One Halloween, when I was about seven, my mother was irritable after school and took a short nap before we went trick-or-treating. I got that crestfallen feeling children get. I was going to be a bad fairy, but I had no wand. Looking around, I spied my father’s Szechuan peppers drying on the door, upside down. I broke one off, bright red, slick with the oil of its spices, and wrapped it in a funnel of tinfoil. Sometimes in those days my father would try to amuse me by wrapping tinfoil into a ball and telling me it contained magic.
No, I’d say.
Yes, he’d insist.
There’s no magic in there. How did you get magic in there?
That is what tinfoil is for. We wrap leftovers in it, but it’s really for capturing magic. Be careful, though: you can’t open it, because the magic will be gone. And you might need it later. Magic is hard to catch, so we should save this one.
No . . . I said.
But I was convinced. I kept that ball of tinfoil carefully against my side all night.
So tonight, remembering the magic tinfoil, I decided the base of my wand would be tinfoil. The hot pepper on top.
My mother woke up.
Let me show you my wand, I said.
OK, she said drowsily.
It’s really cool. Look.
She looked and started laughing. That’s clever, Meg. Very original.
And that was my magic.
It was a warm fall and there were more leaves on the trees than usual. As a friend and I walked home from a birthday party she nudged me and said, “Oh, look! They’re already putting up the winter holiday decorations.” I looked up, and there was a large electric snowflake strung across the street. “It’s a little early, no?” she continued, unaware of the effect it was having on me. “Yes,” I said. “It’s a little early.”
A FEW WEEKS EARLIER, on a late-summer day when even the grass had been burning in the sun, I’d received a condolence note—an e-mail—from a man who’d known my mother in grade school. I had never heard of this man. His shock that she was dead emanated from the note. My curiosity piqued, I wrote back to ask if he had any stories to share of my mother as a girl. Just the week before, I’d read that the newly bereaved often crave more information about the dead—stories that show sides of the person you didn’t know. Anytime I heard a new story about my mother, it was like she was alive again. She was still capable of generating novelty! So perhaps she was not quite dead.
It is said, too, that daughters are particularly keen to learn more about their dead mothers. Whatever the case, D. had stories but wanted to share them in person. We met a few months after e-mailing, on a rainy Friday morning, by a building that had been destroyed on 9/11 and then rebuilt. The week before, he’d called our meeting off because he had to think it over, but today he showed up—a tall man with sandy gray hair; you could see the boy still in his loping walk. He worked at Ground Zero, overseeing some reconstruction, and he’d planned a tour to break the ice, then coffee.
As we walked around he described the progress of foundation laying in the east and west “bathtubs,” or the footprints of the old buildings. The scope of the work was extraordinary. Pointing out the crane at work on one of the towers, he noted, “That’s the biggest crane anyone has ever used. And see those baskets hanging off the girders? That’s a new technique, one developed just to work with these girders. They’re designed to withstand the kind of fireball that took down the Twin Towers. Buildings this secure have never been made.”
We stood, taking in the scene.
“You look like your father’s side of the family,” D. observed suddenly. “You don’t have that Kelly black hair.” We were passing Dey Street, and he paused and waved to a heavyset man bent over a drill in the midst of a construction crew.
“Hey, Tommy,” D. called out to him. “Tommy!” The man came over, breaking into a smile. They hugged and kissed.
D. says, “Let me introduce you. This is Meghan O’Rourke. She’s Barbara O’Rourke’s—Barbara Kelly’s—daughter.”
“Barbara Kelly,” Tommy repeats, lighting up. “No kiddin’!” I recognize his accent. “How’s Barbara? How’s your mother doin’?”
I started to change my facial expression—something I realized I always do—when D. put his hand on my shoulder and said, gently, “She passed away, Tommy. She passed away last year.”
Tommy’s face changed. “Ah, I’m so sorry. Your mother, she was a great lady, she was a blast,” he said, squeezing my hand. “She also did well in school. I didn’t, as you can tell!”
At a deli down the block, the owner knew D. well. “Sit down, sit down,” he said, as we walked in, and he brought coffee and urged food on D., who waved it off. “I can’t eat. I have a story I have to tell.”
As I ate a sandwich, D. started to talk slowly.
It had been forty years since he last saw my mother. They had gone to Catholic school together in New Jersey, back when their town was different: more Catholic, more insular, more old-fashioned. He was unpopular, she was popular; he was a bad student, she was a good student; he was a football player, she was a cheerleader. She was part of a clique he didn’t much like. Once, before he got to know her, he’d gone to Holmdel Park, where all the boys and girls paired up in an elaborate, orchestrated ritual organized by the girls, and walked along various paths, and my mother had somehow ended up with him. Then, at a dance, she approached him while “Hey Jude” was playing and asked him to dance. Later it played again, and my mother went up to him a second time, and, as he put it, “in her direct, Barbara way, she said, ‘So you’re going to dance with me again, right?’”
I interrupted to ask what the other girls were like, and he said, slowly, “There was no one like your mother.”
They grew close. They told each other everything, walking home from school carrying books, talking on the phone for hours. On the school trip to the Museum of Natural History in New York, my mother lingered with D. and explained all the exhibits to him. She was sharp, he said, but you wouldn’t know it unless you were friends with her; she was not a show-off in class. At another dance they walked out from the party and held hands in the courtyard. He felt it was like she had sensed that he wanted to be alone with her—not to do anything, but just to be away from the pack.
In class, he struggled with reading, so my mother arranged to sit next to him—she could make things happen, as he put it. When it was his turn to read, she would read the words under her breath to guide him. “She always leaned way too close,” he said. “I was sure the nuns would notice.” He wasn’t always a good student, and one day he heard a nun say, “Barbara Kelly should not be hanging out with the likes of that boy.”
Her friends also didn’t like that they were spending so much time together. One summer day they were at the beach club when a popular boy picked a fight with D., who was sitting next to my mother; the boy told D. to move away and make room. The fight put D. in a terrible mood; he felt this marked the beginning of the end of their friendship. But my mother asked him to take a swim with her. She swam out much farther than he was comfortable with, but she was very athletic. They stayed in the ocean for an hour, talking, sitting on the rope buoys, her dark hair blowing across her face. Her lips got blue. He told her they should go in, but she said, Let’s just sit out here a while longer. They sat together under the big sky, listening to the cries of the birds.
As time went on, as he told it, older boys were becoming annoyed that my mother paid D. so much attention. In football practice, one tackled him purposefully hard and broke his wrist. D. was benched. He had to go to the games and watch my mother cheer for all the other players. That was hard; it had always felt like something between them that she was a cheerleader and he was on the team. But during the game, she looked up at him as he sat on the bleachers.
At some point soon after, he began to drift away, having decided there was no way to stay friends. Without football, he was having a bad time, and he started getting kicked out of class for talking back to th
e nuns. One day my mother stopped at his locker and said, “I don’t like what I’m hearing about what’s going on with you. Are you OK?” And he said, “Yes,” and walked away. She tried again later. “Why don’t we talk anymore?” she asked, stopping at his locker again; he didn’t respond. She looked extremely hurt, he told me, but he closed his locker and walked away, thinking he would never forget the look on her face. And he hadn’t.
Soon after, my mother left to go to the public school in town. He saw her only one more time. She had already met my father and was at Barnard; home for a visit, she was picking her sisters up from a dance. He was hanging out in the parking lot with some friend. One said, “Barbara Kelly is inside, you should say hi.” And he said, “No, I can’t.” Then he thought, What the hell, why not? We can have the last conversation we should have had. I can explain what really happened. He found her and he said hello. And she just looked at him. Then she turned around and left. That was the last time he saw her.
It was funny: He had always wanted to get out of the town as soon as he could. But it was my mom who left, while he stayed, living two blocks from their school. He told me he never speaks of this period of his life, but last year his father had died and a bunch of old friends wrote to him, asking him to get together with them. He stopped to think about why he always pushed these friends away, and, he told me, “Barbara flashed into my mind, and I thought that if I could just make that girl laugh once more, everything would be OK.”
He knew from another friend that she worked at Saint Ann’s. He googled her to get her number, to tell her he wanted to give her a tour of Ground Zero. Instead, up came the New York Times notice: The entire Saint Ann’s family mourns the loss of Barbara O’Rourke, friend, colleague and teacher, and extends its profound sympathies to Paul, Meghan, Liam and Eamon.
Memories flooded him, memories he couldn’t push away. Every night when he walked the dog—just blocks away from their old haunts—he thought of my mother. So one day he wrote to me, half thinking I would write back to tell him it was all a huge misunderstanding. After all, there was no way the girl he had known, and always meant to apologize to, was simply gone. It had seemed there would be time for one last meeting, one last conversation, one last chance to talk about the bond that had once been between them.
He had a photo he wanted to give me. It showed a barefoot girl with long legs sitting next to a gangly thirteen-year-old boy whose arm is in a cast. “She came to visit me when I was injured,” he told me, “and wouldn’t let anyone else sit next to me.” Her hair is black and neat. Her features look etched, as if she is more painted than real.
He said, “I don’t know why, but I have been haunted by your mother’s death ever since I found out about it. I didn’t feel this upset when my father died.” As we left the deli, we paused once more to look down at the footprint of the towers. And he told me one more thing. His sons played soccer in Holmdel Park, where he and my mother walked that first day. In the park, the trees are mostly hardwood. But there is one part where there is a stand of pines, and the path becomes soft. One day during their practice he went back around the paths and there they were, the pines, and Barbara came vividly to his mind. He doesn’t know why. Maybe she said something about them. Whatever it was, it’s gone. But whenever he sees the pines alone there among the hardwoods, he thinks of the girl he once knew, and their long-ago friendship.
As I walked home over the Brooklyn Bridge, I was wrapped in a languorous, uneasy exhaustion. That vision of her in the pines, I reflected, was the true ghost, the haunting that Halloween’s false ghosts only parody. Home, I got in bed and slept for three hours, as if I’d been on a taxing trip and needed rest.
ONE OF THE GRUBBY TRUTHS about a loss is that you don’t just mourn the dead person, you mourn the person you got to be when the lost one was alive. This loss might even be what affects you most. Jim kept saying, “I am sorry for all the things your mother is going to miss”—and he would list them. And I would think: I am a sorry excuse for a daughter. I just think about how I miss her. I’m sorry for myself, sorry about losing a life where I always had a mom to go to. Whatever the case, in grief you’re not just reconstituting the lost person, recalling her, then letting her go—you’re having to grow into the shocking new role you play on a planet without her. One night Liam said to me, as we were driving home from my dad’s to Brooklyn, “I am not as sad as I was, but the thing is, it’s just less fun and less good without her.” I only now have begun to understand what that means. The main difference is that I’m the only woman in a family of men—a father and two brothers. That this shift came with a certain caretaking aspect, whether I willed it or not, was underscored at my mother’s funeral. My father spoke about how my mother had cut his hair since he was twenty-three, when they got married. Afterward, her sister Joanne came up to me and said, “Now you’re going to have to cut his hair!”
No way. Off he went to the barber the next week.
But that first fall, I found myself making a point of having lunch, talking with him about selling the house. He talked about buying a smaller house, deeper in the countryside. He was sixty-three. I had disastrous visions of his getting sick three years from now and going through the whole goddamn thing again, only now he would be an hour from any hospital and two hours from the city. So I said, Wouldn’t you maybe prefer to rent a place closer to the train station, closer to the city, so we can all visit easily? By the end of lunch he’d come around to this idea. I could see that my mother was dead. In the past he’d never have listened to me like that. In a tiny way I was becoming my mother—and that was not just a melancholic identification. We take on parts of the role the person played.
Part of my new role is to worry. I have a twenty-one-year-old brother who no longer has a mother and who hasn’t graduated from college. He started teaching part-time at Pierrepont and living with my dad. He wants eventually to transfer to a new college, but sometimes this plan seems vaguely distant. And I find that I think about him, worry about him. I call my father to say, “We need to figure out his college applications.” I come by the house and say, “Kiddo, don’t you need to wash your hair?” And, “I think he needs a desk and a dresser in his room.” And, “Don’t you want a plate to eat that off?” My father does everything he is capable of, but he’s in his own grief.
“I just feel like I’m standing in place, and everyone else, all my friends, they’re moving on,” Eamon said to me one day, the fall after her death. I told him, “No, not at all—you’re young. Your whole life is in front of you. You just need to figure out what you want to do—apply to school, travel, what.” He was sitting next to me at the school my mother used to help run, watercoloring a poster he made for the door of his classroom. He had drawn a castle and moat, a deep moat, with a dragon attacking it from on high. Around the castle he’d printed all the names of the kids in the class.
“Yeah,” he said. The paintbrush scratched over the print. “I don’t know.”
But I was telling him partial lies. Because his friends are moving on, many of them with their mothers and fathers at their backs, giving them allowances, helping them buy clothes, showing up at graduation with gifts and flowers, and when he should have been preparing to leave school he was in a hospital saying, I think they’re giving her too much Ativan, too much morphine.
What are the last words of hers that Eamon remembers? After she died he went red-eyed into the living room and curled up on the couch and wrote in his notebook. Later he left it open and I saw in his handwriting, still so like a little boy’s, large-lettered and round, MOM DIED TODAY. SHE . . . and I stopped reading, I picked up the notebook and closed it and put it to the side before the funeral. That night after her death—after that Christmas dinner I barely remember—I found him on the couch looking at a picture of her and him when he was three, the two of them on boogie boards on Cape Cod, and they’re tan and he’s all blond hair and baby curls and blue eyes and he’s grinning as children do and she is smiling a
s mothers do and the ocean sweeps around them, foaming and aquamarine, and you can almost see it move. He was hitting his hand to his forehead over and over. I went over and I took the picture from his hands and I said, I know you need to feel this, but I think you need to go to sleep right now, darling. It’s late and you’re exhausted. The picture will be here tomorrow. And he let me slip the picture from his hands and give him water and an Ativan.
Now he was silent and curved away from me over the drawing.
I didn’t know you could draw so well, I said, lamely.
Yeah, he said.
A few months after my mother died I was reading a memoir by my great-uncle David, my grandfather’s youngest brother, a priest who lives in Berkeley. In it he wrote that he was “especially aware of having moved from the ground rules of one world into a new world with completely different rules.” These new rules were connected to “a sense of entitlement”: Young people today believe that they are entitled. Entitled to the good life, entitled to live without frustration, entitled to a sense of personal fulfillment, entitled to sexual relationships without personal entanglements. . . . I live and work in this world. But I feel like a tourist. In effect, I have become an outsider.
I realized it was what I’d been feeling—I have suddenly become an outsider among my peers. Because many had not gone through a terrible loss or a major illness, they were still operating as planners, coordinators, under the star of entitlement, from which I had been abruptly banished. I had felt that, however benignly or unconsciously, the world around me wanted my grief stifled and silenced; it threatened a particular lie of the moment and class I lived in, the myth of self-improvement and control, the myth of meritocratic accomplishment leading to happiness and security. I drew close to those who’d gone through an experience that ruptured this way of seeing the world, because those who hadn’t often left me feeling keenly alone. A year after my mother died, my friend Jodie’s father was in the hospital; I told a mutual friend, who went silent, then said, “You always think these things are going to happen to someone else, but I guess that one day they’re going to happen to us.” I didn’t know how to respond.
The Long Goodbye Page 17