For The Day When Grass Widows Are Asked To Tell Their Tales

Reading Ute Heggen's memoir of a trans widow

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“I foresee a day when grass widows will be asked to tell their tales, and here I offer mine,” Ute Heggen writes. She is hopeful that others can learn from her experiences.

“Perhaps one person will try to do the thing I’ve proven can be done. Perhaps just one person, who made the mistake of marrying the kind of man I did, will read my words and find strength and comfort, and leave when she knows she must. Perhaps someone can be stronger than I am, and be all well where I have been half-fallen.”

In The Curated Woods: True Tales From A Grass Widow, the retired educator prefers to use the 14th century term for a woman whose husband was alive but unseen, leaving her “the grass, but no grave” to mourn him.

Heggen accepts the label ‘transwidow’ too, but ‘grass widow’ fits her naturalistic writing ethos. Her memoir unfolds over the year of Covid as a diary of land management, a record of the plants and animals on her rural acreage, pausing to write down the memories of her marriage as the…