{"id":268,"date":"2012-11-02T17:58:14","date_gmt":"2012-11-02T21:58:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/liclblog.townoflongisland.us\/?p=268"},"modified":"2022-05-20T22:15:51","modified_gmt":"2022-05-21T02:15:51","slug":"on-the-death-of-a-husband","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/liclblog.townoflongisland.us\/?p=268","title":{"rendered":"On the Death of a Husband"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>By Nancy Jordan.
\nQuite by accident, I recently checked out two books from the library on death and dying, to be more exact, on husbands dying.\u00a0 The one published in 2007, I stumbled upon when I was shelving other books.\u00a0 I liked the title, the End of the Alphabet, and the cover, so I put it in my \u2018to check out\u2019 pile.\u00a0 Later that morning, I noticed someone had put a book out for display that I had been meaning to read: I Married you for Happiness.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t remember the subject, I just remembered it was on my mental \u2018to read\u2019 list.\u00a0 So I checked both books out and brought them home.<\/p>\n

I started with \u2018The End of the Alphabet\u2019 by C.S. Richardson.\u00a0 It\u2019s a novel about Ambrose Zephyr who has always made lists to organize his life.\u00a0 His lists are always not only alphabetical, but in alphabetical terms.\u00a0 The more exotic ones favor places or animals most people have not heard of.\u00a0 He is diagnosed, at age 50, with an unnamed disease and told he has 30 days to live.\u00a0 His reaction:\u00a0 make an alphabetic list of the 26 things he wants to do in those 30 days (luckily, he sighs, the alphabet is only 26 letters long, giving him a few extra days), all involving geographic places.\u00a0 His wife, Zappora Ashkenazi,\u00a0 reacts somewhat differently.\u00a0 In the doctor\u2019s office, she wonders why her body has seemed to stop working, why the doctor sounds like he\u2019s under water.\u00a0 She imagines them at home, preparing a meal for friends, imagining that this is not happening.<\/p>\n

They are off:\u00a0 to Amsterdam to see a painting he\u2019d always wondered about; to Berlin to follow memories of Uncle Jack; to Chartres.\u00a0 Zappora wonders why not Paris, if Paris they could stay there and stop this already mad dash from place to place.\u00a0 Through their travels, the reader learns snippets of the couple\u2019s history and romance, the disagreements, the tender moments.\u00a0\u00a0 Zephyr becomes weaker, more insistent, Zappora becomes more introspective, less calm, begins to panic.\u00a0\u00a0 They make it to Istanbul, then agree to go home to London, Kensington Park where they sit on a bench and talk about the next places in the alphabet, where they\u2019d been and their memories there.\u00a0 The ending is sad, but warm, based on the reader\u2019s understanding of the strength of their relationship<\/p>\n

A very interesting and uniquely written book, not like the usual ones I have read, but I was glad to have read it.<\/p>\n

Next I started the novel \u2018I married you for Happiness\u2019 by Lily Tuck that recounts the last 12 hours Nina spends with her husband of 43 years.\u00a0 But in this book, Philip has already died.\u00a0 He came home and said he was going to lie down for a few minutes before dinner.\u00a0 Nina calls him when dinner is ready, but there is no answer.\u00a0 When she investigates why he didn\u2019t show, Nina finds him lying peacefully on his back, not moving.\u00a0 She crawls into bed with him, and thus begins her 12 hours of reminiscing of their years of marriage.\u00a0 He was a physicist, obsessed with numbers, sees life through the mystery of numbers.\u00a0 She is an artist, remembering their life together through that lens.\u00a0 Throughout the memories, she comes back to the night, his cold body, thoughts of what she has to do in the morning, what her life will be like.\u00a0 As dawn breaks, she feels his spirit leave the room.<\/p>\n

In spite of wondering why, of all books, I was drawn to these two, the pair together created a new reading experience for me.\u00a0 For anyone who wants to read these, and then continue the experience, there is also a memoir by Joan Didion \u201cA Year of Magical Thinking\u201d and another by Kate Braestrup, \u201cHere when you need me\u2019, both different totally different ways of coping with a husband\u2019s death from the widow\u2019s point of view.\u00a0 Now I\u2019m wondering where are the books on the experience of a wife\u2019s death from the husband\u2019s point of view?\u00a0 The only ones I can think of are\u00a0 Julia Glass\u2019s, \u201cThe Widower\u2019, and Helen Simonson\u2019s \u201cMajor Pettigrew\u2019s Last Stand\u201d.\u00a0 The prospective is different however: both of these deal with the husband\u2019s progress through life after the death.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Nancy Jordan. Quite by accident, I recently checked out two books from the library on death and dying, to be more exact, on husbands dying.\u00a0 The one published in 2007, I stumbled upon when I was shelving other books.\u00a0 I liked the title, the End of the Alphabet, and the cover, so I put … Continue reading On the Death of a Husband<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[121,123,122],"class_list":["post-268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-c-c-richardson","tag-death","tag-lily-tuck"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/liclblog.townoflongisland.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/liclblog.townoflongisland.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/liclblog.townoflongisland.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/liclblog.townoflongisland.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/liclblog.townoflongisland.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=268"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/liclblog.townoflongisland.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1418,"href":"https:\/\/liclblog.townoflongisland.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268\/revisions\/1418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/liclblog.townoflongisland.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/liclblog.townoflongisland.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/liclblog.townoflongisland.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}