’m telling it.*
~~~
In the piece I’m writing right now, I’m thinking of a friend struggling with the recent death of her husband. She tells me she is okay, she is not okay. She is doing fine, she is scared to be alone. She doesn’t know how to pay the bills, she paid her own bills for years.
My friend is a writer. She has published several books, both fiction and non-fiction; and many poems. Until the day her husband died, she wrote every day toward a goal – a new novel usually. Now, in alarm, in crisis, in numbness, in adrenaline panic, she says she can’t muster the energy.
But her habit of being nudges her. Writer that she is, she dredges up words that culminate in an obituary for her dead lover, and eloquently, she remembers him, defines him, explains his oddities, eulogizes him in a way that brings him alive to her, and to us, once again. “. . . acts do little to convey his multiple virtues—and an equal number of quirks. He was that rare thing, a man who talked wisely about his and others’ emotions. . . intuitive, generous, and patient….”
Many years ago, I too used the handy – unbeknownst to me just then as reliable – outlet of writing to understand my widow’s plight. After my husband’s death, I wrote poem after poem; scraps of paper littered the floor. I questioned how I was to survive alone, exactly was I to do to take care of the car, the maintenance of an old house, the going out into the world without his having my back? I wrote memories, about how I’d been pole-axed the first time I saw him: it was on the playground in first grade, and I never got over it. I wrote about how his absence made my toes feel as numb as my heart and how was I to survive either weirdness? I wrote a poem about our son who called me “Honey” because that’s what his dad called me. One day in the grocery story, my 3-year-old wandered off, and soon I heard his little voice calling, “Honey, honey, where are you?” The rest of the poem was about me at 64, a fresh widow, calling for his dad – “Honey, honey, where are you?”
I look up my fat packet of poems from that time and read them through – tears and laughter, embarrassment at my poor-me-ness despite my arrogant vow long before I was there that I would not play the role of weeping widow; and a now-and-then wonder at my occasional clarity. The words I used then to describe myself – “terrified, isolated, dumbstruck”; the words I used to condemn him for leaving me – his “vanishing trick,” his “slick disappearance,” his “abandonment” – were all true. Then.
After 13 years, I return to writing again of that once gray area of my life, that were it not for my poems would remain gray, perhaps completely inaccessible. I believe that because I wrote about such a common plight – part of the fear being the ineffableness of it – I am at ease in my solitary life today that is full of endearing substitutes: they are books and friends, trees. Writing. And the memories that writing elicits. Not all-consuming memories, just good stories. The man I love did not abandon me, nor vanish. He was somewhere near me when I first wrote the terror. He remains.
“Keep writing,” his voice said then and says now. “Especially about me.”
This story that I just wrote reminds me – he always did make me laugh.
*Seventeenth-century French philosopher, Rene’ Descarte wrote it much more succinctly– “I think, therefore I am.”
