2022 Spring Contest Runner-Up: Widowing

by Paige Thomas

At twenty-three, I already know that I am going to outlive every man I fuck. I am going to outlive my mother and my father. I am going to outlive my sisters. Both of them. The older and the younger one. I am going to outlive the gray squirrel on the pine tree outside my apartment window as well as the mailman who delivers my Amazon package of Certain Dri fragrance-free solid deodorant. So far, I have already outlived each of my childhood pets. I have outlived one set of my grandparents. I have outlived friends. I have attended one candlelight vigil in the foothills and another in the neighborhood park. I have definitely outlived my virginity.

I mean it when I say that I am going to outlive all of the men I will marry, if I marry men. This is both a feeling and a fact. It is a fact because in America, the average life span of the average man is 76.1 years. For the average woman, it is 81.1. Following that formula, I will have exactly five years to outlive my spouse. Even if I move abroad and fall in love overseas, I will more than likely have to bury my lover. If I marry a man from France, we will spend most of our time drinking wine under the Eiffel Tower, but I will still outlive him by a little more than a year. If he is from Spain, by a few months. From Brazil, by more than eight years. However, I could marry a man from Japan and have him outlive me by two months. From Australia, almost two years. From Switzerland, a single month, but that is only if I am lucky, if I believed in statistics – a formula – that did not take into account race, income, education, chance, history, how I view myself or how others view me, post-breakup, mid-pandemic, and as a new cat owner. That is to say, others do not view me very often or at all.

Anyways, I do not believe in facts as much as I believe in feelings. This is a fact. This is how I feel about facts. I believe, instead, in an informed trajectory for my life. My outliving is more unique than a set of data points, although part of my outliving is quite general. I am, simply, genetically predisposed to last forever. I am spiritually determined.

My mother’s nana, my great nana, lived to be 101, almost 102. She was born in June and, over a century later, died in April. I never met her, but right up until her funeral, my great nana was fiercely alive and fiercely Australian. As the oldest lady at every café, she skillfully peeled strips of meat from chicken breasts with her withered hands and pearl-colored nails and then placed each strip onto her tongue. Before she passed, she crocheted an entire wedding dress for my mother’s second cousin only for the second cousin not to wear it on her wedding day; upon being told that the bride wore another dress, my great nana said nothing. My great nana was a painfully polite woman. Unlike me, she was terribly conflict-averse. She was also a widow for almost twenty years. Her late husband, who in my mind is nameless and unimportant, died at eighty-two. He was buried. His last wishes were carried out. One such wish was that his wife, my great nana, did not live alone. At the time, it was disgraceful if you were left to widow without an audience, without anyone there to watch. It was pitiful to widow out of view of others, so my great nana moved in with my mother’s aunt and uncle. Still, she took care of herself. She stayed busy.

In her mid-nineties, my great nana was interviewed by the Catholic Church. She sat for interviews central to making a woman, the nun named Mary Helen MacKillop, into a saint. Mary MacKillop taught my great nana for numerous years of her childhood, and my great nana must have described those school years to the interviewer with her usual proper speech and reverence.

Mary MacKillop, eventually Saint Mary Mackillop, otherwise known now as Saint Mary of the Cross, was the first Australian to be canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. My great nana, the widow, helped make another woman – a nun, a never-widowed, never-married, also-alone woman – holy in her spare time. My great nana’s testimony was apparently integral to the process. Her account of her teacher’s charity was used to ratify MacKillop’s virtuous connection from heaven back down to earth. Like I said, my great nana stayed busy.

A few years before the interviews, my great nana, tired between flights at an airport, was offered a chair in a separate waiting room for the elderly. She sat down on a stiff bench beside Mother Teresa before Mother Teresa passed away. Nine years after her death, Mother Teresa became Saint Teresa of Calcutta. It seems my great nana’s pious behavior after her husband’s death was rewarded with more pious female company. For this reason, I am not sure she would have been open to talking to me about my current crisis at twenty-three, about how I cannot stop thinking about the strangers that I sit down next to at the coffee shop and the men I let sit down next to me in my bed and how, probably, I am going to keep existing longer than them all – partially because of her, my great nana.

She was fiercely alive, fiercely Australian, but also fiercely old. Even if she would have been  willing to talk about aging, to shoot the shit so to speak, I do not think I could have taken her suggestions on alleviating loneliness seriously; I cannot pray this feeling away. If she had told me I would never really be alone as long as I believed in God, I would have found it really hard not to laugh.

My great nana’s daughter, my nana, is still alive. She is ninety-three years old and living in Australia. Her husband, my pa, is also still alive. He is ninety-one, and a lot closer to dying than my nana, so my nana putters around the tiny house they have always shared with each other and does all the chores and hangs all the laundry and makes all the tea. Despite Australian men averaging the longest life spans in the world, my pa is still alive because of my nana. She cares for him – has cared for him for his entire life – and she also cares for the house, for her children, for herself, like clockwork even though her feet are nearly hobbled with bunions and her hands shake so aggressively that each cup of tea clatters on its glass saucer as she carries it from the kitchen counter to the kitchen table.

When I tell my mother, who is only sixty-one, about Australian men having the longest life spans, she laughs and says, “Men live so long over there because of vegemite, beer, and tea.” But my mother agrees; my pa is only alive because of my nana’s hard work. It is a day-in, day-out lifetime kind of work. As for the vegemite, it is a salty brown spread made from leftover brewer’s yeast, vegetable extracts, and spices, so my mother’s reasoning for its mystical ability seems scientifically feasible. My nana eats it too. She smears vegemite on toast with butter. Her lips quiver while she chews. Of course, she always prepares a slice for my pa as well. When he is finally gone, I wonder what my nana will have time to do. So much of her day will be left wide open without him. It should be liberating; it is less of a time constraint to make tea for one instead of two, but I worry that she will not like being a widow. I worry that she will feel like me: unable, unwilling to fill her free time if it cannot be looked at, shared, navigated with another person. I worry her free time will feel oppressive even if it is well deserved.

My father’s mother, my grandmother, outlived her husband. Nine years her senior, he died at eighty-six and my grandmother kept on going, unmarried, living alone until the very end, which, for her, was at ninety-three. Compared to my nana and great nana, my grandmother did not care for her health, or perhaps she did, but her lifestyle change had come too late. As she aged, she suffered from emphysema, from breast cancer, yet she kept waking up and wrapping her sagging body, year after year, in an emerald bathrobe before pouring herself a bowl of bran flakes each morning. Because she lived in the States, I was locationally closer to my grandmother during her sixteen years of widowing, her sharp moods, her oxygen tank, her single mastectomy. I watched her weed her garden and eat strawberry and lemon sorbet with Sprite poured over it and coconut strips sprinkled on top. I watched her be mean to my mother. She was sharp in what some of my relatives called “personality” and what I called “cruelty,” so when it came to sharing the intricacies of our personal lives, we were never very close. She existed down the street from me and throughout my childhood as a lone figure.

There was little to mention, barely any memory, of the man she was married to. She never dated after his death. She never got back out there. Her solitary existence was normal to me; her lack of partnership easy to observe at family gatherings, familiar. It became so familiar that I thought of her widowhood as expected, as opposed to situational. Her old age, her outliving, was the rule of my future rather than an exception. She just kept on living and living through each hot summer. I expected it – expect it – for myself: chronic longevity. I am doomed to it. I am blessed with it.

So I mean it when I say that I am going to outlive every man I will marry. It is a fact, familial, but it is also a feeling. Like a family history, there is certainty in this feeling – ending up alone. I have grown up adjacent to it my entire life. It is common, almost inevitable, genetic.

I imagine it as a series of difficult tasks. I am going to pack my husbands’ lives up into boxes which, ideally, means packing up a part of my life, too. I am going to write an obituary – or a few – and choose a photo, and perhaps even pick a font. Once the men are gone, I am going to eat bran flakes with soy milk alone at a wooden table and lick my many husbands’ ashes off my fingers after breakfast, but only if they wanted to be burned. Otherwise, I will bring flowers to their graves. I will cut a lock of hair from their corpses and tuck it into my pocket before their bodies rest in the ground. Unless I die in a tragic accident, I am going to be a widow. It is not up for discussion. I am going to place my husbands’ favorite flowers on their tombstones. Tulips, maybe, or daffodils. I am going to get good at this. I am going to have a lot of practice; my great nana, my nana, my grandmother, all perfect examples of living so long that their lives are more easily measured by what went missing than what – or who –is still left. This is a feeling, an informed trajectory, a judgment that is based on experience, a guess. I am trying to come to terms with it.

Two weeks before my twenty-third birthday, I explicitly practiced widowing. I shut my cat in the bathroom and let the handyman into my studio apartment to fix the front door. Because it was raining, the handyman, who looked as old as my father, slipped his shoes into disposable paper covers before stepping inside, before asking me, “do you live here alone?”

I think of what happened with the handyman as an exercise: I answered, “of course, I live here alone.” I told him not to let my cat out. Together, we both turned to look at the closed bathroom door and at the light that escaped from underneath it. The yellow stretched across the kitchen linoleum that the handyman probably had installed himself. At that moment, my cat decided not to make a shadow.

At first, I was not sure whether the handyman believed me when I told him that I was having trouble opening my front door and then closing it. I appeared untrustworthy: I hovered, I was dressed in the woolen mess of my sweater, my hair was piled into a bun, I wore wire-rimmed glasses, I had purple bags under my eyes, my teeth were not brushed. I was very young to be so alone and unshowered, and that cat I kept mentioning – she never appeared. Furthermore, the door, I opened it to let him in without any obvious trouble. He closed it behind him easily enough. I claimed that it was broken, yet there was not much fanfare to the handyman’s entrance.

Besides fate, I partially blamed the weather for how alone I had been, and for the warping of my front door. The weather, I wondered out loud, had something to do with it. Wood expands and contracts in response to moisture and heat, and my front door was wood, and its frame was wood, and my body, my one, erratic body – it moves from hot to cold all by itself. It either emitted too little heat or too much of it. It was a matter of poor circulation. Was that the issue? Is it?

The handyman nodded as I explained my theory. He nodded while he opened and closed my door. He jiggled the lock. He struggled with it, too, and I smiled. I watched him start to take me seriously. Before he got too frustrated, he wanted to see how my front door locked from the outside. I offered him my keys so that he could let himself back in after I locked him out. He looked me dead in the eyes. He said, “don’t worry I have my own set,” and pulled from his back pocket his own golden version.

Then again, do I really live alone if my handyman can let himself in? If he decides to visit me when I am not home? If he does, I hope he remembers that I have a cat. I do not think he really believed me when I told him about her. He was awfully quiet while he scraped away some of the wood on the front door and its frame to make it easier for me to shut it and to open it. In fact, he was not very talkative at all while he worked. I think he was embarrassed that I did not know that he had a key to my apartment, but it was not like I thought he would look in my underwear drawer. It was only a few times I imagined him perched on the edge of my bed, his shoes dirtying the carpet, his hands resting on his knees, as he waited to surprise me once I returned from running errands. I was mostly worried about my cat. She likes to take advantage of people. She likes to escape. Regardless, we both continued to say nothing that day, and the wood shavings accumulated between us. Some were knocked under the bathroom door – I remember thinking that my cat will like that; it might even make her forgive me for locking her away.

Of course, my cat – I am going to outlive her too, and the way she drools on my pillow. I am going to outlive the sound of her teeth clicking together after she yawns, how it sounds like a photograph being taken. Most days, she watches me write from a ledge above my desk. She blinks. She does not forgive me. Instead, she steals a twenty-dollar bill off my coffee table. I cannot find it anywhere. I tell my mother about the missing money over the phone, and she laughs. She asks if I am certain that nobody else stole it. Like her nana, my great nana, she tells me to say a prayer to Saint Anthony, the patron saint of lost things, so that he will help me find it. It is ridiculous. It is ridiculous that I am going to outlive my mother. She is nearly old and Catholic, yet she no longer believes in God. She only believes in saints, Mother Mary, and the Holy Spirit. But if hell is real, my mother will not go there when she dies. She is too kind. Anyways, she has a lot of time left; all of the women in her family last for quite a while. She has time, not as much as me, but quite a bit of it. Before she goes, my mother will probably change her mind about God. She will probably try to change my mind about God. I am surprised she did not ask me to say a Hail Mary to find my lost money. It is her favorite. It is ridiculous. Once I hang up the phone, I sit down on my couch and make the sign of the cross.

Two weeks later, the handyman is gone. He has not visited me again. No one visits me. My front door opens and closes and locks so smoothly that I have to double-check that it actually opened or closed or locked. The only issue now is the light that comes in at the base of it. The yellow stretches across the kitchen linoleum. This is a problem, but the morning light is really quite beautiful, and my cat, on my twenty-third birthday, drops the twenty dollars she stole into my lap and blinks.

About the Author:
Paige Thomas is a recent graduate of Oregon State University’s MFA Program where she taught introductory writing courses, ran her program’s monthly reading series, and was the blog editor for The Attic Institute for Arts & Letters. She was also the recipient of the 2020-2021 Provost’s Distinguished Graduate Fellowship, and during her time at the University of Idaho, she received both the Hogue Family Centennial Literary Scholarship and the Leishman Reid English Award for her writing. Her work appears in Hobart, Noble/Gas Qrtly, and Sonder Review.