Oh William!

By Elizabeth Strout

This is the way of life: the many things we do not know until it is too late.

Elizabeth Strout’s gift as a writer, is her ability to show us the profound within the mundane. She has a keen ability to take a magnifying glass to the subtleties and intricacies of experience. In Oh, William! she focuses her lens on marriage and divorce. I have no personal experience of divorce. But I think that hidden in this story of a divorce is a larger dance with the experience of relationships ending. Strout takes us into the lives of a divorced couple, brought back together out of their continued doubt and confusion. And Strout invited me to ponder some interesting questions:

Can we truly pinpoint a moment in time when we have chosen to end a marriage? Or, instead, do we find ourselves in a continuum of relationship that changes but never really ends? Lucy, the protagonist in Strout’s story and her ex-husband, while road-tripping together, stumble into discussions that trigger more questions about their relationship status.

William says:

Once every so often—at the very most—I think someone actually chooses something. Otherwise we’re following something—we don’t even know what it is but we follow it, Lucy. So, no. I don’t think you chose to leave.

You know, I knew a guy who worked in the Obama administration, and he was there to help make choices. And he told me that very very few times did they actually have to make a choice. And I always found that so interesting. Because it’s true. We just do—we just do, Lucy.

And Lucy ponders:

I was thinking about the year before I left William how almost every night when he was asleep I would go out and. stand in our tiny back garden and I would think: What do I do? Do I leave or do I stay? It had felt like a choice to me then. But remembering this now, I realized that also during that whole year I made no motion to put myself back inside the marriage; I kept myself separate is what I mean. Even as I thought I was deciding.

A friend had said to me once, “Whenever I don’t know what to do, I watch what I am doing.” And what I was doing that year was leaving, even though I had not yet left.

Which made me think about my own marriage, an ending so different and abrupt. At first I was waiting for the “completeness” of it. Waiting to wake up one day and mark the end of our marriage. Because I certainly didn’t experience the marriage had ended the moment Roy died, “til death do us part” not withstanding. Emotions ebb and flow and change all throughout a relationship, and also after the physical and legal togetherness ends. The spiritual separation is never as tidy and complete as the physical and legal one. How on earth could I imagine myself in this world without the 30-year relationship which had shaped much of who I am?

So I flip Lucy’s comment 180 degrees. She says, “And what I was doing that year was leaving, even though I had not yet left.” And the mirror for me is realizing that what I have been doing for the past six years is leaving, even though he had left years ago. Was there a point when I actually made a choice to leave? When I could draw a circle on the calendar and say “this is the day I accepted that Roy had died and I am moving forward without him?”

I have lots of dreams about packing things up to prepare for a trip. I am sorting through the moments of our relationship and subconsciously deciding what I will take with me and what I will leave behind. What I know, now that it is too late. And how to make meaning of that. Learning how it all makes up the fabric of who I’ve become. That’s how I am choosing. Because that is what I am doing.