Ghosting: A Widow’s Voyage Out

In this spellbinding examination of grief and love, Ascher (Playing After Dark) chronicles her widowhood after her husband died of pancreatic cancer. An avid sailor, she looks to the nautical term ghosting—used to describe when a ship makes gradual headway with an imperceptible wind—as a metaphor for her own drift after her husband was diagnosed with a disease that moved “as quickly and intensely as our falling in love.” Having married a man 20 years her senior, Ascher had accepted the likehood that “he would predecease me,” but as she makes clear in propulsive, poetic vignettes, nothing prepared her for the “amorphous, unrelenting anxiety” that seized her in mourning. She portrays the many ways grief can reveal itself: in the pain of their last Christmas dinner and in the fear of being alone on the boat the couple once shared. Though Ascher’s only wish was for the “absence of pain,” she later found companionship in a widower who, like her, had had a loving marriage, and the two eventually wed. While she writes ecstatically of the “enormity of love,” she doesn’t succumb to over-romanticizing its manifestations; even in celebrating marriage, she deems it a “ruthless, radical contract.” This captivates with its raw vulnerability. (Dec.)