Getting old inevitably means losses and memories. I’m pretty sure that there is a considerable amount of autobiographical experience in Alvarez’ story of a newly widowed retired writing teacher.
The title refers to Antonia’s pondering the afterlife of her dead husband. What afterlife do people have? She thinks of Sam often, and seems to have conversations of a sort with him (though he seems to get the last word a lot of the time). Will there be anything more?
“All she has come up with is that the only way not to let the people she loves die forever is to embody what she loved about them. Otherwise the world is surely depleted.” (p. 115)
Whatever losses may come, the world does not stop, even for retired widows.
Antonia is called upon to deal with the old problems of her sisterhood, her three demonstrative Dominican sisters. If Antonia is adrift in retirement, her older sister Izzy is careening as wildly as ever, to the distress of the other sisters. Just how should one care for someone who seems to careless for herself?
At the same time, Antonia faces a new challenge in the form of a young migrant who arrives on her door step, pregnant, abandoned, and young, so very, very young. Antonia, comfortable and safe, is thrust into the risky role of grandmother and protector of fugitieves. It is difficult to not intervene and care for this teenage Madonna, but the truth is it isn’t at all clear what the right thing to do.
In the end, Antonia can do no better than what her mother had said in the face of unsolvable troubles: “We will see what love can do.” (p. 188)
There is not always a happy ending in life or in this story, but we have to try as best we can, and, indeed, see what love can do.
- Julia Alvarez, Afterlife, Chapel HIll, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2020.
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