It is a very tough piece of the puzzle to figure out how Maud remained "fond" of Ewan throughout the entirety of an emotionally starved marriage. It kind of bums me out to read in The Gift of Wings-- at the funeral-- as a part of "Maud's story" of the epilogue:
"There were whispers asking how she had died: it was an open casket, and, wasted to nothing, she did not resemble the woman they had known.
She looked 'horrible', some whispered, lacking fitting words."
The Gift of Wings, Mary Rubio, p. 584
I have a note that is scribbled at the end of "Maud's Story" in my copy of GOW : "YIKES" , it says, and the note was probably a response to the following:
"Maud had asked in her journals that her tombstone be inscribed with a line she adapted from Shakespeare: "After life's fitful fever, she sleeps well." No one had read the request in her journals, and so she sleeps peacefully among her own folk without it, her grave visited regularly by fans from all over the world." The Gift of Wings, Mary Rubio, p. 584If you compare "Maud's Story" to "Ewan's Story" in the same epilogue, it seems that Ewan's final years were happier and jollier in the nursing home at St. Michael's:
"He was showered with attention there by nurses who loved this gentle, dimpled smiling old man, and made his final year happy."
The Gift of Wings, Mary Rubio, p 585
Can we conclude by comparing the variables of these two endings that Maud was simply a martyr throughout her years of marriage with Ewan???
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