By Lisa Moore, 2009

Helen’s husband Cal dies when the Ocean Ranger goes down in February of 1982. Their plan had been for him to do his dangerous but lucrative job long enough for them to buy a small business. She is left with a shattered life, pregnant and with three older children, the oldest a boy who is 10 years old.

The death of her husband makes Helen feel she is outside life, outside society, outside herself. “She was banished. Banished from everyone, and from herself.” To maintain the illusion she is still inside, she insists what is left of the family eat supper together, without tv, and with no elbows on the table. She will do her best to control the little bit of the world she still has some control over.

February is the best fictional treatment of grieving I have read. We follow Helen’s life for 26 years after the sudden violent tragic death of her husband. Moore makes us feel what it feels like to get used to not being touched. She makes us feel how it is to have those who love us try to be patient while wishing we would just get over it. Helen does not achieve closure, she does not put it all behind her, but she does manage to go on living.

While waiting for the settlement Helen still has to feed her children and pay utilities. She reaches a particularly low point when the pipes freeze and she can’t afford a plumber so she takes a blowtorch to them. Louise, who is struggling herself, tersely drops off a week’s groceries, and brushes off Helen’s efforts to thank her.

Louise accompanies Helen to all the children’s Christmas concerts and in time becomes her companion on warm-weather vacations. In the early years of widowhood, Helen tries a number of menial jobs while Cal’s mother babysits, and eventually settles into sewing wedding and graduation dresses at home. This work brings in money, satisfies Helen’s creative impulses, and gives her some sense of optimism, at least about the lives of others.

I skimmed my way through this book on first read. My desire to know how things would turn out for Helen pushed thoughts of almost everything else out of my mind. It takes many years before she is ready to confront the horrendous details of Cal’s death. The part of the book where she does so is achingly sad. Helen is such a compelling character I will think about her for the rest of my life.

On second reading, I see that the other characters are also compelling. The three daughters are by no means the same person, and Cal’s parents are finely and sympathetically drawn.

John as the oldest child and only boy, as often happens in such situations, tries to take on the fatherly role. While a boy he gets a paper route to bring in money. As an adult he becomes an engineer who travels the world, working in the same industry that killed his father. His training to go under water in a small capsule while trusting those above to save him if necessary is particularly harrowing–for John and for the reader. He sends money home to help his sisters but avoids becoming a father himself, because he knows what happens to fathers and what their absence entails. Finally, fate makes the decision about fatherhood for him.

Cal and Helen are lapsed Catholics who turn their relationship and their family into a kind of religion. Helen’s Catholic upbringing is evident in her using the names of Mary, Jesus and Joseph as curses and also as prayers of a sort, and in the way she goes to the basilica after the ship goes down. The old women sing with a resignation that Helen does not feel immediately after the accident and never does feel. “They sang and the reedy sound was resignation. It takes seventy or eighty years of practice to master resignation, but the old women know it is a necessary skill.”

Helen finds an income through the sewing, and some measure of solace through her children and grandchildren. She also tries on-line dating, and spends a terrible evening in a bar waiting for a man whose on-line dating name is Heathcliff with whom she has been exchanging e-mails for three months.

As she waits seven possible Heathcliffs come and go without sitting down beside her.

Anne Enright describes this book as, “Passionate, gritty, lucid, and beautiful.” It is all of those things. If I were to compare Lisa Moore to any other writer, it would be Anne Enright, another novelist whose focus is feeling and family.