The Long Goodbye

By Melvin Madocks

WIDOW

by LYNN CAINE

223 pages. Morrow. $6.95.

Lynn Caine has a bit of the style of the only decent character in a Lois Gould novel. Until five years ago, she and her husband Martin lived comfortably in a Central Park West apartment, making the adjectives "happy" and "hectic" synonymous as only New Yorkers can. Attractive and fortyish, she was (and is) a publicity manager for Little, Brown. He was a successful lawyer, specializing in bankruptcy. They loved their two children, aged four and eight, Mozart, fine wine and summer vacations in New England.

Then one day Martin, a hypochondriac, confirmed his worst suspicions. He had cancer. It was pronounced incurable. At first the Caines went their charming, moderately gilded social ways. "Aren't we classy?" they giggled to each other as if they were starring in a movie. When Hollywood did make the movie, Lynn liked to say to her shocked friends, she would absolutely refuse to let Barbra Streisand play her part. In short, Lynn Caine would probably have been the last person to read the book she has now written about the death of her husband and her own survival.

Widow is neither a gracefully composed elegy nor a profound essay on grief. It threatens more than once to be a nonbook. But its very ordinariness gives Mrs. Caine's account its value. She has the naivete and courage to pose the specific questions. How (and how not) to tell the children? "Get them to ask questions," she advises, and don't try to be "clinical" or "dispassionate." Instead, show your own grief, encourage them to cry. How (and how not) to write letters of condolence? "Praise is wonderfully welcome," she emphasizes, and so is "a little humor"--but "don't tell me how bad you feel." The book verifies that a husband's friends do indeed make passes at the widow. She urges widows to wait--on everything. For months after her husband's death, she suggests, a wife can hardly handle the affairs of daily life, let alone the complications of sex. After numbness comes what Mrs. Caine calls "the Crazy Period." She had mad thoughts--they seemed practical at the time--of buying a ski lodge or a house in Key West. Instead, she went suburban in Hackensack, N.J.--a plan that made almost as little sense, especially because she had no car and, as it turned out, proved incapable of learning to drive.

Money Power. How did Mrs. Caine survive? By bitter flippancies scribbled down on yellow pads late at night ("How's my master plan, God dear? What have you got coming up?"). By folk wisdom, like "Move the body" (she pedaled endless miles on a stationary bicycle). By psychiatric therapy. By working hard at her job. By just waiting out the ordeal. (She has not remarried.) How would she do it differently if she had to do it again? She would talk about death more openly to her husband, to her children. She would not try to stiff-upper-lip it through. And she would have couples make financial preparations--by seeing to things like wills, savings and death benefits, which are often neglected until too late. "Money," she writes savagely, "is power. Strength. Life. It is sexual. I care more about money than I do about sex right now."

Women--and men--will have to decide how much of the author's perception might apply to them. But as Mrs. Caine reminds her readers, about 70% of American women over 65 have been widowed at least once. Here, for whatever comfort example can give, is the logbook of one who made it through the rites of passage. . Melvin Maddocks

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