Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [138]
After the service, Susanna wailed as John’s body was lowered into his grave. “What sorrow is equal to this sorrow?” she sobbed. “It is a strange new feeling to feel so desolate and alone. I ought to be glad. I ought to rejoice that his exit was so easy and painless, that he had for months looked forward to death with pleasure, that the merciful Father saved him from what he most dreaded, a long, lingering death of helplessness and suffering.” Instead, she was plunged into “the gloom of grief.” Her children stared at her anxiously, not knowing how best to comfort her.
For Susanna, widowhood was a death sentence. She was desperately lonely. John had been the centre of her existence; she depended on his love, good humour and enthusiasm to give her own life shape. He had made her laugh, and stopped her taking herself too seriously. He had always read everything she wrote before she sent it off to editors. With him, she felt clever, loved and appreciated. John had protected her from both her own storms of feelings and others’ criticisms. She couldn’t even imagine life without him. “Never, never, can I hope to be so happy again,” she wept. All her children had left home, and anyway, she had never been as close to any of them as she had been to her dear John. “For him I painted, for him I wrote, and I now feel that my occupation is gone,” she wrote to an old friend in England. “Poor Susy is alone—has no motive to live for herself.”
Chapter 17
“A Wail for the Forest”
W idowhood, which was so threatening for Susanna, had proved a liberation for Catharine Parr Traill. It meant she no longer had to put a brave face on the grim life with an ailing, failing husband. After Thomas’s death in 1859, she continued to struggle with the poverty and ill health that had dogged her; her correspondence is liberally speckled with references to lumbago, neuralgia, rheumatism, gout and sciatica. But in none of the hundreds of letters that have survived does Catharine mention that she misses the companionship of her husband. While Susanna confided to her sister, two years after John Moodie’s death, that she still clung “with passionate love to the long, long ago,” Catharine scarcely paused for breath before she was “up and doing.”
Widowhood suited Catharine, who was sustained by her sense of humour and faith in God’s benevolence. Photo taken at Port Hope by R. Ewing in 1867.
Loneliness was not a problem. Catharine’s devoted oldest daughter Kate lived with her and ran the household. And Catharine was soon far more comfortably settled than she had been in years. Although she’d had only a few dollars in her purse at the time of her husband’s death, with her brother Sam’s help she soon scraped together the capital required to buy some land in Lakefield that sloped steeply down to the river. There she built a little frame cottage that she called Westove, the name of the bankrupt Traill family estate in the Orkneys that she had also given to her first log home in Upper Canada, twenty-seven long windows opening onto Westove had clapboard walls, long windows opening onto a view of the water and gingerbread trim round the eaves of the high-peaked roof. Her bedroom was on the ground floor, and in the early hours of each day she could lie awake listening to the dawn chorus. It was cosier than any of the houses the Traills had previously lived in: the east wind didn’t blast through the bedrooms, as it had in Oaklands, or whistle up the staircase, as it had at Wolf Tower. Catharine put colourful rag rugs on the floor and curtained all