As planned, I read Leslie Gray Streeter’s Black Widow and Louise Kennedy’s The End of the World is a Cul de Sac; and as promised, I am reporting back. Unsurprisingly, both books are very good. Surprisingly, they have something in common even though the former is a memoir by a Black American woman and the latter is a collection of short stories by an Irish woman.
Black Widow is the story of Leslie Gray Streeter’s husband’s sudden and untimely death and its aftermath, including overwhelming grief and the risk of losing her child because she and her husband had been in the middle of adopting the child when he died of a heart attack. Spoiler alert - Gray Streeter succeeds in completing the adoption on her own. The story ends in a Baltimore courtroom in July 2016, just a year after her husband’s death, with a judge declaring her to be the adoptive mother of the child whom she and her husband had cared for together for over a year.
*****
The book is very sad and very funny - sad because it’s a memoir of grief, and funny because Leslie Gray Streeter is just funny. It’s also very honest about the practical aspects of spousal grief. You had a partner; someone who helped with the children or took care of the finances or the cars or handled the housework or the cooking - every marriage has its own division of labor. And then all of a sudden, everything falls on you, at a time when you’re not even able to handle your own share of the work.
As Streeter tells it, grief isn’t just one thing - it’s the sadness and the loss and missing the person who’s gone. It’s the fond memories, remembering the things about that person and about your life together that were happy and fun and funny. And it’s exhausting, knowing that the person you shared the load with is gone and the burden is yours alone now. She is very honest about that last part - as a reader, I could almost feel her exhaustion as she tried to take care of herself and her child amid household moves and funeral arrangements and adoption hiccups - things that are hard enough anyway and that become almost impossible when you lose your literal other half.
*****
Black Widow is a true story and The End of the World is fiction (short stories). Most of the stories’ main characters are women - married, single, mothers, childless - and all of them seem connected to the land even when they live in the city or the suburbs. These stories are alive with natural beauty - flowers and plant life, sunlight and clouds, water. Louise Kennedy has a real understanding of the natural world and its effects on people, and she uses outdoor settings - beaches and cliffs and forests and farmland - to great effect. Her characters know the land - they understand the soil and they can identify any and every flower and tree and bird. They can read the sky. They understand creation in a way that has always baffled me, a city girl.
*****
But I said that there was a connection between these two books, didn’t I? It comes back to grief. In most of the stories, a character has lost someone - a child, a spouse, an almost-fiance - and they are trying to figure out how to continue living in the aftermath of the loss. And just like Leslie Gray Streeter in Black Widow, they must navigate what the world thinks of as grief - the tears and the sadness and the loneliness for the person lost - and the practical aspects of loss, like how to manage the things that the person lost used to take care of, and how to handle the paperwork and the administrative details of death.
And of course, the grieving person must also take care of others who are grieving the same loss. In “Powder,” a young woman named Eithne escorts the American mother of her late fiancee on a tour of her son’s favorite places in Ireland. Only at the end (spoiler alert) do we learn that the two had never actually been engaged - the man had told his mother that he was going to be married, but had never actually gotten around to proposing. The mother, Sandy, assumes that the two had been engaged, and Eithne doesn’t have the heart or the energy to disabuse her of that notion. Eithne’s grief is real and in some ways harder than the grief of a widow or fiancee because she thinks that she doesn't deserve to grieve.
*****
I loved both of these books. I don’t think I’d have seen any connection between them, though, if I hadn’t read the authors’ other books, Family and Other Calamities, Streeter’s novel; and Kennedy’s Trespasses, which also had something in common. I looked for another common theme because I like connections. I like symmetry.
No comments:
Post a Comment