Widow’s story engages all senses
Print Edition
One covets a gold star as a small child (chores done!), a student (great work!), an entrepreneur (superior service!). For a military spouse, however, gold star status is anathema, for it is a gold star, edged in blue and floating on a field of white bordered in red, that forms the flag indicating a family member has died during service. A gold star wife, like the author Artis Henderson, is a widow.
Her book, “Unremarried Widow,” began as an essay in The New York Times’s Modern Love column, which has become a farm team for aspiring military spouse memoirists. If not for the ominous foreword in which her 23-year-old husband, Miles, dreamed of his own death, Henderson’s book would seem to follow a certain template: Headstrong, liberal-artsy girl meets dashing, strait-laced man with crew cut (conservative politics optional), marries, then fears losing self while merging into regimented military culture amid moves to various duty stations. But the young soldier’s premonitory dream casts a pall over the meet-cute courtship and this meticulously conveyed love story.
The couple are married for just months when Artis, living with her mother in Florida during Miles’s deployment, returns home to find two soldiers in her living room, one stepping forth to tell her, “On behalf of the president of the United States, I regret to inform you that your husband, Miles Henderson, has been killed in Iraq.”
From here, the narrative unfurls into a powerful look at mourning as a military wife. Henderson documents her loss in unsparing detail, from the investigation into the fatal helicopter crash to the funeral to the distinctive, sometimes contentious, bonds that form between bereaved spouses. In a heartbreaking bit of symmetry, Henderson lost her own father at 5 years old when a flight they took together crashed. Miles’s death provides her with a new lens through which to view her mother, with whom she now shares the fate of young widowhood.
In a genre that has expertly illuminated the lacerating anarchy of grief, the writing in “Unremarried Widow” feels, at times, a little distant. It’s almost as if Henderson is less a memoirist than a bio-cartographer, mapping her life’s events in a manner exacting but somehow remote. That said, one would struggle to find a young author so committed to detail. As she writes her way toward her version of a happy, or perhaps happy-as-it-can-be, ending, she does so with her wits about her and all five senses thoroughly engaged. Her sense of place is exquisite. The day before her husband’s funeral she goes riding. “I felt Miles everywhere. . . . He was there in the alfalfa smell of the horses and the smooth leather of the reins. He was in the open land and the wide expanse of the sky. I turned and faced into him like a wildflower following the sun.”
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