GRIEF, LOSS AND LOVE
Calgary writer’s intimate memoir explores personal journey to healing
Near the end of Sharon Butala’s new memoir, she imagines her late husband, Peter, looking over her shoulder as she writes about him, embarrassed but grinning sheepishly at her “declarations of undying love.”
In the hands of a lesser writer, it may have come off as hackneyed. But in the context of Where I Live Now, it almost seems like a succinct metaphor for what it’s like to write an intimate memoir.
“If it wasn’t Peter it was the neighbours or Peter’s family or it was my own family or it was other writers,” says Butala, who now lives in Calgary. “Somebody is always looking over your shoulder. But, of course, Peter looking over my shoulder carried a little more weight than any of the others.”
Peter died in 2007, bringing 31 years of marriage to an end and leaving Butala lost in a haze of grief, not only for her husband but for the loss of a rural life that she had embraced for decades.
The memoir is about far more than loss, of course. Where I Live Now also chronicles Butala’s relatively late-in-life artistic awakening, revealing how she found her voice as a bestselling and awardwinning writer of historical fiction with a feminist bent. It’s a study of aging and gender roles in Canada’s rural West and offers insight into our relationship with nature, something Butala tackled years earlier with her 1994 non-fiction work The Perfection of the Morning, nominated for a Governor General’s Award. At the centre is a touching and unlikely love story between a pragmatic rancher and his petite, university-educated wife, a relationship Butala explores with tenderness and unwavering honesty.
But grief is undeniably at the heart of the memoir and Butala pulls no punches, revealing it in all its dimensions: From those early days after Peter’s death when simply functioning was a chore to the dull ache of loneliness and flashes of anxiety that followed her for years. Butala nevertheless eventually concludes that even grief can morph into something useful.
“I think it turns into a kind of human warmth that helps you to live and establish new relationships and it turns you into a wiser person and a more compassionate one,” she says. “It opens your psyche to all sorts of possibilities.”
As the memoir briefly chronicles, Butala spent her early years in various rural outposts in Saskatchewan before moving to Saskatoon at the age of 13. But by the 1970s, she was divorced from her first husband, had a young son and was in the midst of a promising academic career when she met Peter Butala and fell in love. He was a kind-hearted if set-in-hisways rancher in his early 40s who had purposely put off marriage to ensure the smooth operation of his family’s sprawling ranch and hay farm near Eastend, Sask. They married in 1976 and Butala lived on the vast rural property until shortly after Peter’s death, when she moved to Calgary.
It was on that land where Butala became a writer, influenced by both her surroundings and the often lonely experiences of rural women throughout the history of Western Canada. Much of Where I Live Now investigates the writer’s deep, and often seemingly otherworldly, connection to the land.
“Generally speaking, the women of the species are the ones who are more open to what is always there for everyone,” she says. “As a writer and an artist and one who went through more than 30 years of solitude, of solitary living to a large extent and living in my head, I became more and more amenable to that aspect of what is available to the human species. What I was saying is, ‘There’s a whole lot more out there, fellas, than meets the physical eye. Nature is where you find it.’”
Peter was supportive of Butala’s writing and was the go-to source when it came to getting the obscure details of rural life accurate in her historical fiction. But he showed little interest in reading any of his wife’s books. In that regard, they lived in separate worlds.
“The older I get the more I see that much of my work is about the male-female tug of war,” she says. “Peter lived in a masculine world, as most western men do, and viewed the world in a way that was inherently masculine. I came along and saw the world from a deeply feminine point of view and that’s what I wrote about.”
But while the book is deeply personal and often painful to write — “It was awful, it was terribly hard,” she says — it wasn’t originally meant to be that way. Simon and Schuster first enlisted Butala to write a nonfiction book about women and aging. The original draft did include Bulata’s own story, but that wasn’t the focus. The publisher eventually decided it should be.
Still, Butala admits she was surprised that some of the most personal material — including passages that were the most painful to write — ended up being left on the cutting-room floor. She was also not completely sold on the book’s subtitle, “A Journey Through Love and Loss to Healing and Hope.”
Now 76 and still coping with the vagaries of city life after more than three decades in the country, Butala is hesitant to suggest the memoir will offer readers hope per se. But she acknowledges her goal with her memoir, as it is with all of writing, was to answer a fundamental question: What is a human life worth?
“I simply hoped to point out, in some way, that you have to think of your life as rich and beautiful at the deepest level,” she says. “That’s what everybody’s life is, no matter how full of suffering and injustice it may have been.”
The older I get the more I see that much of my work is about the male-female tug of war.