The Third Self

 

Before you meet your person, the one who will stick, you are someone—a person all your own. Or a collection of characteristics you think of as a person. You have an identity. We all picture ourselves in a particular way, affected by whatever has been going on in our lives.

I remember the person I was when I met him. She was a worried thirty-seven-year-old divorced mother with one son. She wrote articles for regional publications and worked on fiction that went nowhere.

Then she met him, and after some back-and-forthing, they stuck, and she became his partner and his wife.

We were lucky enough to be a couple for nearly forty years.

During those years my identity evolved into something more symbiotic. It became entwined with the person and identity of my husband. I didn’t realize the extent of the interweaving until he died.

The absence created by his death left me in the condition of a hill-side house after a mudslide removes half the ground supporting it.

The house may have been a home before the slide. A safe place for a family. A place in which to raise children and where a couple might grow old together.

After the mudslide, you walk across its floors at considerable peril. What has that house become? It is certainly no longer what it was.

In the same way, after the loss of the beloved, who am I? Who have I become?

I don’t have an answer. Most people in that situation don’t have one, either.

I know I can’t remain defined by the subtraction, although it’s tempting. Settle in to being “the widow of.” I might almost get used to the words. I might let myself think that’s really all I am, that person—neatly contained within what remains of his much loved identity.

Whatever I do, I can’t return to being the woman I was when I met my husband. I’m forty years older. All the defining responsibilities back then have changed. My son is grown, has his own family, his own children.

My grandchildren.

If they lived nearby, which they do not, the demands of the present would pull me forward into the future, however murky it may seem.

But I have also changed in a deeper way. Life with Leon Hale expanded me. He was open, curious, embracing whatever might lie ahead. Interested in all that went on around him.

With him, I learned to think optimistically, to resist the appeal of a downward spiral when things seem momentarily dark. I’ve been grieving his loss, yes, for eleven months. A tremendously painful experience, and one unlike any I had imagined. But during this whole period of grieving, I haven’t been depressed.

Grief is different from depression, I think. It has been for me. Although there are moments when I feel like I’m falling off the edge of that teetering house, they remain, usually, just moments. Sure, the temporary pain that comes with them can be stunning, but I don’t think it’s as dangerous as depression.

And I am told that the worst moments will hurt a little less and come less often as time passes. I will have more energy with which to engage the future. The unknown future, yes, but furnished with many beloved artifacts of the coupled life that ended with his death. Familiar ones: Friends, family, our dog, the table where I work, the work itself. Many more.

And from these, and memory, and my continuing love for the absent spouse, I will cobble this, the third configuration of my Self.

Whoever she will be.

Hermithood, 2022

 

I’m back in isolation, historically a comfort to spinster ladies and ancient crones. Literature is full of them. I need mention only Emily Dickinson, whose isolation was not quite as solitary as mine.

Men who choose it are often called hermits. We laugh at them in cartoons, hermits in ragged furs, sometimes sitting cross-legged like a guru at the top of a mountain. In front of a cave. Hermithood, to me, implies caves, dank smells, penury, intentional or otherwise.

Solitude has a more satisfying ring, being voluntary and longed for, at least some of the time.

Isolation may look voluntary, but it is compelled. And therein lies the snake in the grass. How can something be compelled when nobody is forcing you to do it?

Or maybe somebody is.

Recent figures in Fayette County show a rise in the number of Covid cases. I know of three or four people who’ve had it, and they were vaccinated, if not quite boosted. And yet the data themselves are unclear. No one counts results from home tests, for instance.

And which masks are effective? Almost nobody wears one, or correctly, if required.

I go into the PO and the person on duty wears hers around her neck. I go into an optician’s office where the fellow who’s coughing into his mask leaves his nose uncovered. Oh, he has allergies, says another employee. Did he test? Without testing, how can he know if it’s allergy or Covid?  

At the grocery store, customers are good about spacing out in lines, but they don’t wear masks. They’re not worried. When one man coughs into the air between us, I jump like I’ve just been stung. Not a voluntary response, I promise.

Hey, you’ll say, but she’s out and about. That’s scarcely Hermithood.

True enough. I venture into stores, double masked, looking like a fool, and I scurry out, Hobbit-like, as quickly as I can. I go on windy picnics with a friend; or sit outside at a restaurant on a mild day.

But I don’t go into crowded indoor venues where everyone is acting as if we have returned to our age of innocence, 2019 and before.

Do we, any of us, truly retain that innocence?

We may want to think normality awaits, shimmering ahead of us like a highway mirage. But isn’t it really an historical artifact, a place to visit, like Washington-on-the-Brazos or Winedale?

What is truly going on?

Sound bites float through the ether and stick like bits of pollen. Resignation copulates with optimism. Real information takes work to locate, read and believe. Real information like vaccination provides quicker protection for self and others. And quicker matters because it minimizes future mutations.

But we’re all so tired of worrying.

I should feel somewhat safe. I’ve been vaccinated and boosted—but the variant is more contagious by far than any of the familiar wintry banes that, for me, travel straight into bronchitis. And each year, the severity of the bronchitis gets worse. I am not alone in this.

For people like me, Covid—however “mild” the variant—would be a disaster.

As a result, I don’t think I’ve ever felt as wobbly, stepping forward into a new year, onto ground ahead that does not look solid, with a view that is anything but clear.

So, at a time when, as a new widow I feel most need of being close to friends and family, I am compelled in the opposite direction, toward isolation. I have to protect myself, even if it makes me look silly or cowardly.

It’s a Texas thing, I guess, to put oneself first.