I Bury My Wife

I have just returned from the town where i was born, Great Barrington, Massachusetts. There i laid to rest, in the sunshine under the great and beautiful elms, the wife to whom i have been married to for 55 years. With all of its sadness it was a beautiful experience, because after decades of work and years of sickness, the life of thsi woman was brought to a beautiful end, and the dark fear that somehow she might outlive me and that i would be unable to care for her until the end--this was gone.

We had been married over half a centruy. I met Nina Gomer at Wilberforce, where i first began my life work as a teacher. SHe was a student there. In appearance of remarkable beauty with her great mass of coiled black hair and extraordinaryily beautiful eyes. People use to stop and stare at her on the street. But she had no consciousness of her beauty and paid little personal attention to it. Indeed her looks were not her cheif characteristic and i never thought so even when at the age of 27, i married her. Her great gift was her singularly honest character; her passion for cleanliness and order and her loyalty. That was contribution to our joint life. Sometimes i felt burdened under it; our home seemed a bit too clean and to carefully kept. I wanted many times for her to have forget her housework and throw away her careful plans for daily life and romp and laugh. She seldom did this, because she could not; it was not in her nature. She was always serious and yet a good companion. SHe held the balance true and her concept of reality of life kept me from surging and wandering and perhaps from overturning our chariot of life.

I was not, on the whole, what one would describe as a good husband. The family and its interests were never the main center of my life. I was always striving to guide the world and certainly the Negro Group, so that always i was ranging away in body or in soul and leaving the home to my wife. She must often have been lonesome and wanted more regualr and pesonal companionship than I gave. And yet on the other hand, she was avid for the things i thought i was doing and as proud of any accomplishments as i was. One never knows under such circumstances, just what might have been changed for the better. Ours was a pleasant and fruitful partnership, not completely ideal for it had ups and downs, but it was peaceful and good. In one respect it was nearly the ideal, and of this i was proud because according to my bringing up i was a :good provider." My wife was never in financial trouble. We always had a good home, even beautiful; we had food and clothes. We traveled, not only over large parts of the United States, but in England, France and Italy. We saw something of the good life; we were never "in want." In fact in all these 55 years, i do not think it once occurred to either of us as probable or possible that we shouldever be sseperated or the family broken. Both of us had been brought up under the old-fashioned concept of marriage as permanent, "until death do us part."

We had two children. One a little boy who came suddenly, unexpectedly, miraculously. Physically he was a perfect child and in the months of his life, vivid in personality. But down in Atlanta, he caught one of thsoe spring intestinal infections, which might easily have been avoided and even stopped had we been persons of greater experience. As it was, at the age of only a year and a half, suddenly he died. And in a sense my wife died too. Never after that wa she quite the same in her attitufe toward life and the world. Down below was all this great ocean dark bitterness. It seemed all so unfair. I too, felt the blow. Something was gone from my life which would not come back. But after all Life was left and the world and i could plunge back into it as she could not. Even when our little girl came two years later, she could not altogether replace the ONE. So it seemed fitting that at the end of her life, she should go back to the hills of Berkshire, where the boy had been born and be buried beside him, in soil where my fathers for more than two centuries lived and died. I feel that here she will lie in peace. And i am definatley glad that i have lived long enough to keep her from poverty and worry and excess of pain to see her die in honor and love.