Betty Jane Wylie

REVIEW OF ENDINGS BY BILL VALGARDSON

Endings by Betty Jane Wylie

The subheading for this book is “A Book For Nearly Everyone”. And it is, although I think you have to be a certain age to have repeated aha moments. The intended audience, I would say, is women of a certain age, but of a certain age only because few younger women think their husbands will drop dead, or that they themselves will suffer health failures, or family failures. Betty Jane’s husband dropped dead in front of her when she was forty and left her with four kids. 

I’m young, I’m young, I’ll always be young, lookit me jog, parasail, dance, but of course I’m young, I’ll be young forever! There is a time when we feel like that. It’s amazing how we don’t think we are going to get old or turn into our parents. Blindness only works if you don’t go to a dinner and dance as I did some years ago and I was the only man at the table. Not because I was a rock star surrounded by admiring fans but because every one of the other nine people at the table were women either widowed or divorced. Most were widowed. 

This book, in its own humorous way, deals with this reality. Facebook has video clips that are titled why men don’t live as long as women. They are painfully funny but their point is well taken. Men do die and leave women on their own and they then need to remake their lives.  Betty Jane has made a career out of writing books for these women: Beginnings: A Book For Widows, New Beginnings: Living Through Life and Grief, etc. She has done the impossible. She supported herself and four children, then herself as a writer. As she says, she was told time and again, it could not be done.  But she did. She’s had non-fiction, cookbooks, poetry, belles letteres, biography, inspirational, children’s books published and numerous plays produced. 

With “Endings” she is reflective. She does not pontificate. She has a great sense of humour and uses it to look back and forward at life with amusement. A few pages in she has her top 9 things she likes about being old. 9. I don’t have to shave my legs. 7. I don’t fuss about dust. I just take off my glasses. I’m 88 and I feel fine.

“Now: sex. Here is where we separate the men from the boys and both from the women. Let me say that it is a terrible thing for a woman to be widowed in her early forties. The intense need/desire for sex in a woman that age is supposed to equal the hormonal level of a seventeen-year-old boy.”

She quotes a line from the Gloria Steinem years “that most women were one man away from welfare.” Time has passed and conditions (until the pandemic) were better for women but many are still one man away from welfare. But there’s more than that needed. People need a goal to get up in the morning. Especially after losing a partner. I agree when she says that. The hardest part of my retiring was no longer going to work. After two weeks what is there to get up for? Thank goodness, like Betty Jane, I had my writing. Having a goal might make you some money but it will also get you out of the house and make you some friends.

She mentions and, although it might be harsher on women, I’ve found as a long retired man, that there are always people who try to impose ageism upon the elderly (I hate to admit it but at 81 I’m not as old as Bettyjane but to anyone under fifty, I’m ancient) and many are prepared to impose upon me and everyone else they consider old all their beliefs, values, folklore, myths, prejudices and stereotypes. She has a marvelous example of going to a doctor (doctors are not exempt from ageism) because she had a sore knee. The doctor muttered something about at 73 she could expect to have a knee problem. She replied that her right knee was also 72 years old and it didn’t hurt.

“Endings” is filled with wisdom gained from living. I think it would be a comfort to women who have aged, are aged, not necessarily old, but faced with that inevitability if they live long enough. In many ways growing old is a rough trip. There are great disappointments, death, divorce, disease. Her advice and examples for dealing with all of these are entertaining but also insightful. 

She’s well-traveled and her travels have taught her much. She even was kidnapped while on a cruise. She managed to make use of it. Waste not, want not was obviously a family motto.

She makes the point that we don’t get to choose the hand we are dealt. However, it is the hand we have to play. When I lived with my grandparents, we played bridge nearly every evening so I learned that truth early. A poor hand can still be played well, the greatest number of possible tricks taken. I hadn’t thought about those bridge evening with my grandparents for a long time. I stopped reading, set the book aside and thought about all those evenings as we shuffled and dealt, as we sorted and played, as we laid down our tricks and counted our score. Those were good times with good people. And I think that moment and many others that happened as I was reading “Endings” were good moments, moments that made me think, for though her book is about women for women, we all have mothers and grandmothers, aunts, sisters, daughters, classmates, colleagues and we have participated in their lives.

I have, of course, experienced this life from my mother and grandmother and aunt, from the three year old neighbour whom I had a crush on when I was four, from my teachers in public and Sunday school, my classmates, my friends, colleagues, and wives of friends, relationships, and have seen their triumphs and tragedies. I don’t think any of them were prepared for the life they were dealt. Or the death that greeted them. Nor were my father, nor my grandfathers, nor my uncles, but their world was filled with different challenges. And, as Betty Jane says, men leave earlier, they come and they go, and their girlfriends and wives are left to piece together their new life. 

I’d like the women in my family life to read “Endings”. I think it will help them not feel so alone with the inevitable. Will provide some suggestions for dealing with the things that so often happen. That have already happened. 

I thought I was doing pretty well to have a novel, “In Valhalla’s Shadows” published when I was eighty. Betty Jane has a non-fiction book published when she is eighty-eight. Amazing. Absolutely amazing. Congratulations.