The Long Goodbye

by Meghan O'Rourke

  “I was saying to Liam in the car on the way home that it’s funny: You could wait for the day of perfect weather, for blue sky and warm sun, but then where are you? When does that day come, and why? And what is it once it does come? It made more sense to do it today, even in the bitter cold. And boy, was it cold, my hands were burning. But it’s what it was.”

  As we drove to Brooklyn, Liam told us that after scattering the ashes, my father had spoken to him about how anxious he’d been about the holiday.

  “He told me that he woke up in the middle of the night, flashing on the orange flip-flops he got Eamon, and thinking, ‘He’s going to think I’m so stupid. They’re going to seem dorky.’”

  Tears came to my eyes at the thought of my father waking, restless, because he was trying on a role that he had never played before.

  I looked at Eamon in the rearview mirror. “Call Dad and tell him how much you liked your gifts, especially the orange flip-flops.”

  Both my brothers groaned.

  “No!” Liam said. “That won’t help. He’ll know I told you.”

  “Yeah, really,” Eamon said. “Come on, Meg.”

  The elaborate artifice of the funeral home business repulsed my mother, and it repulses me for all the ways it cynically preys on the neediness of the freshly bereaved. “What did you have in mind? Inhumement, entombment, inurnment, immurement? Some people lately have preferred ensarcophagusment,” says a funeral adviser at Whispering Glades, in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, a satire of the funeral business in America. “Well, I think we better just have him buried,” responds the hapless British nephew there to perform what he had mistakenly thought was a straightforward duty for his uncle. No: first he must decide whether to get the merely “moisture-proof ” Silent Night casket or to splurge for the “dampness-proof ” Emperor model.

  I was glad my mother chose to be cremated. She wanted to be scattered in many places so she could remain in the world with the kind of expansive, uncentered love she had for it. But I’ve started to be sorrowful that there is no wellmarked place to go to be with her. A few weeks before Christmas, I had a dream about a body in a lot that no one had buried. Waking up, I thought: We need a place to put her, by a lilac bush or a weeping cherry. Liam called that same week and said, “I’m starting to feel that the frustrating thing about cremation is that I’m really wishing there were a place I could be with Mom’s body, a place to think about her.”

  Before we scattered the ashes, I had an eerie experience. I went for a short run. I hate running in the cold, but after so much time indoors in the dead of winter I was filled with exuberance. I ran lightly through the stripped, bare woods, past my favorite house, poised on a high hill, and turned back, flying up the road, turning left. In the last stretch I picked up the pace, the air crisp, and I felt myself float up off the ground. The world became greenish. The brightness of the snow and the trees intensified. I was almost giddy. Behind the bright flat horizon of the treescape, I understood, were worlds beyond our everyday perceptions. My mother was out there, inaccessible to me, but indelible. The blood moved along my veins and the snow and trees shimmered in greenish light. Suffused with joy, I stopped stock-still in the road, feeling like a player in a drama I didn’t understand and didn’t need to. Then I sprinted up the driveway and opened the door and as the heat rushed out the clarity dropped away.

  I’d had an intuition like this once before, as a child in Vermont. I was walking from the house to open the gate to the driveway. It was fall. As I put my hand on the gate, the world went ablaze, as bright as the autumn leaves, and I lifted out of myself and understood that I was part of a magnificent book. What I knew as “life” was a thin version of something larger, the pages of which had all been written. What I would do, how I would live—it was already known. I stood there with a kind of peace humming in my blood.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  {the new year}

  On December 30, I went to a party at my friend Stephanie’s, a reunion of friends. Maureen, a woman I had met earlier this year, took my hand and said, “I’ve been thinking about you, how are you?” She seems always to be saying what she believes, or finding a way to say what she believes, and so I told her about the ashes, about the difficulty of the anniversary period, and idly mentioned a quarrel I’d had with a friend.

  Maureen said, “These are the eighteen months when you find out who can really go there and who can’t. This is a vulgar way of putting it, and there are many wonderful things about our culture, but I’m sorry, it is a phobic culture. People do not want to confront the existential mess that is life. They want to check things off—OK, you’re OK. And just because you can talk about your grief, you know,” she said, looking sharply at me, “doesn’t mean you are in control of it, or that you know what’s going on. You are in the ocean. And what you think, what you analyze, that is just the descanting of that ocean. Your mind is an ocean and it has scary things in it. While you may be able to analyze your grief at three p.m., that has nothing to do with how you feel at three a.m., in the dark center of night.”

  Listening to her, I realized that I had been on some level confusing speech—or language—with feeling all year. I had thought, If only I can speak about this, I can understand it, or contain it. But language is the epiphenomenon of a phenomenon that is like waves. The waves aren’t the whole of it. They are a small part of a larger entity.

  The moment when I flash upon my mother’s smile and face and realize she is dead, I experience the same lurch, the same confusion, the same sense of impossibility. A year ago collapses into yesterday in these moments. Periodically for the rest of my life, my mother’s death will seem like it took place yesterday.

  ON SUNDAY after New Year’s, I drove to New Jersey through bitter cold and high winds and got to my aunt’s house in Holmdel just as my grandmother was walking up the driveway, picking her way over the hard ground. She wore thick baby-blue sweatpants and a matching blue jacket, and somehow the optimistic orderliness of her outfit made me sad. The pastels were like children’s clothes. What must it be like to be eighty-two and have outlived your grown daughter?

  I had made plans to scatter my mother’s ashes today with her family. When I’d told my aunt Joanne that my dad, brothers, and I were going to scatter ashes on Christmas, she wrote to say my grandmother would like to have a place to visit my mother. “She keeps saying to me, ‘I just need to know where Barbara is, to have a place to think of her,’” Joanne wrote. I was embarrassed that I hadn’t thought of this earlier.

  Joanne and my grandmother had come up with a plan to bury the ashes at a spot near a bridle path on a horse farm where my mother used to go riding. It was now preserved land. Liam and Eamon had gone out of town, and my father decided he couldn’t face another ceremony, so I went by myself, reflecting—as I drove—on the odd fact that we lived in a world where a mother might have to ask if she could be part of her daughter’s interment ceremony. (The other night I saw a friend; we talked about her father’s death, and what her family had done with the body, and she said, “I felt like we made a lot of mistakes. We never invited his siblings to scatter the ashes, partly because we were so focused on just getting our stepmother there, to the house. But can you imagine not being invited to scatter your sibling’s ashes?” and she smiled ruefully. “We did the same,” I said. “I felt awful.”)

  Usually, you step inside a Kelly family party and hear loud laughter and the blender busy making margaritas. This time, there were quiet hugs; on the table, fixings for sandwiches were laid out. As we mingled, my grandmother pulled me over and asked, “Are the ashes in a container, like a plain box?”

  “Actually, they’re in a Christmas bag,” I said. “My father put them in a bag for us; let me get it.” So I took the bag—a gold “Merry Christmas” bag, with shiny ribbon painted on—and set it on the sideboard. “There. She’s eating with us.” I couldn’t tell if my grandmother was appalled or not.

  Over lunch, my grandmother and I sat t
ogether and she talked about e-mail. She’d recently gotten an account. Her screen name is BigMamu. “They dragged me kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century, but here I am! Honey,” she continued, genially, “take this bag. It’s got your Christmas presents.” Shit, I thought. We hadn’t gotten her anything. My mother always went in on something with her sisters. None of us had thought to do that. We were bad grandchildren! But she was still talking, about the gift, a throw of some kind. “It reminded me of your mother,” she said. I was puzzled. A throw? But she continued, and I understood—“It says ‘Joy’ and it has an angel embroidered on it.”

  My grandmother rarely talks about her hardships. I have never heard her complain about anything. Last year at the funeral she had said, “I know Barbara’s with Jesus Christ.” But I could see how hard-won that conviction was. As Joanne passed the dessert around, my aunt Janet and I chitchatted about movies. My grandmother remembered how the last time they all saw my mother, she had been reminiscing about the way her old dog Duchess used to pull her around the neighborhood on her bike. “She’d just get on her bike and off Duchess would run,” Grandma said, smiling. “One day Duchess took off after a squirrel and Barbara tumbled off her bike, and she really hurt herself.” She paused and looked down at her hands. “I remember that. Barbara really hurt herself that day.”

  There was much back-and-forth about routes to the farm—But that way would be a half-hour slower! Joanne exclaimed to Mary Ellen.

  “Can I have a spoon?” my grandmother asked over my aunts, who paid no attention. “Joanne, will you please get me a spoon to bring with us?”

  “You want a spoon? So you don’t have to touch the ashes?” Joanne said. “I think it’s OK to touch them. It’s Barbara, for Christ’s sake.”

  “It is the windiest day,” Jackie said. “I got up this morning and said to Nick, ‘Today’s the day we’re spreading Barbara’s ashes,’ and the wind howled. He said, ‘With any luck, she’ll just end up back in our yard.’ ”

  We milled in the hall, bundling up. As we walked through the living room, Grandma picked up a throw and said, “See”—and she pointed to a robed angel blowing a trumpet—“this is the angel. That’s Barbara. Though I don’t know if she’s playing a trumpet. Or maybe she’s learned,” she mused, “and now she’s showing off.”

  She turned to me and said, “That Barbara. She could do anything she put her mind to. I didn’t even know her. She had such a quick mind. When she was a little girl, she was always off playing quietly. And I’d say, ‘What are you doing, Barbara?’ and she’d say, ‘Nothing, Mom.’ What was going on in that mind? It was impossible to know. Did you know her?” She peered at me.

  What could I say?

  “Don’t forget the ashes!” someone called out.

  “That would be perfect!” Mary Ellen said. “Barbara would be laughing: You bunch of idiots are standing out in the cold, and here I am back in the toasty house.”

  The plan got disrupted from the start: Mary Ellen set off on her own route, not Joanne’s. The snow was coming down hard.

  “They know each other so well,” my grandmother said. “Those girls know when to argue and when to agree and then do what they want to anyway.”

  “Your mother was the master of that,” Jackie said, looking at me in the rearview mirror. “It’s like she said that day in the hospital: ‘It’s simple. I know what no means. And so when I say no, people listen to me.’ She said that was the secret to her life.”

  Suddenly I knew where we were. It was the road we used to take to go to my dad’s parents’ house. We passed their street and went on, over a bridge, up a hill, and took a left on a dirt road, passing skeleton trees and a red horse farm.

  “You’re going to like this spot,” my grandmother said, looking back. “It’s a big evergreen by an overlook. Horses go by, and you can see the water. In the morning, the river glistens like a million tiny diamonds in the sun. This is a good day for us to do this. She was a winter baby, an Aquarius, like you. I would bundle her up in her snowsuit and out she’d go and come back hours later.”

  “I’m glad it’s snowing,” Joanne exclaimed, as we piled out of the cars, the snow swirling around us. “It makes it special. You know it snowed, last year on her birthday, February third, and now it’s snowing today, as we put her ashes to rest, on January third. I think it is her way of saying she’s with us.”

  Uncle Nick raised an eyebrow. “Amazing what will happen,” he said. “Snow in winter! A miracle!”

  “Let me have my magical thinking!” Joanne protested.

  We walked down a path high on a hill to the wooden walkway.

  “See, you can see the water,” Joanne said.

  “And this is a horse path,” Jackie added. “So horses will come by her all day long in spring and summer.” They started down the path.

  My grandmother lingered. I went to take her arm and walk with her.

  “I know you miss your mom,” she said, looking down at her feet. “And that’s OK. I miss your grandpa. For years, I missed him all the time.”

  “Do you still miss him?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “Mostly I’m just sorry about everything he doesn’t get to see and do.”

  My grandfather had died before I was born. But to her, he was still a complete and total presence, or, rather, absence. Just as my mother would be, should I ever have children: an absence I thought about all the time.

  The observation deck was small, with a bench and a striking view of the river—a shining circle of ice in the distance—and the farm and trees below. Next to the deck was a robust evergreen, tall, but not as tall as it would get.

  “See? That’s the tree,” Grandma said. “Isn’t it pretty?”

  And it was.

  “I have a prayer to say,” she said, as we all took our places by the tree.

  My grandmother read a prayer for my mother’s soul, leaning over the railing, my cousin Lindsay by her side. Then Joanne read a poem my grandmother had picked out, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life,” which I had never read before. I imagined that my grandmother took the end of the poem as a kind of road map for her own mourning:Lives of great men all remind us

  We can make our lives sublime,

  And, departing, leave behind us

  Footprints on the sands of time;

  Footprints, that perhaps another,

  Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,

  A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,

  Seeing, shall take heart again.

  Let us, then, be up and doing,

  With a heart for any fate;

  Still achieving, still pursuing,

  Learn to labor and to wait.

  We stood in a moment of silence. I held up the bag.

  “You go,” Joanne said.

  “No, today is for you.”

  “Oldest to youngest,” one sister said.

  Joanne took off her gloves and plunged her hand in the ashes. She knelt in the ground, where one of the husbands had dug up some dirt, and said, “I love you, Barbara, and I think about you every day.”

  Jackie and Janet both had tears in their eyes as they bent down. Mary Ellen took a handful and let them go, saying, gently, “Rest in peace, Barbara.”

  I walked back to the cars with my grandmother. I had two different sensations: first, that this was really real, and my mother was really dead, and second, that the ceremony felt like a performance from someone else’s life, and we’d get home, and there my mother would stand in the kitchen, my mother, like normal.

  The snow was truly flurrying now. It was eerie and witchy out and the sadness in my heart grew more swollen, but it was the swell of mystery: What strange beauty surrounds us, and how impermanent our vision of it, how palpable our loss when those we love no longer can view the world they would adore.

  “That was good. We scattered her ashes and she has a place to be.” She paused, and added, with typical Kelly deflection, “And now we’re all
going to get pneumonia.”

  WHEN I GOT home that night, I called my dad. “They found a beautiful spot,” I said, “one that Mom would have liked. It’s near where you grew up—right by Grandma and Grandpa’s house, just off Navesink River Road, above a horse farm.”

  “You know what?” Dad said slowly. “This is really crazy. But when Mom and I first met, and no one knew we were together, that’s where we would go. We’d park, and we’d sit under a great big tree. We used to call it the farm. We’d say, ‘Let’s go to the farm.’ We’d just go to this tree, and we’d sit there and talk for hours. We’d go there and be alone and smoke pot.” Dad laughed. “It was the summer before we got married. I was a dopey first-year teacher. Mom was still a high school student. All that stuff wasn’t there—it wasn’t a public park. The people who owned the farm never said anything to us.” He broke off. “Where was the tree again? Do you drive down and go over a tiny bridge, and then take a left?” he asked.

  “Yes. I’m looking here at the map again. It’s called ‘Browns Dock Road.’ ”

  “That’s it,” he said. “We had this tree we’d sit under, and we would look down at the river.”

  He pauses, thinking. “That makes me glad I didn’t go today,” he says. “Because I would have been like, ‘Holy shit, this is where we used to go smoke pot before you knew we were together!’” He sounded young and amused when he said that, the father I remember from my childhood.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  {so that nothing was lost and nothing ever went away}

  On my mother’s second birthday since her death I found myself calculating: She was two in death years, fifty-seven otherwise. Last year I had forgotten it was her birthday, remembering only after returning from work. It had been five weeks since she had died. When I got home and saw the date—with a knife-twist of pain—I read Tennyson’s memorial for his friend Arthur Henry Hallam:Break, break, break,