Half Lives

Anne Milano Appel, Ph.D. ©2026

            I was driving home from a dinner at the home of a woman who had lost her husband a few years ago. Over the years Estelle had gathered together a loosely knit group of women, all of a certain age, all widowed, all determined to move forward, and tonight she had invited several of them to meet along with me and Ellie, another woman who fit the category. Though we “grief girls” shared a common bond, we were all very different in our circumstances, interests, and approaches to dealing with our loss.

            As I idled at a stop light, the thought hit me that all of us were now living half lives. Not in the scientific sense of the time required for a substance to break down and lose its initial value. No, it was more the idea that individuals left without their life partners are dealing with a hole, a gap, something missing.

Fast forward from the night of that dinner. Friendships had started to form among the participants of the weekly grief group I attended, and one night a couple of us shared links to our websites. Out of curiosity, I went home, started scrolling, and had a kind of epiphany. An individual who in the group sessions came across as vulnerable and uncertain, convinced she was not meeting certain family expectations related to her loss, was actually quite an accomplished woman. As I shamelessly continued my search, looking for other names on LinkedIn and other social media venues, it came to me that none of us were really living half lives. True, in the sessions we only got to know one another’s grieving selves, the selves defined by our personal and very individual losses. Yet each of us was much more than that. Every one of us had many different facets that distinguished us and defined our identity. The grieving self was only part of that rich mixture. To ignore the other aspects would be to impoverish who we are.

            As a translator I can’t help drawing a parallel with translation and how it is sometimes regarded. For some, the meaning of the foreign text is somehow altered or distorted when it is converted into another language, implying a failure, intentional or not, on the part of the translator to respect the original author and his work. It continues to amazes me that there are people who think of translation as a loss: “lost in translation” as the saying goes. Nabokov, for example, considered non-literal translation a profanation. In his poem “On Translating Eugene Onegin,” he regarded translation as the decapitation of the prime author: a “poet's pale and glaring head” on a platter. Viewing translation as a gain rather than a loss produces a more positive perspective. The same can be said of loss. If you think of the gains, living a half life has its positive as well as negative features.

I am reminded of a special glass I have at home that I use all the time. It is part of a small set that my husband bought me one day while we were browsing in a houseware shop in Italy. It’s a simple tumbler, no stem, with a line circling it midway down. The words “ottimista-pessimista” appear above and below the line, inviting the question of whether your glass is half full or half empty. Recalling the glass started me thinking about the positives and negative of the hole that you find is left in your days and in your heart. To think of that absence solely as something lacking, something lost, is to admit defeat and remain in the state of immobility that characterizes a loss. “The fog is real” said a woman in the bereavement group I attend.

If instead you fill your glass above the line, you may start to glimpse some positive effects as you negotiate your journey. For one thing, you may begin to realize that you are capable of doing things you never thought you could; you may find that you are more open to new friendships; you may learn that it’s okay to ask for help and to rely on people. And as Toni Morrison put it: “Sometimes you don't survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It's not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances.”

 About the Author

Anne Milano Appel, Ph.D., has translated texts by a number of leading Italian authors for US and UK publishers. Her shorter works – translated and authored – have appeared in a variety of literary journals.

--Anne Milano Appel, Ph.D. ©2026