A Fade of Widows

By Petra Abernathy

Ours is a lineage of widows, generations of us and our uncanny talents fading away because we lost the love of our lives too soon.

 

Since he died I have used what magic I have left to create healing rooms for troubled souls. My daughter, Phaedra, crafts fragile ceramic moon jars that salve the wounds of all who own them.

 

We fade beautifully, Phaedra and I, achingly talented, hamstrung by our grief.

 

Then my father dies, and my mother doesn't fade. Instead she gets brighter, and our own gifts burgeon once more.

 

That terrifies me. It means I might not be done. The fade may not be inevitable. We might love again and bloom again.

 

For Phaedra another love is something she is oblivious to. For my mother it is the expected response to her beauty and glamour. For me it is the font of all guilt.

 

A Fade of Widows is a fantastical magical realism novel of lost love, the kind of magic that passes down the generations, and the twists in our heritage that make us what we are. From the enchanting waves of the Irish sea to the fairy chimneys of Cappadocia in Turkey it will take you on a mystical journey of grief and growth. Perfect for fans of Alice Hoffman and Joanne Harris.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balloon Ride Books
• Release date: Dec 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201452865

Book preview

Chapter One

You don’t see them leave; you just know when they are gone.  There is no glittering swirl of a soul taking flight or whispering breath to freedom from pain and fear. There is no rattle, no gasp, no swish of the scythe; there is just nothing.  One second they are there, the next they are gone, leaving behind so much cooling meat.  I’ve seen it before.

I sit with my dad and I wait for it.  I lightly hold his paper-skinned hand whilst the whiffling breath of the warm air blanket blows like the sirocco wind across our skin.

The ward is sterile white; so white and hard it cuts at me. The only colours are the neon numbers and graphs on the screens that surround him. The bitchy red of the blood pressure read out, the cantankerous green of the oxygen saturation levels, the post-it note yellow of the ventilator, flashing urgently.

I keep looking out of the high windows at the tips of the trees waving at the sun in the cloud strewn sky.  It calms me, much more than this room which with its air of sterile efficiency and technology in charge, feels soulless.  I suppose that’s a good thing, if it was full of soul I’d struggle to be here because of the unpleasant things I would see in the bays.

Yet again I have come to a liminal space. A place between, on the edge of things. In this case it is between living and dying.

I want to bring more humanity here.  I want to charge the efficiency with hope. Turn the sterile into just cheerful clean.  I want to make it smell of lemon curd and ginger beer.  Make it invigorating and energised, make it a place to welcome the sick back to their bodies, not a blank anteroom for their vessels to wait in.

The nurse pads quietly around the bay, adjusting, checking, readying.  He is the only human warmth here.

He is so sweet, this nurse, with his sandy hair and soothing brown eyes behind serious round glasses.  When I turn and look at him directly, as I do rarely in circumstances like this, I can see his reality, his many roles.  Around his knees ghostly marionettes jerk in endless circles; carer, comforter, hunter and husband, all restlessly revolving.

I want to make him a room to reward him for his service. A manly room of dark leather brown and midnight blue, some sophistication for a man who spends his working life in rubber clogs.  A retreat where he can be himself, to sometimes think selfish thoughts, have a sly glass of whiskey, read a risqué book, be free of the soft impulse to care and coddle.  I want to give him a place where it’s okay to turn off the empathy and where the ghost marionettes can be locked away in an upholstered stool he can rest his feet on.

I turn back towards Dad but he has left whilst I, as usual, have my head in the clouds.

He has moved a twist of time away. The other side of the atom away.

I look over at the nurse and he gives me a head tilted, professional, half smile.  There’s no blood pressure. He’s gone, he says radiating acceptance I don’t need.

The machines work on, their alarms silenced days ago but their hard drives registering it all for later learning and eventual analysis.

That’s another thing; there isn’t even an electronic announcement of the passing of another human in the ICU of today. No dramatic flatlines or blaring fanfare, just a double dash where the blood pressure monitor finally fails to find a number.

I’ll let my mother know. 

It’s not like we didn’t expect this today. 

Gently I disentangle my father’s hand from mine under the warm covers.

Thank you, I say to the nurse, and I try to put a month’s worth of appreciation into the phrase because one of the things I acquired from my mother was impeccable manners.  I am unfailingly polite.  We don’t have much in common, my mother and I, but we are both very, very polite.

I stand up before I bend over and kiss Dad’s empty cheek. I don’t know why, because he isn’t there. He is so very obviously hollowed out and gone, but I do hope he can still see me, that he isn’t too far away yet. I want him to make his journey knowing someone saw him on his way.

When I think of the journey the dead make I see it like a film in my head.  I see my beautiful husband on a golden stairway to heaven, shiny steps going up through the clouds into Mr Blue’s sky (I’ll remember you this way). I imagine him dancing upwards, playing air guitar all the way.

For some reason my dad is a fish; a great, strong, tail beating, muscle arching silver salmon, forging through the current.  I see him heading out to the open sea, not going inland to spawn and die. Instead I see him heading out, into the deep blue, to explore the whole wide world.

I look at him lying there, all shell, no soul, and now I have to go and break the news. Make it comforting and nice and spiritual when all it is is done. 

I’d like to tell Mum about the salmon but she wouldn’t even try to understand. It would annoy and confuse her.  I’ll hold my tongue, as usual.

I leave the ICU and take the mice maze of corridors that lead to the sudden optimism of the main entrance, a wide welcoming portal into a world of sunlight stroke, breeze touch, and deep breath freedom, where late spring feels like a whole different world.

I walk with my head up and my gaze carefully placed. I narrow my viewpoint to a safe space a few feet in front of me and only high enough to follow the line of the wall.  That way I don’t see anything on the way. Hospitals are always difficult for me, particularly under these circumstances.

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I firmly believe the dying need someone with them but I think maybe I gave too much of myself to the task this time. The strength leached out of me during the long miles on the road and the endless talking to the father who was drifting away.  Something inside me got so very tired and now it is over I am worn thin and so faded I don't know if I even cast a shadow today.

In the afternoon sunlight I wrestle my phone from my handbag and stand with my back against the car, looking down at the tidal river below the hospital.  The high tide has flooded in and on the khaki green salt marshes my gift shows me ghostly images of ancient round houses rippling like mirages amongst the reeds. On the breeze I can smell the phantom whiff of campfires long turned to peat and as I listen to the phone ring, loud and strident, it drowns out the faint sounds of the Neolithic, resonating down 500 generations to me.

I tell the remains of my small family that Dad is dead and then I get into my car and I go back again, to that landscape on the Celtic edges that created me. The one I am forever going home to.

Over the years there have been so many sad journeys, so many long roads to home. There was the time I came home alone leaving my husband’s body far behind me. Then two years later when I rushed to Phaedra’s side when her husband died. Now, today, with my father gone to the last great adventure before us, I go home again.

This is my homeland, as far west as the mainland goes, with its back to the east wind and its pretty face of high cliffs facing the west, stretching out into the green blue, gulf stream tickled waters of the Irish Sea.  It is the last unconquered land; the Romans didn’t take it, the Vikings and the Saxons tried and failed. The Normans took a slice out of it but we outlived them in the end.  Even the modern world barely fights through. The motorway from the east, exhausted by the trek, by the rivers crossed and borders breached, gives up well short of my home.  Invaders all eventually turn back and leave us in peace, practically forgotten.

The north is all brooding mountains and mad poets in the shadow of Cader Idris. The south and east are darkened by deprivation and scarred with the coal heaps of men who broke and burnt the earth but here in the west it feels lighter, fresher, more magical, like myths made possible. As if maidens made of flowers are still walking through summer meadows of mist and the sweetly curving bays of smiling sand forever feel like holidays.

If I am anything I am a product of this magical corner of the world, this space between land and sea on the ultimate edge of this island kingdom.  Born here, bred here, bone and blood, and that matters more than one would expect.

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When I arrive at my mother’s house I don’t give myself time to reflect and draw myself together. That would be a kind of cruelty to those who wait anxiously inside for the thin consolation of soothing details.

Mum looks so small when I see her, so fragile and tiny, and again I feel like a great big galumphing elephant of a daughter. 

I don’t know how to comfort her. She can’t bear hugs from me, and I can’t bring myself to give them. She’s not great at listening but I try to talk comfort to her. I keep telling her how calm and peaceful the passing was.  I urge her to see how the world is still beautiful and how Dad was awesome and that she is not alone; just like Phaedra told me after my husband died, and just like I told Phaedra when hers was gone.

Mum doesn’t cry, she never does, at least I have never seen her cry. She just looks shocked and talks and talks in cascades of clipped phrases, all time worn and expected. 

She says what she thinks everyone says at times like these.  As if she hadn’t felt him go.  But I know she did, I can see it in her lying grey eyes.

I watch her carefully, trying to see what is waiting in the wings for us. How will she mourn? 

I look for the fade; the start of the washing out, the no longer anchored in reality, blurring at the edges, that signals the individual withdrawing but it isn’t there.  If anything she is more vivid, small and fragile, yes, but glowing like an Orthodox Icon. The magic in her painting her edges with gold leaf, calling for worship.

Still spattered with the clay she works with daily, the dirt she gives her life to, Phaedra grieves more conventionally. She sits there all riotous hair and oversize t-shirt slipping down her shivering narrow shoulders. She leaks tears over peach skinned cheeks, and eventually I leave them to leak and talk together.

I take up the duty once more and start phoning people to let them know and by the third call I have it efficiently scripted; explanation, pause for expression of shock, give thanks for offers of help, apologise for giving such bad news, promise to call with details of funeral arrangements.

In the background I hear Mum repeatedly saying, Nothing will ever be the same again. And, He was always so careful with his health, this shouldn’t have happened. And, He would never have been the same would he, even if he had woken up. She seems to find this last thought useful.

Every time she speaks Phaedra agrees with whatever she says because in our considerable experience of being subjected to hamfisted condolences the kindest thing you can do with a new widow is agree with her.

I work my way through the address book crammed with a neatly handwritten lifetime of social connections and obligations, and then I phone our local undertaker. He, faultless as ever, takes over and is brilliant, utterly professional, and says he will be right over.

When I tell Mum she grasps the idea of a man to lean on and I can see her palpably relax.  A man will be here soon and all will be well. I feel the well known flicker of anger at her attitude but I turn away before it shows in inappropriate ways and I accidently manifest something odd.

My mother was always, to my eyes, impossibly glamorous, even her name was beautiful, Sybil, a romantic, mystical name that suited her, high priestess of her own allure.  As an adult I can scorn the frippery and the artifice and the lash fluttering, giggling, flirtatiousness she employs as some old fashioned hang over from her 1950’s prime. But when I was a child I was dazzled by it and she made sure I knew I would never match it. She did that carelessly, less malicious than just stating the fact because I was quiet and boyish and more than a little strange and that annoyed and disappointed her.

All my childhood she was this waft of perfume and glitter, coming downstairs looking amazing whilst I waited in my pj’s to say goodnight. Bed by 7.30 Lowri, she would say to me.  Make sure she doesn’t read under the covers, she would tell my grandmother, who would be a wisp of almost there having made the effort to pull herself into the real world for babysitting duties. It will ruin her eyes. Then she would go off to yacht balls and parties and be the most beautiful woman there.

Dad would have been waiting impatiently for her grand entrance. He would have dried his hair in front of the fire because she had usurped the bathroom hours before and she would turn from me to receive his admiration. I don’t remember what he wore but she would be in something daring. ‘Backless, frontless, sideless’ she called it. Something selected that week from the exclusive boutique downtown with no other intention than to be shockingly sexy and glamorous.  It always worked; I remember his look would tell her that.

Her glamour was always very much in evidence. How could she not see it, the obvious magic of it, the innate ability to bewitch?  My magic has always been tucked inside, sometimes seen through the bore of my gaze if I fail to curtain it but hers was always right out there in the open and she pretended it didn’t exist.  Whilst I am always the stern goddess, the frightening goddess, sprung from the head of Zeus, she is the goddess in love, an Aphrodite forever laughing her teasing laugh.

I remember waving goodbye to Mum and Dad one morning, not so long ago. Phaedra had dropped them at the local station to catch the early train, off on some new adventure together.  I waited in my garden, fifteen minutes down the line, waiting for the train to pass.  It was a frosty dawn, all crunchy grass and pale skies smeared with yellow and pink and the weaving of trees in the valley still dark black before the light hit them.  I heard the train coming and I stood on the lawn and waved.

The train came in a golden rush, all warm lights and hot engine and there was my mother, so clear in the midst of it. Her gilt hair shining in the carriage lights, her handsome consort by her side. And there was me, standing all alone in the cold in my oldest uggs and a jumper with a hole in it, my hair uncombed, rats tails blowing in the passing of the train.  I felt like the railway children, forever the child, watching the glamorous people passing me by and I waved and I waved and I don’t think she saw me, she never really did.

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We are generations of widows, stretching back as far as the family goes and you wouldn’t notice that unless you looked closely because in recent centuries widows are quiet things and they don’t draw attention to themselves.

Long ago I think it was different, we had value once. We had wisdom and power all our own; we were keepers of tradition, magically relevant. We were more useful in ages past, before the silicon age came, before electricity charged the minds of men and made them think the cold light they created was more important than the home fires we had tended eon after eon.  Back then, in the dawn times, our gifts of building the healing home and seeing the future in flashes were valued. We gave survival a fighting chance.  Not now.  The world has changed.

Now nobody notices the widows and we don’t want them to see us. We have become bad luck; we have been for a legion of generations. We are witches in waiting and hags in the raw. We don’t want the whispers that come with the role. We don’t want the finger pointing and the quick flick of the hand that averts the evil eye.  We could just do without that shit.

My husband died in a lightning fast moment, far from home in foreign lands. He died of a brain haemorrhage (we think), and as he passed the Aegean Sea, seen from the olive tree studded hills of Turkey, sparkled at me with unseemly beauty, the bright blue bitch that she is.

My daughter’s husband burnt to death within reach of the dowsing sea. As he tended the rare green winged orchids on the cliff top at Stack Rocks his Land Rover slipped its gears, failed its brakes and took him through the thin as dreams barriers to be tortured on a rocky platform of twisted strata laid down in the distant past.  They were less than two weeks married at the time.  Phaedra paid her price early.

My mother was luckier; she had decades with my Father. As he died from a tiny complication of a minor issue a high spring tide swallowed the mud banks of the estuary below the hospital on the hill. It wiped away the three toed bird tracks that pecked at the ochre surface, it swept in high and fast and then turned at the perfect moment and gave him a free run to the ocean home.

My grandfather died beneath my Irish Sea in the cold dark depths.  He slid beneath the grey sea with his ship. Trapped in its saw-toothed tangle of metal wreckage he rests in the Lost Lands, the drowned kingdom we farmed in ages past, where the ghost grasses ripple in the rushing tides.

My great-grandfather dived to his death from the clean sky touching cliffs above the harbour, weary beyond imagining at what he saw in the trenches in France.  The sea gave him his freedom from pain, took him away in its dreamless depths, washed all the mud and blood away.

My great-great-grandfather was kicked in the head by a horse on the narrow tranche of beach as the last days of shipbuilding killed off the master craftsmen. He died with his blood on the sand and the crafty crabs smelt the iron rich scent of it and sidled out from under the rocks in the pools left by the low tide and clicked towards him on legs like blades, blowing bubbles.

The sea comes for all our men; the ones who love it, those who fear it, it doesn’t matter, the sea is waiting for them, watching them, endlessly taking the payment for when we led the tribes inland to stop it taking us all.

Marrying one of us is clearly a recipe for being outlived.

The men that rage against the dying of the light leave behind them widows who fade quietly into the night.

This is how we fade, watch us, withdrawing from society, frightened of the judgement that always comes. Do we love again too soon or do we never love again? Did he leave us penniless or well provided for? Will we grieve for ever more?

My grandmother suffered from the fade for sixty years. Every year she got less real, until her dresses were the shade and pattern of any wall she stood against. Her eyes became the washed out blue of a high overcast sky, and her hair, once blond and buoyant, dried out to a web spun fluff like the lichen on the rocks that mark the ancient burial sites on the bare rock headlands.  If I look at old photographs I can barely see her anymore. Even dead and gone and her ashes washing through the sea in search of her long dead man she continues to fade.  Maybe she hasn’t found him yet.

I fear the fade because I am not yet tired of living.  It would be easier if I was but I still want to live, and I feel bad about that.

Before I was a widow I was so much more real.  I could have moved the world for love because one fine day I got really lucky and I met the man for me and together we created a whole that was a hundred times better than the sum of our parts.

We met in cyberspace when the web was so young you could still find money spiders at the corners.  We fell in love in a still blind virtual world, before digital photography pouted into being and he travelled across a country to meet me based on a description of short, dark and scruffy.

He loved me before he saw me and when he saw me he said my beauty took a while to sink in and then it stayed with him forever.  How wonderful was that!

He changed his life for me, coming into the west to be with me, and I became real with him, not the strange little misfit I was before.

We had our own language, our own in jokes; we became a third person, funnier, stronger, cleverer, so much braver.

We were the perfect compliment to each other, personally, professionally, in every way possible.  We thought we were lucky to have found each other and we wished we could have met sooner.  We should have wished we could have had longer but we were too smug to see the time running out.

We built houses on three continents, leaving behind us a string of romantic testimonies to our love in bricks and mortar.  Everywhere was full of possibility.  We chose intriguing places to build in; we thought this a very fine thing to do.

We were good at it.

When he was gone I travelled still but now I ran in short sprints and then returned to Pembrokeshire, run, run back, run, run back, like some stupid interval trainer in a world wide gym.

He didn’t leave me rich, we did what we did for the fun of it not for riches and so I still work.  I do good work, but it isn’t steady and it is small work, different from the big architectural projects of old.

I used to tuck whole hotels away in narrow village streets; I would design rooms full of sexy sunlight for hot honeymoons and glamorous courtyards for illicit love and erotic nights.  I built infinity pools and octagonal towers - towering erections (laughter).

Now I make pretty the chiropractor’s reception and the florist's frontage. I make holiday cottages into romantic retreats that make reluctant men drop to their knees and offer spur of the moment proposals. I quietly do nurseries for twins, and dining rooms for earnest foodies. The mother of twins finds they nurse better and sleep like little bricks in the new room, and the foodies are making a fortune as a pop up supper club. 

I still have magic in that direction, the talent doesn’t wither with the fade of widowhood but the reasons to exercise it get harder to grasp.  The motivation is a slippery thing, and the joy that used to come in making wonderful rooms is now a fleeting thing, weak like tea when you want espresso.

I grieve the loss of motivation as much as anything else.

On the waxing moon I meet clients and design the rooms I can allow myself to work on. The waxing moon is my communicative moon, when I can face strangers and smile and when I am furthest from the fade.  The waxing moon is the perfect moon for me, it is when I take on my short projects (always short, never commit). It’s when my particular gift is gentle and diffuse and I can look at people and only see what they need rather than the unpleasant details of what they will get if they aren’t careful!

On the full moon I do mundane things because the mad light drives me nuts.  When the full moon boils in the sky I will do anything to turn off my overactive right brain. I will send it to sleep with study and research.  I read science and history, archaeology and anthropology.  I swim