Friday, July 12, 2024

Toby Olson | The Other Woman: A Brief Memoir / 2015

the little things you do together

by Douglas Messerli

 

Toby Olson The Other Woman: A Brief Memoir (Bristol, England: Shearsman Books, 2015)

 

Rereading my regretful piece above only this morning, after just having finished Toby Olson’s “brief memoir” on his wife, Miriam, dying of Alzheimer’s, I am even more sorrowful about my simplistic friendship with her. And then, after Olson described it so wonderfully in his beautiful book, The Other Woman, I was reminded of her smile: “her smile, empty of guile, not reminiscent of but exactly the same as it always has been. Trusting and delighted, welcoming, those qualities all the more apparent now that so much else has faded into a background of silhouettes. My heart is broken. By that smile I have charted my course.” Yes, that too was the Miriam I knew. Those brown eyes and that open smile. I remembered the laugh, but forgot, while I was writing, that so memorable smile. How could I have forgotten that?

 

     Sometimes it was a smile of pleasure, not just for the pleasure of your company but her own personal pleasure in having been able to share something with you—with others—such as a meal, a conversation, a joke. But then that smile was sometimes a maternal one, the kind which, as a child, you might enjoy seeing upon your mother’s face—a smile of some small pride in just being part of your life, of her own life, of the joy of life itself. It was perhaps a mysterious smile, but unlike Di Vinci’s Mona Lisa, not flirtatious, never calling attention to itself; it might have been, at moments, slightly mischievous, maybe just a little judging, but never cruel, never the smile of anyone who felt superior. 

      And I can imagine the dancing woman Olson describes, although I never saw Toby and Miriam dancing. I can see that graceful woman rocking in her chair to music. I can imagine that!

      Yet the woman Olson particularizes in his book is someone, after all, I never knew, is a woman, as he puts it, who is “another woman,” someone who did not even know herself, and certainly had great difficulty often, in those dark days he articulates, in knowing who he was: Toby only occasionally, more often, “My Father” or “the other guy”:

 

                              “Which one are you?

                              “There’s more than one of us?” I ask

                              “Well, yes,” she might say, almost articulate. “There’s

                     you, Toby, and the other guy.”

                              “I’m the middle one,” I say. “That Toby.”

 

In the final chapter, Olson attempts to imagine Miriam’s thinking, the shifting feelings of confusion, the impossibility of separating time and place, of putting a name or identity to anything or anyone. And yet, a sort of joyful displacement about it all, the wonderment of being able, perhaps, to float through one’s own history with a shift of a look, a word, a smell, an image: something like a constant Proustian infusion of present and past. There might be a release in that or, as Toby hints, a terror. But that terror, well, that too is the kind of terror that, when we are lucid, creates the excitements of our life.

     Olson’s ability to present himself as alternately achieving a kind of personal “sainthood” in caring for his dying wife, and a man who also is angry, jealous (even then) of her woman friends, worn out, fearful, and simply tired, unable to sleep some nights and afraid, some days, to awaken, is remarkable in its honesty and emotional intensity. This is not, strangely, a sentimental story, yet there was hardly a page I could read with a dry eye.

     And although this “memoir” centers on Miriam, his wife, it astonishingly reveals a great deal also about its author’s personal history, his own lifetime searches for a father who died too early, for a mother whom, he perhaps, still longs for and, just maybe, sought out a little in his long relationship with his wife.

     I knew of Olson’s peregrinations, of his own brief troubles with the law, of his early youthful drifting, but in this work I learned of how Olson had become the so gentle man—not a gentleman of yore, but an always gentle, athletic, constantly-in-motion lion-like being—he might almost have played the Bert Lahr character in The Wizard Oz, except he is so much more well-spoken and loquacious—that I knew him to be, particularly when he, with understandable pride, served as a military nurse to a patient wasting away, which the staff had dubbed “Nasty Jack”:

 

                            …covered to the chest with a thin sheet, was a wasting-away

                            man, I thought it was a man, whose bloated and unrecogniza-

                            ble as human face was hanging with chunks of suppurating

                            flesh, his chest running with thick fluids and blood….

 

Like a kind of male Mother Teresa, Olson begins to wash the flesh, to talk with the man like a friend, to suture the wounds, to abolish this monster’s distance from other human beings; and the man heals, looking almost normal again until, one night, with his wife and sons about him, he slips into death.

     Olson tells this tale less to demonstrate a kind of sainthood—a not so dismissible aspiration when one perceives that Olson’s first book recounts a mythical-like salvation from a problematical adolescent childhood by imagining himself, in The Life of Jesus, as a kind of boy Christ—as to establish his credentials as Miriam’s final caretaker, an individual unafraid of cleaning her deepest orifices, of implanting her needed suppositories, of caressing, feeding, and carrying her off to her needed destinations. It is, finally, the only way that someone like him—a loving husband who has seen his wife become some “other woman, ”a woman he no longer knows—can come to terms with his insurmountable loss.

     My own uncle expressed what we often like to forget: when you lose your life-long companion, to whom can you turn? “Women have other women,” my Uncle Lloyd (now dead) complained, while American men, alas, even among those few male friends who may still be living, “do not bond in the same manner.” To talk of a wife you’ve lost, a male mourner might as well be talking about a woman with whom you long ago had a passing affair.

     I might suggest that The Other Woman be required reading for anyone suffering in a similar situation, except that, despite our knowledge that there are so many similar stories, none of them can ever be the same. Each of them, as Miriam seems to insist in her repeated chants, are a “little little little little little different, a difference which is everything to the survivor—yet so little to the society at large.

    

Los Angeles, May 27, 2015

Reprinted from Rain Taxi XX, No. 3 (Fall 2015), 18-19.

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