My Marital Status

SIX YEARS AFTER THE EVENT, I still cannot say for sure whether I am divorced or widowed. The question comes up whenever I am filling out a form that wants to know my marital status. All the other questions I can answer in seconds, but this one — which asks that I check single, married, separated, divorced, or widowed — always stumps me. I’ll pause there at the dentist’s office, insurance company, or bank, and, while the clock ticks and other people’s children scamper at my feet, I’ll reflect on what it really means to be married.

The event I refer to is the death of the woman who used to be my wife. Wanda was not my wife when she died in December 2001 at the age of forty-two. Not legally, anyway. She and I had met in the summer of 1980, married in the summer of 1984, and divorced in the summer of 1994. Before we’d gotten married, I’d made it clear to Wanda that I did not want children, and she’d told me that she could accept this. Yet, throughout our years together, it seemed she never put her longing to rest. I watched her study the infants our friends and family brought into the world, as if silently hoping I would change my mind. I didn’t. I couldn’t see the sense in my becoming a parent and said so. Wanda’s mother, with her affable proddings, would ask me why I’d married her daughter if we weren’t going to have children. That, she would say, did not make sense to her.

The discontent Wanda and I felt about each other’s intractable positions eventually spread into the rest of our marriage and soured it. What Wanda’s mother kept saying began to make sense to me: why stay married if I wasn’t going to give Wanda the child she wanted? I was forty; Wanda was thirty-four — still plenty of time for her to have a child with someone else. I talked to Wanda about it, we put ourselves through a year of psychotherapy, and finally the two of us sadly agreed that things just weren’t working out.

After we’d split, our lives suddenly took far different turns, as if we’d been spring-loaded to take off in new directions. I began studying Buddhist meditation; went on retreats in Nepal, Thailand, and here in the States; and found myself at the feet of dozens of spiritual sages who invariably spoke of the impermanence of everything. I knew about impermanence, having ended a marriage that was supposed to last as long as we both would live. But somehow hearing it spoken by teachers I considered wise gave me solace. I also put myself through Union Theological Seminary in New York City and earned a master’s in divinity.

Meanwhile Wanda launched herself into physical pursuits, becoming a luminary in the local contradance, zydeco, and swing-dance community — a scene the two of us had never set foot in when we’d been together. She occasionally invited me to dances at a local parish hall or rec center near our homes in upstate New York. Sometimes, when I missed her, I’d show up. I’d pick her out of the crowd and wave, and she’d scoot over and guide me onto the floor, where I’d hobble along under her patient instruction as some of her suitors looked on. I can keep in step to rock-and-roll, but to this music I was like a rusty engine that’s reluctant to turn over. Wanda and I would laugh at how clumsy I was. Then I’d watch her dance with another man, the two of them seeming to glide across the floor.

The remorse I’d felt about initiating the divorce diminished when I saw Wanda enjoying life on her own. From time to time we’d talk on the phone and trade stories about our latest romantic escapades. It turned out she and I were better friends than we’d been spouses: happier, more candid with each other, and less prone to bickering.

I had not seen Wanda for several months when she phoned me in April 2001 to tell me she was having surgery to remove a large mass in her abdomen. As I penciled in the date on my calendar, she told me not to worry, said it was nothing. And off she went with her latest beau to a Cajun-music festival in New Orleans.

I HAVE ALWAYS LIKED Wanda’s family, and they have always liked me. Even after the divorce, I was invited to holiday dinners, birthday picnics, and Christmas services at their church. Wanda was Chinese American: her father had emigrated from Beijing and her mother from Shanghai in the 1940s, both fleeing the communist takeover. They’d met in New York City, married, and moved to suburban New Jersey, where I met Wanda while working at a newspaper. I was a young reporter, and she was an intern in the paper’s graphic-design department. A middle-class, Connecticut-raised WASP, I was charmed by Wanda’s Asian beauty. Although she and her two siblings were as American as I was, her parents were still very Chinese, and their culture seemed exotic to me. Her mother spoke with an accent I found hard to understand. Her father showed me sawtooth-edged black-and-white photos of the house where he’d grown up: a palatial estate in Beijing that had been confiscated by the communist regime and turned into a barracks for the People’s Liberation Army. Wanda and her family seemed less tormented by the guilt, worry, and conflict that droned on in my family and friends, and this held a certain allure for me.

On the day of Wanda’s operation I joined her mother, father, older sister Frieda, and brother-in-law Peter at the hospital. Wanda maintained her silly, often droll sense of humor throughout the pre-op. As the nurses rolled her on the gurney into the operating room, she held up the hand not tethered to the IV and cranked it side to side, like Queen Elizabeth waving from her Rolls Royce. Several hours later we met with her surgeon. We learned that a softball-sized pelvic mass had been removed in a total hysterectomy. He appeared disconcerted; the tissue, he said, would be sent to a lab for a biopsy, and the results would take a couple of days. Wanda would remain in the hospital to recover.

One evening a few days later I walked into her room after a stressful day at the office. Wanda was on the phone, snapping at the hospital-switchboard operator — unusual behavior for her; Wanda was usually courteous to a fault. And she was glaring at the foot of her bed. The way I figured it, she had just been sliced open and was in pain. Of course she was irritable. Seeing me, she hung up and started to cry.

“I don’t have good news,” she said.

Whatever had bothered me at work that day fell away, and I rushed to her bedside and cupped one of her hands in mine. I imagined some infection, or perhaps she would need another operation.

“What is it?” I asked, caressing her long black hair.

“It’s cancer,” she said.

Ovarian. And it was serious.

I laid my head on Wanda’s lap and sobbed.

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