The Light of the World

[Guest TooSoon]

Happy New Year, everyone!  I'm in England at Andy's house.  We went to bed early last night and this morning I made a traditional Greek New Year's pie for tonight and then sat down with this book that I'd bought on a whim and haven't put it down in hours.  It is Elizabeth Alexander's "The Light of the World."  I've read a lot of widow-lit (to coin a phrase) but nothing I have read comes even close to getting it as right as this book does.  I've had to apologize multiple times today for the tears streaming down my face - not tears of sadness but of deep, primordial gratitude for the life I lived with my husband and for the life I am living now.  While I continue to live and love, that person I was - through all of those firsts and a belief that we'd built something permanent and lasting and deeply intimate - no longer exists.  It was real.  And it was perfect.  Until the diagnosis.  I loved it and him even through all of that, blindly and without question.  And then it ended, leaving nothing for me to work with because it was all built on "us."  And out of it, somehow, I became - a bit like the Velveteen Rabbit. I just became. Someone different that even I don't recognize.  It isn't a bad thing.  It is just a thing.  It is very strange to look back on the past 6 years and not quite be able to put together all of the pieces of what has happened.  But here we are.  There is such a sense of grief, loss and sadness but also so so much joy.  It is the in between that is murky and grey.  A sort of chasm that is colorless.  What is that grey in between space?  Why is it following me around? I have made Herculean efforts to keep it at bay.  But will it ever go away?  And Elizabeth Alexander's story is different from mine - as are all of yours - but my god does she get it.  Its a really powerful book but it did dredge up a lot of stuff for me that probably needed dredging but keep that in mind before you read it.  Sending love. 

[Lisa]

Thanks. I'm on it!

[Needytoo]

I just reserved the book at the library. 

 

I can't express the feelings I got from your post except it moved me.  Thank you TooSoon.

[bdean38]

Wow! That's beautiful. I need to read this book!

[calimom]

I'm about 60 or so pages in - saw an excerpt in the NYT Magazine last year, and thanks for jogging my memory about this book.  Wow. Wow. Wow. This woman can write and puts to words so many of our experiences in such an eloquent way.

[Guest TooSoon]

It blew me away. 

[Wheelerswife]

I finally read the book.  Elizabeth Alexander has a beautiful way with words, and although my experiences of life were very different from hers, she helped me connect to feelings and experiences I had had with John that were very powerful for me.  I wish I had her abilities to express myself in such a beautiful way.

 

I read this book at a time when I am disengaging from where I live - the world of my husband - a place that was initially such a locus of healing, but then associated with loss.  I know this book brought me deeper into my grief in some ways - not into painful grieving, really, but into a more contemplative state where I was feeling the depth of meaning in gestures, expressions, breaths we took alongside each other while looking out over vast glaciers in the Alps or the Andes or in Alaska...or pebbles on a northern California beach. 

 

Love and death are fathomless, aren't they?

 

Maureen