The Long Goodbye (13 page)

This yearning is what I felt most strongly in the weeks after my mother died. I kept thinking of a night many years ago, when I took a late flight to Dublin, where I was going to live for six months. I was nineteen, and it would be the longest time I had ever been away from home; boarding the plane that hazy summer night, I was lit up with the prospect of making my way in a strange city, where no one knew me and I knew no one. At one a.m., I woke up disoriented in my seat. Out the window to my right flashed the aurora borealis. I had never seen anything so spectacular. The twisting lights in the sky evoked a spectral presence. I had a sudden, acute desire to turn around and go back—not just back to my parents in Brooklyn, but deep into my childhood, into my mother's arms holding me on those late nights when we would drive home from dinner at a neighbor's house in the country, and she would sing a lullaby and tell me to put my head on her warm shoulder, and I would sleep.

 

 

W
E HAD no rules about what to do right after my mother died; in fact we were clueless—

“What do we do now?”

“Call the nurse.”

“The nurse says to stay here.”

—and so we sat with my mother's body, holding her hands. I kept touching the skin on her face, which was rubbery but still
hers
, feeling morbid as I did it, but feeling, too, that it was strange that I should think so. This was my mother. In the old days, didn't the bereaved wash the body as they said their goodbyes? I was ransacking the moment for understanding. Finally, when the funeral home workers came to take her body away, I went to my room and called some friends, saying, “My mother has died.” I had the floating sensation that I was acting out a part in a movie, trying the words on.

Once my mother's body was gone, my father immediately moved the furniture back into place and wheeled the hospital bed onto the porch, where it assumed the bedraggled look of an outdated piece of machinery. He came back and sat down in his normal chair, and for a panicked moment I wondered if this was how he would treat my mother's memory. But his eyes were looking inside himself instead of out; he seemed shrunken in his chair.

“I want to cook Christmas dinner,” he said.

What else was there to do? A few hours later Jim had driven down from his parents' house to join us for dinner, and Liam's friend Emily had taken the train up from the city. I don't remember much about that dinner, except that we sat together, and there was carrot cake afterward, and it seemed odd to eat anything so sweet, and my father talked at one point about an enormous pig he and my mother had seen in Spain on their honeymoon, and I decided to fast for a day in recognition of this loss, which was so huge I needed to contain it somehow, to put barriers around its chaos. But the night slides away in my memory, like a balloon; there is no center to it. Do my brothers and my father remember those hours very differently? They must.

The next afternoon, my college friend Jodie came up; I was feverish. She took one look at me and brought me to the doctor. I hadn't slept a full night for a week or more, and I had a sinus infection. After she left, my high school boyfriend, M., came up with bagels and we went down to the basement rec room and watched TV for hours with my brothers. I was not sure if we were dead or alive. Would we, too, enter the world of the dead now? “Eating is a small, good thing at a time like this,” says the baker to two newly bereaved parents in Raymond Carver's famous story. He feeds them rolls and dense, hearty bread and at last they talk; they cannot sleep, but the conversation and consumption bind them to this world.

 

 

My mother was cremated, and so we didn't have a proper funeral for her. At first my father didn't want to have any kind of funeral—just a memorial service, perhaps a month or two down the road.

“But she
died
,” I said.

“I'm really exhausted, Meg,” he said, looking drained. “I don't want to have to organize something and clean the house.” I remonstrated with him and he said, “I'm
tired
,” and went upstairs.

This resistance seemed bizarre to me. My mother had just died. And we weren't going to have a funeral for her because we were tired? I sat, unable to move, in the living room; though the furniture was back in place, the room seemed deflated and empty. A few minutes later my father came back downstairs.

“You're right,” he said. “We should do this. It makes me anxious but I'll be OK.”

I reminded him that we were the bereaved. We didn't have to provide the food. Someone would help us with it. And three days after my mother died, we gathered in our living room around pictures of her—I could barely look at the pictures of her as a young mother—and said our goodbyes. My father talked about how my mother, wanting to get out of the house a month or so before she died, had gone with him to return some books at the university library in New Haven; over lunch, afterward, she asked him, “Wouldn't it be nice if it could always be like this? If we weren't always worried about the things we had to get done?” My brothers and I, and her sisters and Isabel and Diana and even Diana's ten-year-old son all spoke briefly, too, and afterward, we all ate and drank and shared more stories of her life. My grandmother is normally a gregarious, optimistic person, but she didn't talk much. She looked very tired. Earlier, in the fall, my mother had said to me, “It's very hard for my mother to see me this sick. It'll be easier for her afterward.” It didn't seem easier. Before my grandmother left, she pulled me aside in the foyer and said, “Just remember, your mother isn't with us anymore, but you kids carry her forward in this world. You all have her inside you.”

The night blurred with exhaustion. I remember trying to eat the warm, cheesy pasta our friend Peter, a chef, had brought, and being unable to get the slippery pieces down my throat.

 

 

When I got back to Brooklyn, I didn't know what to do with myself. I couldn't focus on anything at first. Because of the holidays, most of my friends were away. I wasn't teaching that semester; I was still working on the Web magazine, which would launch in May, but I had a week's leave. The world seemed to push me away. I felt that I was pacing in the chilly dark outside a house with lit-up windows, wishing I could go inside. But I also felt that the people in those rooms were shutting out the news of a distant, important war, a war I had just returned from. Consumed by the question of what it means to be mortal, I looked around and thought, We are all going to die. When a friend talked about a minor problem at work, I wanted to shake her: You're healthy, your loved ones are healthy, this problem is small. I stared at the clock, willing the minutes to pass. I hated being alone. I hated time. One night I went out with M., my old boyfriend—we had been seeing each other, sort of; I had gravitated toward the solace of a shared past—and stayed out till six a.m., with no idea how late it was. I wanted the hours to rush past. I wanted to fast-forward a week, a month, a year to when I'd feel “better.” Though I had been “prepared,” I remained clueless about the rules of shelter and solace in this new world of exile. I said to myself at times that it was not worth continuing. Life ended in death, and usually in great suffering. Why wait around? My mother was gone; my husband and I had divorced; the man I'd been dating was no longer part of my life; and even M. seemed skittish and odd. There was at least one night when I lay in bed eyeing the bottle of sleeping pills. I opened it and spilled them all over the bedside table, where they shone like moons of another galaxy. I wanted someone to save me—I desperately wanted someone to save me with an all-consuming love, as in a movie.

What was most difficult was that I myself didn't know what to expect. How long would I feel like this? Would this yearning ever pass? And—did I want it to?

 

 

T
HOUGH I WAS EXHAUSTED, I had a hard time sleeping. The nights were long and hallucinatory; death seemed present in the room with me, an enemy to have it out with then and there. After several fruitless, insomniac nights, I gave up trying to sleep. Instead, I read, turning to books to understand what was happening to me.

I had been sent healing workbooks and Buddhist texts about how to die. I had been sent
On Grief and Grieving
and
On Death and Dying
and the Bible and memoirs about deaths of parents. I read nearly all of them; I was hungry for death scenes. C. S. Lewis's
A Grief Observed
, his slim account of the months after his wife's death from cancer, was the most evocative. Grief is paradoxical: you know you must let go, and yet letting go cannot happen all at once. The literature of mourning enacts that dilemma; its solace lies in the ritual of remembering the dead and then saying,
There is no solace,
and also,
This has been going on a long time.

But the book I was most preoccupied with those first nights was
Hamlet.
I returned over and over to key speeches as if they were prayers or clues. I'd always thought of Hamlet's melancholy as existential. His sense that the world “is out of joint” came across as vague and philosophical, the dilemma of a depressive young man who can't stop chewing at big metaphysical questions. But now it seemed to me that Hamlet was moody and irascible in no small part because he is grieving: his father has just died. He is radically dislocated, stumbling through the days while the rest of the world acts as if nothing important has changed.

For the trouble is not just that Hamlet is sad; it is that everyone around him is unnerved by his grief. When Hamlet comes onstage, his uncle greets him with the worst question you can ask a grieving person: “How is it that the clouds still hang on you?” Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, tries to get him to see that his loss is “common.” No wonder Hamlet is angry and cagey; he is told that how he feels is “unmanly” and unseemly. This was a predicament familiar to me. No one was telling me that my sadness was unseemly, but I felt, all the time, that to descend to the deepest fathom of it was somehow taboo. (As my dad said, “You have this choice when you go out and people ask how you're doing. You can tell the truth, which you know will make them really uncomfortable, or seem inappropriate. Or you can lie. But then you're lying.”) I was struck, too, by how much of
Hamlet
is about the precise kind of slippage the mourner experiences: the difference between being and seeming, the uncertainty about how the inner translates into the outer, the sense that one is expected to
perform
grief palatably. (If you don't seem sad, people worry; but if you are grief-stricken, people flinch away from your pain.)

Hamlet
also captures an aspect of loss I found difficult to speak about—the profound ennui, the moments of angrily feeling it is not worth continuing to live. In
A Grief Observed
, Lewis captures the laziness of grief, how it made him not want to shave or answer letters. Hamlet's famous soliloquy invokes that numb exhaustion:

“Weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable”: yes. I shared with Hamlet the pained wish that I might melt away.

Researchers have found that the bereaved are at a higher risk for suicidal thinking than the depressed. But Hamlet, I thought, is less searching actively for death than wishing futilely for the world to make sense again. And this, too, was how I felt.

 

 

I took a trip to California, to visit my friend Dana and go to the Mojave Desert for a few days. I needed a break, a different landscape; the holidays had hardly been a “vacation.”

On my way to Joshua Tree National Park, a vast wind farm loomed on the left. The turning windmills were eerie, like machines from another world, and their strangeness made my stomach hurt with something like homesickness. The desert was dry and majestic and it calmed me; I was empty and it was, too. The open sky over the land, the juxtaposition of the minute and the majestic—it all expressed the dissonance I felt, and having my sense of smallness reflected back at me put me strangely at ease. How could my loss matter in the midst of all this? Yet it did matter to me, and in this setting that felt
natural
, the way the needle on the cactus in the huge desert is natural.

Hiking alone under the warm blue sky I had a sense that my mother was nearby—a vivid sensation I had had on several occasions since she died. I imagined I could detect her in the haze at the horizons, and so, for the first time since Christmas, I talked to her. I was walking along past the cacti, when I looked out into the rocky distance. “Hello, Mother,” I whispered. “I miss you so much.” Then I started crying. Ridiculously, I apologized. “I'm sorry. I don't want you to feel bad. I know you had to leave.” I didn't want her to feel guilty that she couldn't be here with us.

A part of me knew this concern was foolish.

But it was intrinsic to the ritual, to the lingering belief that she was there, listening. I was powerless over it.

The solitude quickly turned painful. In a café, I ordered a coffee just so I didn't have to go back to my hotel room. In Brooklyn it had been hard to be around people, especially when they seemed uncomfortable talking about my mother, who was all I thought about. But it was also hard to be alone; one night, I spent hours writing to near strangers on Facebook, as if that would create the connection I was searching for.

I drove back to L.A. to see Dana. That night, we stayed up late, talking about the difficulty of grieving, its odd jags of ecstasy and pain. Dana's father had died several years earlier, and it was easy to speak with her: she belonged to what more than one acquaintance who's lost a parent has now referred to as “the club.” It's not a club any of us wished to join, but it makes mourning less lonely. I told Dana that I felt my mother's loss was curiously unrecognized; I envied my Jewish friends the ritual of saying Kaddish. She talked about the hodgepodge of traditions she had embraced in the midst of her grief. And then she asked me, “Have you found a metaphor?”