Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars

By Joyce Carol Oates

Even now, four-plus years after Roy died, my daughter Katie mentioned to me how our family still feels a bit like a three-legged chair. Wobbly. An important piece of our stability is still missing. We haven’t rebalanced quite yet. Because the death of a family member reshapes the family. There is simply no way around it.

And in this expansive novel (and I use the term lightly at nearly 800 pages), Joyce Carol Oates takes us on one family’s journey through that rebalancing. She shows us how all family members, in some way, shape and define others. And how the loss of one member will inevitably draw each of the others into a journey toward the person they will become without their missing piece.

I especially, of course, related to the mother in the family, the protagonist in the story. Of her struggle to grow a new limb to replace the one which had been so mysteriously snatched from her being; of her struggle to redefine herself within a circle of children who were driven to protect her, and perhaps rescue her from the inevitability of change. Of the many “widow” moments Oates drew on from her own experience with grief.

As a writer I was very interested in how her personal experience, the sudden loss of her husband which she writes about in A Widow’s Story is reflected and expanded on in the protagonist in this story.

But I was especially intrigued with the way she wove the web of family. And the way she showed us how the loss of a parent can be a catalyst for a child to redefine themselves. For some, to suddenly find themselves free to explore aspects they might otherwise have ignored. For others, to feel free to, at last, become who they really were. Or for others still, to find themselves entrapped in a need to carry on the imprint of the person they have lost.

Finally, the story provoked me to think a bit about what rebalancing looks like for us now. I think my daughter would agree with me that the image of a steady, stable and unchanging four-legged chair is not a reality. I found myself resisting the expectation in the story that rebalance comes when the widow finds her new partner. Everyone gets to exhale. But I am finding that my rebalancing is not as simple as replacing the missing piece. New things need to grow. And my journey is in discovering what those new things will be, and to create new space for their growth and nurture.