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How Does
a
Wife
Interfere with Her Own Happiness? by Anne Fielding
There
Are
Wives
Seminar: May 4,
2006
Part
4. Would We
Rather Be Important or Happy?
The upshot of Joan Didion's
very intense
memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, is that, despite all the literature she read on the subject of
grief,
and the persons who tried to be kind and useful, there is no answer to
her
pain. She writes:
[T]he
survivors of
a death are truly left alone. The
connections that made up their life—both the deep connections and the
apparently…insignificant connections—have all vanished.
This is simply not
true; “the
connections” have not “all vanished”—for one thing people are reading
about
them. A big interference to a woman’s happiness, I’m personally
grateful to
have learned, is our desire to be important, which often takes the form
of a
preference for seeing ourselves as tragic. In a class, Mr. Siegel
explained:
Many
people feel if they’re
dismal they’re honest. The equation of
the ego is: the worse you feel, the more honestly you’re facing the
facts. People feel they prove the
largeness of
their emotion by collapsing.
Ms. Didion
writes:
Grief
turns out to be a place
none of us know until we reach it, that unending absence, the void, the
very
opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which
we will
confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.
This sounds deep,
but it’s not
sincere, it’s conceit, not love for a husband. In his essay on “The
Meaning of
the Hebrew Kaddish”—the Jewish prayer for the dead--Mr. Siegel explains
in some
of the kindest sentences ever written what I believe is working in Ms.
Didion:
When
a great grief comes, there
is a tendency to retreat into ourselves, and there be glumly
dismal.
Grief can make for a flat, formless privacy;
an indifference unwilling to see color in anything, goodness in any
person,
meaning in the universe. Selfishness is a great muffler, a great
duller, a
great hider; and grief often makes us more selfish, not less so.
Would Ms.
Didion’s
husband want her to collapse, to be “glumly dismal,” not to see
goodness in any
person? Is this the way to honor him? I think he might say, in his
lively way,
“You did too much of this when we were together, my dear Joan, and I
didn’t
have the good will or knowledge to criticize you then.”
On the last pages,
Ms. Didion writes:
The
craziness is receding but no
clarity is taking its place. I look for
resolution but find none.
Were Joan Didion to
have
Aesthetic Realism consultations, I’m proud to say she would find that
resolution, that clarity. We would ask
her: “Do you think you have a chance to try to know who your husband
was--not
just in relation to you, but as a full person in his own
right? Meaning itself, we learned from
Aesthetic
Realism, is the relation a person or thing has to all the things it or
he has
to do with—reality itself. It seems
your husband was interested in many things: the film industry,
baseball,
international politics, the lives of other people—and, of course,
you. Can knowing what he cared for, what he had
against himself, be a means of your understanding him, feeling honestly
closer
to him even now, and seeing new meaning in your own life—and in the
world
itself? Do you think your husband would
be very much for this?”
5.
Being Just to
What Is Real
Makes a Wife Happy
In the journal The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be
Known, there are
sentences I love by Ellen Reiss that stand for the uninterfered-with
happiness
that every wife is hoping for as she thinks about her husband. They stand for me as I think about mine:
“This person, whom
I care for very much, is meeting the world in the form of traffic, and
sky, the
office he goes to, his mother, the people he knows at work and passes
on the
street, books, his memories, and much more. I want—with all of
me—for him to see as much meaning
as possible in
these things and people,….And through knowing him, I want to be clearer
and
deeper about everything. I know I would betray him if I didn’t use
him…to be
fairer to every person, to try passionately to be just to what is real,
because
he is real and stands for reality.”
The
meaning of these
sentences
represents a big change in the marriage of Eliza and Andrew
Meadows.
The possibilities of happiness are growing
in both of them. Mrs. Meadows told us
that on a Sunday outing with their children, her husband was very much
interested in two other people—a man taking photographs and a woman who
needed
assistance with her car. She told us-—and I end my paper with these
sentences:
Seeing
Andy proud of
the good
effect he had on others and they had on him, made the snobbish way I
have held
myself back look stupid. I smile as I
write about this because I realize that Andy is dearer to me through
his
relation to the world. Had he focused
himself solely on our children or myself or just blindly walked down
the street
at these times, we all would have been a little bit colder. This
shows me that the more interested in
and fair to the world I am, the happier I will be.
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