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 introduction “The Lost Other Is an Ongoing Part of Our Existence” I never imagined I would write a book about deceased spouses. But then again, I never imagined I would lose my beloved wife. Barbara died on April 5, 2004, after a twenty-month struggle with pancreatic cancer. Immediately after her death I began writing a memoir about our life together after her diagnosis on August 12, 2002, one day after our thirty-fourth wedding anniversary. Writing about Barbara was both an act of will and an example of following one’s obsession. As soon as I completed Dying to Teach (2007), I began a new book, Death in the Classroom (2009), a study of how my undergraduate students responded to Love and Loss, a course I taught in the spring of 2006. Like the fabled Scheherazade of the Thousand and One Nights, who must keep on telling stories to remain alive, I find myself writing books about death, partly to work through my grief, partly to commemorate and honor my wife’s memory, partly to remain securely attached to her, partly to understand my changing relationship to her, and partly to help others—my students and my readers—understand and cope with their own losses. Thus this book. Most of the books and articles I read during Barbara’s illness focused on dying, death, and bereavement. After her death I became curious about how other memoirists write about their own deceased spouses. How do memoirists portray love, loss, and bereavement? Why is it so difficult for the bereft to let go of their grief—and how does grief change over time? How does one speak for the dead? What do their stories teach us about caregiving? Can these memoirs offer wisdom or comfort to those readers who have also lost their spouses? What role does writing play in bereavement? What do these memoirs teach us about recovery from spousal loss, including the possibility of falling in love again? These questions confront all memoirists of spousal loss.  Introduction Some memoirs, such as C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed (1961), reveal little about the spouse’s life or death. Finding myself curious about Lewis ’s marriage late in his life to Joy Davidman and her life before meeting him, I tried to learn everything I could about her. I was not content to rely on what Lewis’s many biographers—and her own biographer as well—wrote about her. I decided to read her own writings, including her two novels, Anya (1940) and Weeping Bay (1950), as well as her theological treatise, Smoke on the Mountain (1954). It is probably only an accident —a serendipitous one—that all the deceased spouses in my study were themselves writers. One may infer a great deal about authors from their books. And so I found myself reading everything I could about the deceased spouses, not only to learn more about their lives but also to see how they were represented in the memoirs written about them. No matter how faithfully memoirists portray their spouses, they nevertheless construct them as characters, seeing them from the memoirists’ unique points of view. Sometimes these constructions are strikingly different from the spouses’ own self-representations. My title comes from Donald Hall’s observation in his memoir The Best Day the Worst Day (2005): “Poetry gives the griever not release from grief but companionship in grief” (118). So, too, do memoirs about deceased spouses offer us companionship in grief. Companionship implies relationship, and we see a double grief: the dying person’s grief and also the survivor’s grief. In the case of sudden, unexpected death, the survivor feels more grief than the dying person. Thomas Mann observed in The Magic Mountain: “It is a fact that a man’s dying is more the survivors ’ affair than his own” (532). The grief becomes triple if we include the reader, who empathizes with the memoirist’s anguish. Companionship in grief also implies the special camaraderie that develops between writer and reader. Lewis, Bayley, Hall, Didion, and Trillin became my companions in grief. I found myself regarding them, and their deceased spouses, as allies, friends, and teachers. I felt less lonely and grief-stricken while reading their stories. Reading spousal loss memoirs alerts us not only to anticipatory grief, the term thanatologists use to describe the grief that occurs before impending death, but also anticipatory recovery. Working through one’s grief is both an individual and collaborative process, and spousal...

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