A Widow’s Story

Forever after, you will recognize those places–previously invisible, indiscernible–where memory pools accumulate. All the waiting areas of hospitals, hospital rooms, and, in particular, those regions of the hospital reserved for the very ill: Telemetry, Intensive Care. You will not wish to return to these places, where memory pools lie underfoot, as treacherous as acid.

A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates, New Yorker December 13, 2010

I have to admit, I’m not a huge Joyce Carol Oates fan. Maybe it’s the sheer volume of her output, or the way she seems to insist on having her say on the latest trend (a couple years ago she had a story in the Atlantic’s fiction issue that was a pale shadow of Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” that simply left me cold). “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is one of the best American short stories ever, but I’ve always chalked that up to the adage that a stopped clock is right twice a day.

But this piece about her husband’s death is beautiful, painful, and devastating. Told in a first-person present voice, it is both immediate and reflective. She captures perfectly the timelessness of the hospital waiting room, the abruptness of a medical emergency, and the strange and cold end of a life, where the existential and the practical crash into each other.

It’s enough to make me consider giving her another chance.