Unremarried Widow: A Memoir
Artis Henderson
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 1451649282
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In the tradition of The Year of Magical Thinking and What Remains, this breathtaking memoir by a young Army widow shares her heartbreaking, candid story about recovering from her husband's death.
In this powerful memoir, a young woman loses her husband twenty years after her own mother was widowed, and overcomes two generations of tragedy to discover that both hope and love endure.
Artis Henderson was a free-spirited young woman with dreams of traveling the world and one day becoming a writer. Marrying a conservative Texan soldier and becoming an Army wife was never part of her plan, but when she met Miles, Artis threw caution to the wind and moved with him to a series of Army bases in dusty southern towns, far from the exotic future of her dreams. If this was true love, she was ready to embrace it.
But when Miles was training and Artis was left alone, her feelings of isolation and anxiety competed with the warmth and unconditional acceptance she’d found with Miles. She made few friends among the other Army wives. In some ways these were the only women who could truly empathize with her lonely, often fearful existence— yet they kept their distance, perhaps sensing the great potential for heartbreak among their number.
It did not take long for a wife’s worst fears to come true. On November 6, 2006, the Apache helicopter carrying Miles crashed in Iraq, leaving twenty-six-year-old Artis—in official military terms—an “unremarried widow.” A role, she later realized, that her mother had been preparing her for for most of her life.
In this memoir Artis recounts not only the unlikely love story she shared with Miles and her unfathomable recovery in the wake of his death— from the dark hours following the military notification to the first fumbling attempts at new love—but also reveals how Miles’s death mirrored her father’s death in a plane crash, which Artis survived when she was five years old and which left her own mother a young widow.
In impeccable prose, Artis chronicles the years bookended by the loss of these men—each of whom she knew for only a short time but who had a profound impact on her life and on the woman she has become.
pulled over her right shoulder. “That looks better,” Annabelle said. My mother eyed herself in the mirror as I leaned forward to dab gloss on my lips. “You look beautiful, Mommy,” I said. “Really?” I twisted the cap back on the tube and looked at my mother. People say I look like her but mostly they are talking about our hair. Mine is long too. It never feels long enough. I smiled and she dabbed at her eyes with a balled-up piece of toilet paper. “I’m so happy for you,” she said. The tip
back to shore. The weight of my mother’s courage seemed to press through the phone and across the receiver, so that it flowed into me and joined us like a cord. “Would you still have chosen to be with Dad?” I said. “Even if you had known how everything would turn out?” My mother did not hesitate. “In a heartbeat,” she said, and I smiled. Of course. 2011 Five years after Miles’s death, I spent time at a residency in Florida working on this book. I had graduated from Columbia University’s
in front of us and extinguished the bulbs over the path we had just walked. At the end of the tour she said she would shut down all the lights, to let us see the cave in its natural state. Miles and I looked at each other uneasily. I raised an eyebrow. He nodded his head. The guide flipped a switch and the metallic clicking ricocheted off the walls. The cavern disappeared in a blackness without end. I lost Miles then, but I breathed in the dampness of the cave and found him there in each particle
closest she could come. I was incredibly touched by her note; this was a woman I barely knew, and I realized in that moment that the other wives would have understood what I was feeling in a way people in the civilian world could not. In your Modern Love piece, you talked about how Miles’s death drew you closer to his mother, with whom you initially felt some tension. How has that relationship evolved since then? Do you still see his family? I’m still in contact with Miles’s family, and I still
I thought it was going to blow.” My grandfather stayed beside the plane and looked to my father while my grandmother carried me to the ambulance that was already turning down the dirt road. The freshness of morning had given over to thick afternoon heat, and as I looked back at the plane I saw everything through a film of stirred yellow dust. At our house my mother was in the kitchen when her mother-in-law, who lived up the mountain, called. “There’s been an accident,” she said. “What?” “An