The Long Goodbye

by Meghan O'Rourke

  Around Easter, I began to experience some respite from my sorrow. The daffodils were peeking up out of the seemingly still-frozen ground. The magnolias had come into bloom, their spoon-size petals opening wide. And I started feeling less beset. Not “recovered.” But more even-keeled. In this, I conformed to the clinical norm: many mourners begin to feel less depressed around four months after the death. (A part of me was annoyed: I didn’t want to conform to a chart.) The main difference was that I had more energy; still, when I was sad, the pangs were just as painful—perhaps more so, since it had been longer since I’ve seen my mother, and the reality of her death was beginning to intrude in new ways.

  Some researchers say grief comes in waves, welling up and dominating one’s emotional life, then subsiding, only to recur—an experience I recognized as my own. As George A. Bonanno, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University, has written, “When we look more closely at the emotional experiences of bereaved people over time, the level of fluctuation is nothing short of spectacular.” This oscillation, he theorizes, offers relief from the stress grief creates. That made sense. I thought of one of the lines from Lewis’s A Grief Observed : “Sorrow . . . turns out to be not a state but a process,” he wrote. “It needs not a map but a history.”

  Easter itself was terrible. I spent the day being reminded of the ghosts of Easters past: the many times my mother would hide eggs and then forget where she had put that last one. A week later, moldy and soft, it would turn up in someone’s shoe. (At the time, I couldn’t understand how she could forget: those precious eggs!) I walked around my quiet neighborhood, pained by the sight of parents and their children sauntering about in lazy togetherness.

  The truth was that even four months after my mother’s death, I still privately believed she was coming back. Deep down, I felt that—like Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen—she would, through some effort of mind, reconstitute herself and appear to me, even as a ghostly form.

  On one of those warm spring days that come and vanish, I went for a run in Prospect Park. I finished the loop after a long hill near the entrance. At the top of the rise, there is a stand of magnolias and a view of what’s called the Long Meadow. Exhausted, I sat on the grass and granted myself ten minutes to put aside the to-do lists invading my head and think. (One downside of feeling better had been that it was easier to pretend I was OK. Then work I couldn’t do would pile up.) I felt the sun on my face. The grass tickled my hands. An ant crossed my pinkie.

  As I relaxed, I thought of first one memory of my mother in this park, then another, and then, like a BlackBerry that has tuned in to its signal after a long flight, I was flooded by a dozen distinct memories of being with my mother here. There was the August day in 1994 when she and I met Diana, and we sat in the grass; I read books for school as they talked about their summers. There were the many mornings my mother and I would go running together in the park before school. We listened to running tapes we made and traded; we talked. One morning she had told me that her younger sister—who had a new baby—had colon cancer. Running in the cool air, I imagined myself to be her friend as well as her daughter.

  So I sat there, thinking of her and looking around. I had for a moment the distinct feeling that she had asked me to do this—that she had said, somehow: I can’t look at it; will you look for me? And as I sat, a robin hopped toward me. Its red breast was shiny, and it had bright, bold eyes. And I thought: OK, so, resurrection; I don’t know. But what in the world—in the universe—made this creature? Can evolution account for the mystery of life? As a theory, it doesn’t go as far as I’d like toward explaining the world. I wanted the sky to open up and reveal universal secrets to me. My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures. And here I was, ready to learn! But: silence. A robin hopping closer. I watched it for some time, half wondering if in any way it could be my mother. What MADE you, robin? my mind practically shouted. Then the bird lost interest in me. I stood up. I brushed the dirt from my pants and jogged out of the park, thinking about that bird. How could I disregard the bubbly, foolish sense of beauty I felt looking at it? And: How could I reconcile that with the pain my mother endured before she died?

  The poet Anne Carson wrote that after her mother died she suddenly felt that everything she read was in font. I understand what she meant. I write and want to strikethrough. I smile and want to strikethrough. It is as if, for some time, the world exists mostly in strikethrough. Over time, the strikethrough gets lighter, and you can see the words underneath more clearly. But it’s still

  It’s easy, when you’re grieving, to resent your suffering. My grief was not ennobling me. It made me at times vulnerable and self-absorbed, needy and standoffish, knotted up inside, even punitive. I wanted a way to understand it. But it was hard to know what that way was outside of the ethical framework of religion. In the fall before my mother died, I’d copied out a passage from an interview in The Paris Review with the novelist Marilynne Robinson that gave me some solace. The interviewer recalled Robinson’s having once observed that Americans tend to avoid contemplating “larger issues.” Here is what Robinson, who is a practicing Protestant, said in response:The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of it, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.

  I was trying to learn to do that, because the otherworldliness of loss was so intense that at times I had to believe it was a singular passage, a privilege of some kind, even if all it left me with was a clearer grasp of our human predicament. It was why I kept finding myself drawn to the remote desert: I wanted to be reminded of how the numinous impinges on ordinary life. It was a sensation one could experience even in New York, but the hubbub of commerce and honking cars made it hard to let it in.

  Late on the long days of winter and early spring I would often call Jim, craving the company of someone who knew me well; we fell into a routine of occasionally watching a movie or eating dinner together, but he embodied a future that had been forever lost, painfully discarded, and, stricken, I sometimes turned distant and cold even when I most craved his kindness. I wondered if this was bad for both of us—“Do you think maybe you should take a break from talking?” a friend asked—but contemplating not talking to him was like contemplating not taking a medicine I depended on.

  ONE OF THE FEW TIMES my mother had sounded happy in the last spring of her life, the spring of 2008, during her fifth month of a second round of chemo, was when she talked about the landscaping plans she and my father had for their new home. It was the second home they’d owned. The first was our apartment in Brooklyn, four flights up. At last she had the yard she had always wanted. And at lunch one day—after we had gone to see the doctor who passed crystals over her body—my mother told me about the landscaper’s first visit. “We’re going to have staggered trees lining the driveway, so it’s not too fussy. And we’re planting irises and foxgloves at the top, where the drive ends abruptly; it looks like a parking lot right now. And we looked at trees to plant beside the pond by the road. I really want two weeping cherries. They’re like weeping willows, but they have light pink blossoms. They’re beautiful. But they’re way too much money. Ten thousand dollars each.” She played with her chopsticks. “Anyway, it’s too late in the season,” she said. “Maybe next year.”

  A few weeks later, I drove her home from New York-Presbyterian after her chemo. I was late to pick her up because I had wanted to squeeze in a run beforehand. She had an appointment with the doctor after chemo. I played the odds, guessing that he wouldn’t see her right away. But I lost the
gamble and she had to wait for me for ten minutes, standing weakened outside the hospital, her overstuffed bag drooping from her shoulder. When I looked at her settling exhaustedly into the car, her face scaly and dry from Erbitux, one of her cancer drugs, I thought, “Well, I’ll just figure out how to buy her the cherry tree.” As if I had the money.

  She slept most of the way, waking only as we neared the house. “Look,” she suddenly said. “There’s one.” And there it was: a swooping blast of pink among the bracken.

  Now, a year later, there was a weeping cherry practically in my own front yard. I’d moved to my apartment the previous fall, just as my mother entered her final decline. I hadn’t realized that my street was lined with flowering trees: wisteria, dogwood, and the pink weeping cherry. I experienced a shock every time I saw its drifting pink tendrils. Sometimes I thought that its presence meant my mother was coming back. Why would it be here unless it was to announce the universe’s mistake? Here you go. She’s a good woman. You can have her a bit longer.

  I visited my father’s house in mid-April. It was only the fourth time I had been there.

  My father’s house resembled my parents’ house: same number of rooms, same smells of garlic and ginger in the kitchen, same dogs wagging their tails. It was what wasn’t there that made it different. An absence that becomes a presence, like the shadow cast by an oil lamp on a stormy night: her voice, calling out to me as she went to bed, walking past my room, sometimes knocking and tucking her head around the corner: Good night, Meg. Her bustling around the kitchen, her coughing, her shuffling slippers, the way she sat in the mornings, those last five months, in the living room, looking out the window at the pines. Her solitude within herself. These things were missing. I had memories of her, but I no longer had her secret sense of the world, the self that took notes and wrote them in scraps of small books. I found one after she died, complaining that at Christmas my father had given her books she wouldn’t be very interested in.

  Dad showed me around the garden. He was excited. “Come see,” he said. “Last year, your mother and I planted these irises and foxgloves. The irises never bloomed and I thought, oh well, they didn’t take. Look at them now. The foxgloves were all brown and shriveled. I was about to dig them up a few weeks ago, when I came out and I found that they had grown several inches. And were green!” He was happy, as if this meant that my mother might, too, go green in the earth, and somehow return. It hurt to see how happy he was, and to think of them together, privately planting these flowers; the thought of his pain was too difficult for me to bear.

  That weekend, I found one of my scrawled notes from a doctor’s appointment my mother and I went to together:

  Alkaline. Mushrooms.

  It meant she needed to eat more alkaline foods, to combat the cancer.

  The psychologist and bereavement expert Therese Rando argues that mourning requires people to recollect and reexperience the deceased before relinquishing the old attachments. I knew that I was supposed to relinquish the old attachment, but I didn’t want to yet. When I see the lilacs my mother loved, I thought, will that not return her to me?

  My father, I could tell as he showed me the flowers, was wondering something similar.

  Last week, a friend e-mailed me about the cherry blossom festival at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which my parents had taken us to every spring as kids, and I decided to go, because my mother couldn’t. I went on an unseasonably warm day—freak weather that descended on the Northeast for a weekend, sending us from spring to summer overnight. Entering the gardens was like walking into an old dream. The space was familiar, but I couldn’t attach a narrative to it. I followed the flow of people past the front lawn, noting the benches and trees dedicated in memory of someone. I’d never understood the point of such benches. Now I did. (One day in college, I was sitting on a bench in my dorm’s courtyard, when an old man approached me. “Do you like to sit here?” he asked me. “Sometimes,” I said. “It’s nice in the sun.” “I put this bench here in memory of my son,” he said. He patted the warm stone.)

  At the end of the meadow the lilacs were in full bloom and the scent was overwhelming. We’d lived in Maine for a year when I was in nursery school, in a house with lilac bushes beside the porch. One of my first memories is of standing with my mother under one as she pulled a lilac blossom down to my nose. “Smell,” she said. “Doesn’t that smell good?” As I stood there, a bee buzzed and I saw a father pulling a stem down toward his toddler son, saying, “Smell,” and the boy closed his eyes and breathed in. “Mmmm,” he said. “That smells good.”

  My friend had been wrong. The festival was not for another week. But the trees on the Esplanade were already in bloom. People took pictures in elaborate groupings. The Esplanade is designed to draw your eyes down its majestic avenues of cherries, and so I’d never noticed the weeping cherry that stood off to the side. It was extremely tall, stretching upward with “weeps” that reached to the ground. I walked off the path, parted the blossoms, and stepped inside the circle of the tree’s blooms.

  Inside, there was a diffuse pink otherworldly light. By entering I had moved into another realm. I felt protected. In here I could detect my mother touching my skin. I thought: Stepping inside this “embrace” is the closest I am ever going to come to having my mother touch me in this world. Because my mother had loved these trees so much, she had poured something of herself into them, as if her soul had left her and entered them. Even if in no way did I think she was, literally, in the tree.

  CHAPTER TEN

  {reckoning}

  On Friday of Memorial Day weekend, I drove out to visit a couple of friends in Montauk, a fishing town on the South Fork of Long Island. It was the first time I had been by the ocean since my mother’s death. We strolled down the dock, past the boats. The air stank of salt and fish, like Cape Porpoise, the Maine town where we had lived when I was four and Liam was a toddler. Tired of the city, my parents wanted to live in the country. My father left his position at Saint Ann’s and took a job on a boat as a commercial fisherman; my mother, who found part-time work making cakes for a local diner, would take us down to the harbor to meet the boat now and then. Sometimes my father would smuggle past the harbor police a lobster illegally caught in the nets, wrapping it in a sweater and throwing it to my mother. While we waited, I liked to run along a series of paths on a cliff by the sea; they split and forked through the dune grass, heading off in mysterious directions, evoking all sorts of possible adventures. Now, in Montauk, when the reek of saltwater and fish hit me, a wave of understanding swelled: My mother no longer exists.

  If children learn through exposure to new experiences, mourners unlearn through exposure to absence in new contexts. Grief requires acquainting yourself with the world again and again; each “first” causes a break that must be reset. I knew, already, that the next time I visited the ocean, I would not be gutted like this. In this sense, my mother’s death was not a single event, but a whole series of events—the first Easter without her; the first wedding anniversary without her; the first time Eamon, who has epilepsy, had a seizure and she was not here to calmly take charge. The lesson lay in the empty chair at the dinner table. It was learned night after night, day after day.

  And so you always feel suspense, a queer dread—you never know what occasion will break the loss freshly open.

  I spent all of Saturday on the beach. The waves were repetitive and rhythmic as memories. Liam and his friend J. came up to visit from Sag Harbor. We barbecued hamburgers on the deck, pouring fresh glasses of rosé till we got tipsy. There were Christmas lights over the fireplace, and in the soft light we played music and talked until we were exhausted. I went to bed buzzed and sun-flushed.

  That night I dreamed of witnessing my mother’s death all over again. I woke gasping for breath, tears running down my face, with the jolt of relief all dreamers feel on waking: Thank God. It was just a nightmare.

  Then came the realization that the nightmare was real. I had
dreamed I’d watched my mother die.

  I had, in fact, watched my mother die.

  In the dream version, I was with my mother, my father, and my brothers in the ruined courtyard of an old hospital. Deep in a coma, my mother was strapped to a bulky steel contraption, part hospital bed, part electric chair. The pillared courtyard around her was crumbling. An orderly approached to tell us that a nurse would be putting my mother out of her misery in two minutes. “Your mother is scheduled to die at two-thirty,” the orderly said.

  I stood looking down at my mother, sick to my stomach.

  I know you’re going to die, I thought, but I need you to say goodbye.

  But she was unresponsive.

  Then, as the nurse approached with a cartoonishly large needle, my mother’s left hand drifted through the hospital bed bars and gripped mine. Sand streamed off her hand. And I thought: There is no fucking way I am going to stand here and watch my mother die. This is not to be borne.

  And I woke up.

  Before my mother died I had never seen a dead body. My great-grandmother—my father’s grandmother—died when I was in the fifth grade, but I didn’t go to the funeral or the wake, because it would have meant missing school. My father went off alone, looking uncomfortable in a stiff black suit instead of his usual chamois shirts and jeans. I thought he looked like a figurine of himself. After that, death remained distant until one summer, after eighth grade, Finn, my dog, started to grow lethargic. He was eight years old, and I teased him when we jogged, yanking him along: Come on, old man. One day he wouldn’t get up but lay panting on the floor of the cottage we’d rented in Cape Cod. The vet told us the news: Your dog has a large tumor in his heart, he said. We could operate, but we would have to cut open a flap in his chest—for some reason that phrase remains with me—and it would probably return anyway, so I would advise that you put him down.