Finding the Missing Parts
Dear Books,
Unexpectedly widowed at 51, all my plans have fallen away, and I now find myself with the opportunity to re-envision my life and reinvent myself. In just over 4 years my nest will be empty. What do I do then? I have lost sight of who I am in the endless demands of marriage and motherhood and am unsure how to find myself again. I am full of hope, but also scared of the unknown future.
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Dear Full of Hope,
I am so very sorry for your loss. It feels so thin, typing those words, because it’s a grain of sand against a Grand Canyon of grief. But I wanted to start there. I’m so very sorry that you’ve suffered in this way. My heart goes out to you.
And. And and and. Look at you! Look at how much life is still banging on your door, ready to bust through!
The most obvious book I could recommend would probably be Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, a bestseller about a whip-smart woman who is unexpectedly widowed and then must figure out how to create the life she wants. This book is great, but this is not your book.
(I pick these books with my heart, not my head—or the universe picks them, I’m not sure. Either way, you have a different book.)
Instead, I’d like to recommend the memoir Becoming Duchess Goldblatt by Anonymous.
The short version is that, out of her loss and grief, Anonymous creates a twitter personality named Duchess Goldblatt. That is interesting and would make for a good memoir regardless, but what is exceptional about this book is the absolute life force that leaks out of it. You can’t help but get it on your hands, on your heart.
Anonymous knows herself so well, and it is absolutely breathtaking the way she’s able to inhabit, again and again, the space that is uniquely her. It is soul-healing to read about a woman who just knows, intuitively, how to do that—even after loss, even after a shattering of self that leaves her life like a broken mosaic.
“I understood intuitively as a small child that my voice was a gift,” she writes about her refusal to speak as a small child, “not a gift in the sense of a talent, but a gift because it was divinely given, just like anybody else’s: the voice is the mingling of the soul, the mind, and the body together, expressed through breath, which is life itself; how could any human voice not be sacred? I saw clearly that no one could demand a share of it. It was absolutely mine.”
You don’t have to be on twitter (or X) to understand the “Duchess” character that Anonymous creates. You just have to let her in. She is weird. She is wise. She is hilarious and healing.
Anonymous finds herself through Duchess Goldblatt. And I hope this story will help you find the parts of you that are missing, too.
Much love,
Lara
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