The Long Goodbye

by Meghan O'Rourke

  My first memory is of waking up from a dream about balloons, a street fair, being on my father’s shoulders. My mother comes into the room. Where was the parade we went to last night? I ask her. Hmm? she says, pulling my pajamas over my head. We went to a parade. The cotton shirt lassoes my arms. No, honey, that was a dream, she says.

  Some days still, the memories come. And I can’t read, or think, or do anything but want her.

  IN MY MIND, Thanksgiving marked the beginning of the end of my mother’s life. I had a cold hollow in my stomach thinking about its arrival. A few days before, I went for a walk on the Brooklyn Bridge, looking out over the metallic water. Gazing out beyond the Statue of Liberty and the Buttermilk Channel to the Verrazano, beyond the loading docks and derricks, I felt, viscerally, the interweaving of industry and nature and people, the layers of history. It helped me slip out of the grip of obdurate individuality and into the grip of something larger: a sense that I was part of a system. That morning I had reread a section of John Ashbery’s “The New Spirit”:Because life is short

  We must remember to keep asking it the same question

  Until the repeated question and the same silence become answer

  In words broken open and pressed to the mouth

  And the last silence reveal the lining

  Until at last this thing exist separately

  At all levels of the landscape and in the sky . . .

  Walking home, thinking about the silent changes that had occurred in me over the last year, I reached the intersection of Atlantic Avenue and Court. As I stood at the light I heard a thud. Something feathery rolled along the hood of a black sedan to my right and hit the ground, and there were feathers, a leg, another leg—had the driver hit a pigeon?—and even as I wondered, the feathers slowed into a tawny hugeness and the thing rolled over and I saw amber eyes look at me and blink. It was a hawk—a large, magnificent hawk. Struggling to raise itself up, it shook its wings but fell back. It lay panting on the pavement two feet from me, huge, badly hurt. I began to shake. Seeing it jostled some sensation loose in me that had been tamped down since my mother’s death—the panic of witnessing vulnerability, a creature struggling not to die.

  The car that hit it drove on. Now the light was red. A man advanced into the traffic and waved at the bird. I stepped into the street and waved, too, as if it could be shooed. It strained but couldn’t get off the ground. “Come on,” I said, powerless. Cars were honking and people were turning to stare and the traffic pressed forward. What should I do? What could I do? Could I call 911? Confusedly, I stepped back on the sidewalk and called Jim. “There’s a hawk in the street,” I said nonsensically, crying, as if he could do something about it. The man nudged it again and then the light changed once more and the cars surged forward. “Oh no,” I said. “Oh no.”

  But as I held the phone to my ear the hawk strained once again and this time it lifted up, unfurling its long wings and rising, heading from the ground to the sky majestically. “What’s happening?” Jim said. “It’s flying,” I said. Hanging low, it looped to the left and changed direction. “It’s flying. I don’t know if it’s OK, but it’s flying.” And I hung up and ran after to see, still shaking. One minute it had been on the ground, wounded, mortal, and the next it had risen, and a burden lifted from my shoulders.

  Thanksgiving itself was cloudy and mild. I bought apples for pie at the local store before driving up with my brothers; the Brooklyn streets were quiet, as after a storm. Worried about my father being alone, we arrived at his house in the late morning. He was glad to see us. The rest of our guests—Emily, our cousin Rachel, her husband, Doug, and their two-year-old daughter, Sasha—arrived in the mid-afternoon. We began cooking, and I found that in the chopping of apples and the smells there was a strange, pleasurable tug of connection to the past.

  Earlier that year, I had had to make an apple pie for a video for the Web magazine about the everyday lessons mothers teach their daughters. The idea filled me with dread, and for a day or two before I made the pie I was gloomy, resentful that I had to make this pie, a pie I wished she were teaching me to make once again.

  On the day of the shoot, I pulled out the old recipe book my mother and father had given my brothers and me—the 4A Cookbook, they called it, after the apartment we lived in. And, step-by-step, I made the pie. I didn’t let the dough chill for long enough and it came apart as I tried to roll it out. The result looked messier than usual. But it had been strangely comforting to read my mother’s words and revisit her way of making things. At the end of the recipe for pastry (butter, Crisco, flour, sugar, water) she had written, philosophically: “This will constitute the dough,” a phrasing I would never have paid much attention to in the past. As the pie was cooking, I got flustered. I was supposed to turn the heat down from 425 degrees. But to what temperature? I reached for the phone. And realized—I couldn’t. From now on, I would have to answer my pie questions myself, through trial and error.

  Afterward, I called my dad and asked him why he thought making the pie had brought me so close to my mother. He listened, then said, “A few months ago, you were talking about how you were envious of cultures where there are rituals for mourning. And it just seems to me that within our family, when things happened, whether good or bad, we tended to get together. And when we got together, we ate together, which meant cooking. So you learned from your mother how to make pie. It is a concrete thing she gave you. But it’s also that when you make it, you are part of a tradition. Someday you’re going to be the person to teach someone else.”

  I told him about the impulse to call her, and he said something that stayed with me. “The making of the pie is the phone call. To make pie was to call your mom.” Then he added, “Come Thanksgiving, you’ve got to make the apple pie.”

  “What do you mean I’ve got to?” I asked.

  “Well, the common thing across societies is this idea of yearly commemoration—Easter, the empty chair at the Seder, the Egyptian festival called the Beautiful Feast of the Valley, when the Thebans crossed the Nile to picnic at the mortuaries that held their ancestors and recent dead. It’s almost like forced remembrance. So next Thanksgiving, you’ve got to make the apple pie.”

  And so here I was on Thanksgiving, making the pie. With family around, cooking the same things we always cooked, creating the same smells we’d always created, my mother’s death no longer seemed a bleak marker of “Before” and “After.” I felt her absence around us but I also saw how, too, she was embedded in us.

  The next day, a couple and their daughter came to see the house, which now, to my shock, had a For Sale sign outside. They walked around and asked questions; upon entering, the realtor asked me, “Are you the owner?” “No, I’m their—his daughter,” I said, stumblingly. “The owner is Paul, my father.” As the realtor talked to my father, the family wandered through, opening cupboards, peering into my mother’s study. “This is cute!” the wife said. “It’s like a little study, it could be my work room.” They wandered back into the dining room.

  “We’d want to put a pool back there,” the husband said, gesturing to the part of the yard where my parents had planned on putting one. “So why is your dad leaving?”

  “I think he has too much space,” I said, semi-truthfully.

  III.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  {anniversaries}

  I knew that a Christmas carol would make me cry this season. I just didn’t know it would be “Frosty the Snowman,” that least dignified of all carols, the Asti Spumante to the Champagne of “Silent Night.” I was driving to Trader Joe’s on a rainy Sunday to buy poinsettias and eggnog for a small party I was having. As I distractedly pressed the radio buttons, I heard the familiar bumptious chorus, and my stomach turned with nostalgia: “Thumpety thump thump, thumpety thump thump, look at Frosty go.” But it was when Frosty, knowing of his imminent demise, tells the kids, “Let’s run, and we’ll have some fun now, before I melt away,” that tears leaked down my face.


  The holidays brought a feeling of togetherness that my mother loved. After Christmas, before going back to school, she would sit for days on the couch reading the books she’d been given, playing with a new camera, and take us for walks with the dogs, imbued with joy at the week’s quiet wintriness. Though my parents never had much money, she always went overboard, searching out gifts that we didn’t know we wanted.

  I still can’t bear the idea of anyone knowing she is about to die, least of all my mother. Last year at this time, she was climbing the stairs with me to the attic to gather the Christmas decorations. She had already had radiation surgery for her brain tumors, but it had left her weak and confused (and on the verge of descending into a steroidal delirium) and she kept trying to pick up full, heavy boxes and carry them downstairs.

  “Mom, put the box down.”

  “But I want to decorate.”

  “I know, but we don’t need all that.”

  “But I want all the decorations,” she said, stubbornly.

  It was like managing a child. As I turned away, she picked up a large box containing the heavy tree stand, and, when she caught me looking at her, regarded me with truculent defiance. I realized that my idea of decorating the house while my brothers and father were at school was a bad one. Wanting to get my mother away from the television, I’d built up a Norman Rockwell vision of cozy togetherness, in which hanging up the old red ribbons and the white lights could stave off the death that was sniffing around our house, looking for a point of entrance. But she was far too confused and fragile for this exercise in nostalgia.

  She was living gamely despite her approaching death and it hobbled my heart. I still find it terrifying to imagine. It is like picturing one’s slow self-erasure, noticing the disappearance, one day, of a pinkie, the next of a toe, then slowly, all the toes, all the fingers, a hand.

  I have been thinking of a story my mother used to tell me when I was a little girl. I loved baths and resisted getting out. One day, when I was about three, my mother, impatient, said, “If you stay in the bath any longer, you’ll turn into a raisin.”

  “No I won’t.”

  “Look at your fingertips.”

  I looked. They were wrinkled and pruny.

  “That’s just my fingers. Fingers always wrinkle.”

  “You don’t know the story of the little girl who turned into a raisin?” my mother asked, holding up a towel.

  “No.”

  “There was a little girl in New York who loved to take baths. She never wanted to get out when her mother asked her to. One day, her mother asked her over and over to get out, but the little girl wouldn’t. So her mother threw up her hands and went downstairs. The little girl kept playing, but she was getting smaller and smaller. First her fingers and toes wrinkled up, then her hands and feet, then her whole body, until she had shrunk to a raisin. Her mother came upstairs and looked for her but she wasn’t in the bath. ‘Oh, she must have gotten out,’ the mother said, and she pulled the plug out of the drain. ‘Oh no!’ cried the girl, but her mother couldn’t hear her. And as the bath water swirled out of the bath, so, too, did the little girl, going down the drain.”

  “Was she OK?”

  “She went down the drain and out the house through the pipes under the streets and came up in a grate on the street. Meanwhile, her mother and father searched for her everywhere, very upset. They wanted their little girl back! But they couldn’t find her. The next evening they went to a friend’s house and passed the grate where the girl was lying. It was a very quiet night and as the mother walked she thought she heard something. She looked down. ‘Look, it’s a raisin,’ she said to her husband. ‘How strange!’ and she picked it up. It moved in her hands and when she looked she saw it was their little girl. She cried with joy and went inside and took out a hair dryer and dried the raisin girl until slowly she plumped back up, first her fingers and toes, then her hands and feet, until she was herself again.”

  My mother gave me her look. “Now do you want to get out?”

  “Yes!” I said.

  And I stepped out into the scratchy old white towel and her arms came around my body.

  I KNOW I need to do something with your mother’s clothes,” my father said to me one night after dinner. “I just don’t know what to do. I started to look through them and I thought OK, all this can go. But then I found some formal clothes, and I thought, I can’t just go dump these at Goodwill. I have memories of your mother wearing them, at Saint Ann’s events, at parties, at weddings”—mercifully he didn’t say “at your wedding”—“and it seems odd to just leave them there with everything else.”

  “Do you want to keep them?” I said.

  “Yes, I want to keep some, just to, just to,” he faltered, “have.” He rubbed his hair, which is fine and soft, like a duckling’s, a pale white that could almost be a newborn’s blond corona. “I also want to do this mindfully, and I don’t think that just dropping all of her stuff off at Goodwill is mindful. It seems mindless,” he said. “I want people to have things of hers. I just don’t know how to do it. I don’t want to do anything rash.”

  Holding on indefinitely to the possessions of the dead, and keeping rooms just as the dead left them, are symptoms of complicated or pathological grief, I’d learned. That my father was thinking about letting go of her clothes was a good sign. He hadn’t cleaned out her closet or her study, though he didn’t seem finicky about keeping her possessions exactly in place. Mostly, he just seemed overwhelmed. “We could help you,” I said. “We could take stuff to Goodwill for you.”

  “Oh, I have no problem taking stuff to Goodwill,” he replied. “I don’t find it upsetting or anything. I just don’t know what to do.”

  I thought how different men and women are—how clear it was that he did find it upsetting, but simply wouldn’t say so. Even knowing this, I was hurt to hear him say that dumping my mother’s possessions at the Goodwill didn’t upset him. It is upsetting, I thought. And you should be able to say so. We’re always judging one another, we mourners.

  MY MOTHER had given me a novel for Christmas many years ago, which I found myself wanting to reread, about a young woman who loses her father, whom she’s been taking care of for eleven years. Because she is devastated by the prospect of losing love again, she prefers to retreat than risk love. It is easier to live in emotional hiding than with the likelihood of a future heartbreak.

  I remembered the book on one of those days when I thought how easy it would be to lie around sleeping and eating mindlessly for the rest of my life. I wanted to reread the end of the novel, where the heroine who has grown depressed in her seclusion decides to reject her fearful penitence and return to a life of pleasure—to sex, to love, to her friends, to the chance of joy. But I couldn’t find the copy my mother had given me. One night, walking home from teaching, I saw an old paperback copy of it on a dollar table on Sixth Avenue and bought it. I read it that night, feeling I was understanding both something about my experience and my mother’s, since she had loved that book. I think I will always look for clues to her in books and photographs. A mourner is always searching for traces of the lost one because they bear testimonial force: This person existed.

  We were now in the anniversary of the last week of her life. On my way uptown to meet my friend Anat, my childhood best friend, who was in town from Palo Alto to see a play, I did some shopping, meandering down to the West Village to Three Lives, the kind of bookstore we used to all browse in for hours as a family, where my mother would slowly introduce us to the books she had loved and now thought we should read. Looking at a book about science and the Enlightenment, I thought how much it would interest her. “It’s perfect,” I decided. “I’ll get it.” Then I remembered. But still I thought, stupidly: Surely if I buy it for her, she will read it.

  “Anniversary reactions” are common among mourners on any date that reminds them of the loved one: birthdays, holidays, and especially the first anniversary of a death. One study fo
und that people are often admitted to the hospital on the anniversary of a death, even many years later. But in the days leading up to Christmas, I had been sleeping better than I had all year. I went to friends’ holiday parties in a daze of gratitude that I was not “numbed out.” I found myself picking up the old routines, putting on makeup, realizing I had to go to the gym. I felt lightness again, a true sense of savoring the everyday, especially when I saw Anat, whom I’d known since I was twelve. My mother had been instrumental in our friendship. As the principal of the middle school, she’d assigned me to be Anat’s “guide” on the first day of seventh grade, when she was a new student. I apparently started talking, quite fast, as soon as we met, and didn’t stop all day. We have been close since then. Peculiarly, it happened that the play we went to had been written by an old colleague of my mother’s and was about the anniversary of a death. It seemed as if the universe were conspiring to show me: Look! People move on. Or perhaps these signs had been there all along, only now my brain was ready to see them.

  After we had dinner, I walked home from the subway in a snowstorm, past all the houses with their holiday decorations. I snapped a photo on my phone of the snow falling through the holiday lights by the brownstones. The snow was falling so fast that in the picture the flakes resembled scores of ghostly tiny comets streaking to the mantled ground. What if our minds are cameras set to a narrow aperture, unable to perceive the full reality around us, and we are in the midst of a complicated storm, one that is ongoing, dynamic, imperceptible? And what if my mother were in that storm? It was in the haze of such chimeras that I found hope.