Mrs. Singer

Original date 13 March 2011

"Mrs. Singer"

My heart contracts at these syllables:

Miss-us Sing-er

The name, in the mouths of strangers, stings like mockery.  For there is no "Mr. Singer" so how then "Mrs. Singer"?

I am angry with Brian. I am very angry.  With my poor dead defenseless husband, I am furious, as I was rarely, perhaps never, furious with him in life.  "How can I forgive you?  You left me."

And now, this is my life.  This is what my life will be.  This aloneness, this anxiety, this dread of the next hour and of the upcoming night and of the morning to follow, this will be the rest of my life without my husband.  This is unbelievable, impossible to believe, and yet of course it is true.  There is a Certificate of Death as proof.

When you are not alone, you are shielded. You are shielded from the stark, implacable, unspeakable, indescribable terror of aloneness.  You are shielded from the knowledge of your own insignificance.  When you are loved, you are blind to your own worth; or you are indifferent to such thoughts.  You have not time for such thoughts.  You have no inclination to think "Why am I here, why am I left behind, what am I doing here, why is this car driving on the highway, why not turn the steering wheel sharply to the right, there are trees, there is the promise of quick oblivion--or--maybe not.

That is the dilemma:  Maybe not.

Maybe things would be worse.  Actual pain, agony, brain damage, hospital...you don't die in the car crash but survive in a mutilated and disfigured state--a single eye remaining, swollen and near blind, and you open it to see a nurse hovering over your bed, chattering in your face.

The widow-life of low-grade misery is preferable to that.