Christmas 2013
Christmas Eve, after my day's activities were done --the holiday envelopes given out, the wassail proffered to and appreciated by Katy and Tucker, the laundry put in drawers, Beau fed and walked and happy in his crate-- I sat on the carpet in the living room and watched one of my favorite Christmas movies, "Bridget Jones' Diary".
For the uninitiated, "Jones" is about a thirty-two year old woman working a clerical job at a London publishing house and still unhappily single. In the end she finds happiness, but the road to Mr. Right is full of speed bumps and potholes. Numerous jokes send-up Christmas sweaters and ties, department store product demonstrators, parties with a "tarts and vicars" theme, and the English custom of wearing paper crowns to celebrate the holiday.
Of course "Jones" --as her treacherously seductive boss, Daniel Cleaver, calls her --thinks happiness is being in love and being loved. At thirty-two (the age I married), I thought so too --and it was.
Now I'm alone and the question seems irrelevant to my present existence. Bill and I didn't have children: our relationship was bilateral, by choice. It was deeply fulfilling and rather extraordinary, I've come to realize. So many people are stuck in relationships that bring them no happiness; or they dry out emotionally, never having been presented with the chance to know the happiness another man or woman can provide (if only for a time). So my circumstances are exceptionally lucky, even if I would give anything not be in the position of being prompted to make the reflection by the fact of Bill's absence.
I was thinking today that having no children and no family to speak of (my sister and I are not close, and my one cousin is fading fast), Bill's death sent me to a strange place, a minority enclave. Husbands lose wives, and vice versa, but in most cases there are children and relatives. My own inclinations being cerebral and solitary, it could be said that I forgot to take the possibility I'd be alone into consideration. Rather like the story of Freud looking at himself closely in the mirror one day and shockingly, seeing a stranger staring back at him. He was an old man who didn't recognize himself.
I don't think that's the case. I doubt I'd have made a very good mother: I never had the slightest maternal instinct. I'm grateful that I lived in the United States at a time when women were no longer obliged to reproduce or face life in the narrow, deplored subculture of the childless. Still, most healthy, gainfully employed Americans marry and have children. And having children gives life a common dimension many people think the natural order of things --and build lives around. The happily married nulliparous (the medical term for "non-childbearing"), experience nothing comparable: no concerns about what might be unsuitable on the Internet, no family vacations, back-to-school shopping expeditions. The closest similarity might be the demands a dog makes, but the differing motivations for choosing to make a home for a child versus a pet stop further comparison right there.
Still further out of the mainstream is the widow or widower, particularly the childless ones, like me. I'm not unhappy, but I'm odd, because I'm not part of a pair. Relative to most people, I live in a foreign country, I now realize, but it's one for which I have no map, I have to make it up as I go along.
Who might my models be? Thoreau? I do like his assertion "I want to live deep and suck the marrow out of life." Words to live by, whether you're twenty or sixty, married or alone.
Merry Christmas everyone!
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