you can't predict the weather

Original date 14 March 2011

"How are you?'

This query has always been baffling to me.  For I have no idea how I am, usually.  Far more logical to reply "How do I appear to you? That's how I am."

For truly, my "self" is a swirl of atoms not unlike those paintings by JMW Turner--almost, if you peer closely, you can see something amid the atoms, perhaps on the brink of coalescing into a figure--maybe not.

Even when Brian was alive, and I was Brian Singer's wife and not yet Brian Singer's widow, I found it difficult to respond to this totally innocent, totally conventional social query.

How am I?  I am fine.  How are you?

From time to time, in a social situation, an individual will acknowledge that things aren't so good, maybe he isn't so fine, which will derail the conversation in a more personal, pointed direction.  But this is rare, and must be handled with extreme delicacy.  For it's in violation of social decorum and people will be sympathetic initially, but finally, maybe not.

Now, when people see me, when they ask, often with tender solicitude, "How are you, Kimberly," I assume they mean "How are you managing after Brian's death?" Usually I tell them that I am doing very well.  For I am, I think, doing very well.

Interminable days have passed, and interminable nights, and I am still here.  This is amazing to me.
There is something ignoble, selfish, in continuing to live as if nothing has been altered.  But I am not strong enough, I think.  And then--so I tell myself--I had, have, many responsibilities  to which Brian would have entrusted to me.  Though Brian has left me, it is not so easy for me to leave him.

Really, I have no idea how I am.  I have become a sort of wraith, or zombie, I know that I am here but have a very vague idea of where here is. I have been observed laughing with friends. My laughter is not forced but seems natural, spontaneous.  I have been observed staring into space, in the company of friends.

Though I am aware of being observed, I try to shake myself into wakefulness. Sometimes it isn't so easy, to haul myself back.

Often, when I am driving the car, I begin to cry for no clear reason.  Often it's at night; I am dreading my return to the empty, deserted, apartment.  Only a light or two will be burning.  No longer is it lit up as if for a festive occasion.  But it's in the car...there's a kind of free-fall no man's land inside a car...in which one is neither here nor there, but in transit.

If I am in tears while driving, by the time I reach my destination, I am no longer crying...I am fine.  A widow's emotions, I think this is generally true, resemble a lake-effect of the Great Lakes.  One moment, crystal clear skies and sunshine, minutes later, enormous dark thunderheads moving like battalions across the sky; soon after a lightning storm, churning waves, danger...You learn you can't predict the weather from visible evidence.  You learn to be cautious.  The lake-effect is ordinary time, speeded up.

But I have become so sad.  I have become one of those blighted, wounded, limping, sinister malcontents of Elizabethan drama...an observer who glances about seeing, not happily smiling individuals, not friends whom I love but individuals destined for tragic ends...the women to lose their husbands, sooner than they would expect; the men to become ill, to age, to vanish within a few years.  I feel kind of sick terror for my friends, who have been so kind to me...what, one day, will happen to them?

Of all the malcontents, Hamlet is the most eloquent: "How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Seem to me the uses of this world..."

This is the very voice of paralysis, depression, yet it seems to me in my zombie-state an utterly astute reading of the human condition.  Still, one must not say so.  One must try.

Asked how she is, it is a good idea for the widow to say brightly, like everyone else, in answer to "how are you?"  "I'm fine."