“Let Me Tell You a Story”
A Collection of Ninety-Six Stories and Some Poems
Cliff Williams
PDF file of the whole collection
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Linda, 8–18
After Linda and I graduated from Wheaton College in Illinois in 1964, she went to the University of Illinois for an M.A. in English Literature. We married in 1965 right after she finished the M.A. She then taught at the University of Indianapolis for three years before we moved to Rochester, New York, in 1968. Laura was born in 1969.
We lived in Rochester, New York, for fourteen years, in Deerfield, Illinois, for thirty-five years, and moved to Wheaton, Illinois, in 2017, where I now live.
Linda died in 2022. We had known each other for nearly sixty years and had been married for nearly fifty-seven years.
Linda loved poetry, especially that of George Herbert and Mary Oliver. She taught poetry to independent groups of interested individuals both in Rochester and Deerfield. For nineteen years, she was a proofreader, copyeditor, then a senior editor at a publisher of high school textbooks in Evanston, Illinois. She spent countless hours, designing and tending to the flower gardens at our Deerfield home.
First Encounter
Linda and I first met outside Dr. Longenecker’s office in Blanchard Hall at Wheaton College at the end of our sophomore year, in 1962. We needed his signature to get into an honors class for the fall.
Dr. Longenecker was not in his office, so we waited in the hallway near his office. We were both shy. What year are you? What is your major? Short answers, then silence.
After getting the signatures, we parted. As Linda walked across campus, the thought came to her out of the blue, “I’m going to marry him.”
“What??!!” she thought.
The class was held in a small room with a large table. We dozen or so students sat around the table.
At some point, Linda and I started sitting next to each other. And at some point after that, we started playing footsies underneath the table with our shoes off.
In November of that semester, Linda got ill and had to stay in the college infirmary for a couple of days. I wondered whether I should visit her, as doing so, I thought, would indicate that I had more of an attachment to her than I thought I had. I asked my roommate about it, and of course he said I should visit. So I did.
When Linda saw me, she got a huge smile on her face. That smile got me attached to her a good deal more.
We started dating at some point after that even though we never had a formal agreement to do so—no DTR, no request. We simply knew we were a couple.
Engagement Day
On January 30 of the spring semester of our senior year at Wheaton College, we talked about getting married. But I was not ready to say yes. I told Linda I would tell her when I was.
On a Tuesday evening in the middle of April, we went to the library to study together. Here is Linda’s account of what happened, which I found fifty-nine years later, in 2023, at the end of a journal she wrote for a creative writing course she had taken the previous semester.
“Engagement Day April 14, 1964
“A cool night in April. The sky was a rich blue, and a few bright stars were sprinkled through it. The slender crescent moon was clear and white.
“Under these beautiful heavens, as brilliant and fresh as the springtime below them, Cliff asked me to promise to marry him, and I whispered ‘Yes’ from my heart.
“I had felt lonely for Cliff while we were studying. It wasn’t the loneliness of separation, but rather that yearning to belong to the one you love. I wrote Cliff a note. A few minutes later, he asked me to take a walk. Of all the silly things, I said we didn’t have to! We did go for a walk—we walked to front campus, and under the stars with pines and tamaracks reaching far above us, he proposed and we pledged our love to each other for the rest of our lives.”
Afterwards, we went back to the library to study. (We were both study nerds!!) But we could not study very well. We wrote each other notes, and we wrote out an Engagement Day pledge:
“I promise to marry you, Cliff, and to love you always. . . .”
And below this:
“I give my promise to marry you, Linda. I promise to love you forever. . . .”
We signed our first names, Linda’s above mine, and she drew a heart around them.
I did not, however, have a ring I could give to Linda. I was broke. I don’t think I had more than six or seven dollars in my pocket at any time during that last semester. I skimped on lunches and suppers, which I ate in the Stupe on campus so as to make it through the semester. (I lost some weight because of that.) But becoming engaged could not wait for money!!
During the last week of classes, though, Linda and I went to the student center to pick up our mail. I had a letter from my great uncle Albert. Why was he writing me, I wondered. I had never met him.
Linda was beside me when I opened the letter. Out popped a check for $100. My first reaction was to exclaim, “Oh, boy! Now I can buy you a ring!!!” Linda’s eyes glistened as she got a big smile on her face.
We went by train to a jewelry store in Chicago that had advertised in the student newspaper. On June 4, 1964, I paid $90 for a modest ring, plus $9.00 and $2.70 in taxes. I don’t know where I got the extra $1.70 or money for train fare.
Linda wore the ring from that day, just before Wheaton’s commencement, until the day she died on August 5, 2022, just sixteen days short of our having been married for fifty-seven years. A month before she died, as she lay in the hospital bed in our living room, unable to move, she said, spontaneously, “You can have my rings.” They are now in a little, round, decorative, wood box, along with a snippet of her hair. The box sits on the shelf in front of the bay window in the living room, just in front of a picture of her, where I see it often.
Daily Parting
You press your body
Close to mine,
Wave out the front window,
Then race to the bedroom
And wave out its window
As I drive by.
I wave back—
Twice—
And continue on,
Warmed for the day.
I Gave You My Heart
I gave you my heart
In front of a hundred well-wishers
Forty-one years ago
And yesterday, too,
When your face shone
With delight
As I walked through
The front doorway,
Home from another day
At work.
Written for our forty-first anniversary, in 2006.
Old Love
When you are old,
Love for your spouse
Is only sometimes hot passion.
More often it is calm passion—
A lit-up face,
An energetic wave,
A soft touch.
Calm passion, though,
Is still passion.
You feel it surge
And remember it
The rest of the day,
Sometimes, even,
The next day as well.
A Squeeze of the Hand
Linda had slowly been becoming more and more unresponsive as she neared death from Lewy Body Dementia. She ate less, drank little, had more hallucinations, and talked in a garbled way, all with her eyes shut. Most of the time I could not tell whether she was sleeping or awake and did not know whether she could hear me. She did not respond to what I said.
On a Saturday afternoon ten days before she died, as she lay quietly appearing to be asleep, I slipped a few fingers into her hand, which lay beside her, and said again for the twentieth time, “I know you have to leave. I will miss you. But everything will be okay. Everything will be okay for you, and everything will be okay for me.” Instantly she squeezed my fingers.
Actually, it was scarcely a squeeze, just a barely perceptible movement of her hand. But it felt as though she had become totally alive for that instant. I have hung onto the memory of that movement as though it was a valuable treasure.
A Report from One Who Has Been Grieving the
Death of His Spouse
Linda died three months ago today, on August 5, 2022. Even though I had many months to prepare for her death, it was more painful than I ever imagined it would be. When I discovered that she was no longer breathing first thing that morning, the image of her lying completely motionless, with her eyes shut and her mouth open, instantly began to haunt me.
During the coming weeks I had tortuous fits of sobbing. Though they lasted less than a minute, they were excruciating.
I could scarcely get up in the morning. Although I sensed that life could be good again whenever I talked with someone via video call or in person, that sense left me as soon as the call ended or the person left. I felt paralyzed—I could not do the things I had previously loved.
At times I wondered why there is such a thing as death. Actually, it was less wondering and more a piercing resentment at death’s having taken my Linda.
Mostly, I simply went through the motions of staying alive.
There was no precise moment when things began to change. I kept doing numerous video calls. I saw people, sometimes on the front porch and sometimes for walking. They listened and gave warm affection. I started going to lectures and music events at nearby Wheaton College, occasionally running into people I knew. I gradually increased the length and speed of my walking to recover from hernia surgery several weeks after Linda died.
Doing these functioned as something of a rescue operation. The people I encountered helped deliver me from constant, incapacitating sorrow. I now wake up sometimes with anticipation. I have largely stopped being paralyzed. More of what I do has come to feel worthwhile.
My sorrow is not gone. I don’t know whether I will ever adjust to an empty house. Sometimes those initial pangs of grief return and overwhelm me. I have not yet fully accepted the fact that Linda is actually gone—I continue to wear my wedding ring, and the answering machine for the landline phone continues to say, “This is Linda and Cliff’s. Leave a message if you’d like. We’d love to hear from you.”
Still, it feels as though I might be able to love life all over again. The gratitude I have for those with whom I have spent time itself feels life-giving. I have gotten beyond the interlude I have been in.
Numerous times while Linda lay dying I gave her a Julian-of-Norwich reassurance: “Everything will be okay. You will be okay. God will take care of you. She will hold you in her large and loving hands. And I will be okay.” For a while after Linda’s death, I was not okay. But now I am, mostly, sometimes even more than okay.
Posted online November 5, 2022, at www.cliffordwilliams.net/grieving
© 2024 by Cliff Williams