Or maybe tomorrow. I’ll try to make it today….Well, I’ll make it today with the Preface from my book:
PREFACE
My husband died suddenly 46 years ago after 20 years of marriage. We had four children, still unfinished, still in the midst of growing up, as I was, in the midst of a life now irrevocably changed.
I had been a stay-at-home mother with a difference. I was a writer, and I worked at it; that is, when I didn’t have dinners or birthday parties, or flu or mumps or vacations or special events to cope with. I was a playwright with some claim to the title, having had several plays produced in Winnipeg, Stratford and Toronto, but I had never had to make a living at my vocation. Now I did.
There’s a saying attributed to the Canadian playwright Bernard Slade (1930–2017) that “you can make a killing in the theatre, but you can’t make a living.” I knew that. What I didn’t know is that you can’t make a living as a writer, either, unless your name is headline-famous. I decided to hang out my shingle as a writer, a journalist, and try to leave enough spare time and energy to keep on writing plays. That way, I could still be a stay-at-home mother and look after my youngest child, who is challenged. Oddly enough, I managed to do this, which I recount in my book The Right Track: How to Succeed as a Freelance Writer in Canada (1998).
My first book grew out of an article on my widowhood that appeared in MacLean’s magazine. That evolved into a commissioned series for the Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association and then segued into a book, Beginnings: A Book for Widows (1977). It went through several printings each of 4 or 5 editions, plus 2 printings in the U.S. and big print in the U.K. It remained in print for 27 years and developed a devoted cult following of absolutely powerless women who lend each other my book.
I was the darling of the insurance industry, casting myself as a professional widow, young enough to be a prime example of how not to back into widowhood. London Life Insurance Company used to give a copy of the book with every death claim they settled, and they had a wailing wall at their head office where they posted their thank-you letters—no wails, only praise and thanks. Most (Protestant) churches kept a copy in their libraries, and a lot of funeral associations did too. Whenever and wherever I spoke, and no matter the subject (frequently playwriting, or whatever my latest book was about), there would inevitably be two women in the audience who came up after to touch me (!) and tell me, “You saved my life.”
Now that the book is out of print and my friends have reached the age when their husbands are dying, I buy copies of it from secondhand bookstores via Amazon to offer help. It was the book I needed and couldn’t find when my husband died, and it continues to be helpful for others.
Now you understand why I have titled this book Endings, and I dedicate it to all the women (mainly) who have grown old with me, plus all the younger ones, men, too, the Boomers who scarcely know how to deal with death, to say nothing of its not always prerequisite corollary: age.
What we call the beginning is often the end/ And to make an end is to make a beginning. /The end is where we start from. -T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
Tomorrow is another day…..