Reading through Grief
feat. two short story collections and a lot of my tears
My gorgeous dog Phoebe left us last month. It was unexpected, she had recently been given a clean bill of health by her vet. My friends knew how much I loved Phoebe. Laminated photos of her graced the walls of every apartment I lived in during university. I spent the first week after her passing in a fugue state. I knew it would happen eventually, I just didn’t think it would happen so soon. It’s the most profound pain I’ve ever felt — pure sorrow, not mixed in with any of the emotions I’m used to feeling alongside sadness like guilt or shame. I know she wasn’t human but that only made my love for her even more pure. I never knew if she could feel the force of our love.
Despite this, the world continued to turn. I still had to write emails. Other people were still having fun. I entertained the thought of commenting on every dog picture with some version of “hug them tight, you never know when they’re going to leave” but decided to delete Instagram from my phone instead.
It’s hard to talk about grief without resorting to cliché. Time does make the pain less acute. And it is important to remember that she lived a good life. And dogs are just like family members but they leave us too soon. At the same time, there is so much about grief that is unexpectedly mundane or surprisingly easy to swallow.
As coincidence would have it, two of the books I’ve read recently touch on the complexities of grief. I bought them both in Australia just before Phoebe passed, I’m lucky that the words found me at the right time.
Here Until August by Josephine Rowe
This is a collection of ten short stories, many of them taking place in the aftermath of loss. In these stories, the immediate shock has passed. There are no hysterics. The characters now have to find their ways forward.
The body has no memory for pain. She’d read that somewhere and believed it to be true. Now she knew it to be.
“Glisk”, the opening story, narrates a man’s reunion with his estranged brother. “Chavez” is about a woman’s life after she loses her husband in an act of terrorism. In “A Small Cleared Space”, a woman isolates in a rural cabin after a late miscarriage. The reader doesn’t learn about these inciting incidents straight away. The stories, all dense with detail, are exercises in revelation. These reveals, however, aren’t the keys to unlocking each story. The stories aren’t really about the painful things. They’re about the spaces around them. At the beginning of “Chavez”, a story that has stayed with me in the weeks since finishing this book, all we know about the narrator is that she is helping a neighbour watch her dog named Chavez. We find out that she has trouble leaving her apartment, that she had to bribe herself with gifts like fresh cigarettes and nice underwear. Since becoming Chavez’s caretaker, she no longer has a choice. The dog still needs to go on walks. The world keeps turning. This isn’t a story of how a plucky lovable dog saves a depressed woman. Rowe is too good a writer for a pat ending like that. Instead, it’s a story about the little negotiations the protagonist has to make in order to make sense of her life again.
In “Sinkers”, a man returns to the town his mother was raised in to scatter her ashes. According to his mother, the town was a victim of the Hydroelectric dam. He never knew it, he only knew the replacement lake that they’d paddle out onto every summer. He did not know his father either. It’s also possible his father didn’t know he existed. As Cristian floats along in his rented boat, mustering up the will to say goodbye to his mother’s human remains, he faces his borrowed memories of the town beneath him. His mother isn’t around to furnish him with the facts.
Whatever comes after a bell has rung out and the sound has drifted away.
Today A Woman Went Mad In The Supermarket by Hilma Wolitzer
This book was published last year but most of its stories were originally printed in magazines in the 1960s and 70s. Wolitzer writes about American life at a time when it was more common for a woman to be a housewife. These domestic tales are effervescent — conflict still emerges but Wolitzer’s touch is featherlight.
Everybody said that there was a sex maniac loose in the complex and I thought — it’s about time. It had been a long asexual winter.
In “The Sex Maniac”, Paulette bemoans never having run into the infamous sex pest in her building, suggesting that he might even be an urban myth. This might read strangely in 2022, (it pains me to say this but) in the #MeToo era, but it comes off as quaint against the backdrop of this story. The lull of middle age has set in. The people she interacts with are her husband Howard (with whom “lovemaking” is “only ritual”), spooked female neighbours, and the “usual parade” of tradespeople – the plumber, the delivery boy, the superintendent. Paulette is caught in the “madness of dreams” and the “sanity of what was familiar and dear”. She never meets the sex maniac. It might have brought some excitement into her life.
We first meet Paulette and Howard in “Photographs”. They have a shotgun marriage in the “dark ages before legalised abortion”. They are in love but it is hardly a fairytale beginning to a union. The story closes with Paulette giving birth to their child in a frenzied scene shot through with the comic sensibility that Wolitzer employs throughout this collection.
In school the teacher rolled down charts on nutrition. We saw the protein groups, the grain groups. Green leafy vegetables. Lack of vitamin C leads to scurvy.
Liars! The charts ought to show this, the extraordinary violence of this, worse than mob violence, worse than murder. FUCKING LEADS TO THIS! those charts ought to say.
Paulette and Howard feature in most of the stories in this book. In some, they’re up. “Overtime” is a surprisingly sweet story where Howard’s ex-wife crashes their apartment. Paulette’s response is tender, if a little eccentric. In “Sundays” Howard is depressed and distant. Paulette devises a plan where they visit model homes for fun on Sundays to get him out of bed. It works. Paulette still feels unsettled.
“Are you happy?”
And even as I wait for his answer, my own ghosts enter, stand solemn at the foot of the bed, thin girls in under shirts, jealous and watchful, whispering in some grown-up language I can never understand.
These stories are all told from Paulette’s perspective and she makes for a captivating narrator. She’s witty and independent. She’s surprisingly childlike. And she loves with incredible force.
“The Great Escape”, the final story in this collection, is the only story to be written in the 21st century, it’s set in the early days of the pandemic. Paulette and Howard are elderly now. From the novelty of Paulette’s first group Zoom to the anxiety of hearing that neighbours had contracted the virus, Wolitzer renders the moment perfectly. I won’t give away the ending because I really think this is a book worth reading but when I closed the book, I was sobbing. First for my new friends Paulette and Howard, then for every shard of my grief still left unexpressed.
In loving memory of my beautiful friend
Ruby- This was both heartfelt and wonderful at the same time. Thank you for sharing such a personal journey through a loss of the beloved-