Another tough essay on death--from Joyce Carol Oates

As I have noted often in this blog, the inevitability of death and the emotions that event draws from those who are alive is a topic that I have been drawn to ever since I was young.  And over the years, an indifferent stoicism, which was primary my defense against the tragedy of it all, has slowly yielded to an embrace of all the emotions that come with it--from before the event to long after as well.

Joyce Carol Oates writes about her husband's death in an essay that brought me to tears more than once while reading it.  Oates is a phenomenal writer, and every sentence there made me feel that I was the going through those same emotions.

While reading that essay (subscription required) I was struck with these thoughts:

• They drove a Honda Accord.  Until reading that line in the essay, I hadn't given any thought to what kind of cars famous writers drove.  But that got me thinking--I would expect Oates and her husband to have earned and owned enough to have been in the top five percentile of households, or somewhere there.  Yet, it was an Accord they drove.  If I recall correctly, it was a 2007 model.  Why does this matter?  This small piece of data lends enormous credibility to the emotions and descriptions of their lives that Oates writes about.
• Death is lonesome.  Oates writes that when her husband died in the hospital, in the middle of the night, she was home.
• Given their influence, I would have expected the couple to have had an army of friends with them in such situations.  But, Oates writes about driving by herself in the middle of the night, by herself in the ER, .... I wonder if that was how they lived--things personal were strictly personal ...