The Long Goodbye (15 page)

 

 

I saw my therapist twice a week for a while, though I had no money; she gave me a break. I looked forward to our sessions greedily. I was hungry for her time; I thought perhaps she could save me; I couldn't wait to get to her office because there, at least, I didn't have to feel self-conscious about my sorrow, my desire to talk about my mother, my need to tell the story of her death over. This was the gift of those sessions. Still, I nearly always left crestfallen. It wasn't my therapist's fault: there was no way for her to do what I wanted her to do, which was to bring my mother back. In some sense, I was looking for a medium, not a shrink.

Medication might have helped, of course, and there were times when I thought,
Just give me something to take the pain away
. I had many of the typical signs of depression. But my pain and sleeplessness, my lack of appetite one day, my overabundance of it the next—these were not the result of an aimless melancholy. They were because my mother was dead. And there was one key difference between my grief and depressions I'd suffered in the past: the world appeared to me in heightened, shimmering outlines, like a mirage. At times it seemed excruciatingly beautiful, a place I never wanted to leave. I hated that my mother couldn't see the snow or the sky anymore. And in the end, I kept coming back to a simple fact: My pain was caused by the absence of my mother. Did I want to deny this? Did I want to medicate it away? I did not.

 

 

I
HAD DINNER with Liam in Brooklyn one night, and he told me he had been dreaming about our mother. He was comforted by this. I was envious. I was not dreaming about her, and my main fear, in those first days, was that I would forget what her face looked like. I had told M. this fear. He looked at me and said, “That's not going to happen.” I didn't know how he could know, but I was comforted by his certainty.

A month later, the dreams started. They were not frequent, but they were powerful. Unlike dreams I'd had about my mother when she was alive, these seemed to capture her as she truly was, as if, in the nether realm of sleep, we actually were visiting each other. These visits were always full of boundaries: I was never fully able to grasp her.

In the first dream it was summertime, and my mother and I were standing outside a house like one we used to go to on Cape Cod. There was a sandy driveway and a long dirt road. We were going to get ice cream, and we were saying goodbye to Eamon, who was just a little boy. When I looked at him, an oceanic sadness filled me, but I didn't know why. He smiled and waved from the porch as we left; I was driving, which struck me as odd. I kept trying to turn to see my mother, but I had to keep my eyes on the road, so I couldn't see her clearly. It became evident she was going away, though I couldn't figure out where.

As we headed down the road, my mother talked about Eamon, telling me I didn't need to be anxious about him. The conversation replicated one we'd had while she was in the hospital, when she'd worried about dying when Eamon was still in college, and I had reassured her he would be OK; here, it was as if she were playing my role and I was playing hers. Every time I looked at her, a sadness filled me, one so cold and deep that even months later, when I thought of it, my heart sped up. It was like ice being poured down my windpipe.

The second dream had an even stronger quality of visitation. I was at my parents' house, feeling anxious about work. In the den, my father was watching football, and I told him I needed to go back to New York. As he got up to get the train schedule, I became aware in my peripheral vision that there were holiday ornaments on the kitchen table and that someone was sitting there. “Stay another night,” I heard my mother's voice say, and I looked up to see that
she
was the person at the table. Her hands were busy—either knitting or rolling dough for apple pie. “Stay the night,” she said again, with longing in her voice. “Of course,” I said.

My father and Liam told me about their dreams, and the continuities among them startled me. Our dreams followed certain rules or patterns. In all, we knew either that my mother was gone or that something was wrong. In all, too, she was hard to reach, but we were given a moment to share a look with her. I still have these dreams, and every time I wake from them, I am reminded of those passages from epics in which the hero goes to the Underworld and sees his father but cannot embrace him. Or of the sonnet by Milton about his wife, who died in childbirth. Recounting a dream about her, he wrote, “Methought I saw my late espoused saint,” and then described her disappearance at precisely the moment they tried to touch: “But oh! As to embrace me she inclin'd, / I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night.”

What surprised me was how comforted I felt when I woke from the first dream. I was sad that it had ended, but it was not the depleted sadness I had often experienced when waking up from a wishful dream. It seemed my mother had been saying something important to me: I was still her daughter. I woke reassured, like a child who has kicked the covers off her in her sleep on a chilly night and dimly senses her mother steal into the dark room, pull them up over her, and stroke her hair before leaving.

Other nights, there were bad dreams, and I woke shaking.

 

 

Reading a library book one day, I found my eyes kept circling back up to a word someone had penciled in along the margin:
Gravestones
.
Gravestones
. There was nothing special about the word; the passage was about burial practices becoming more elaborate. Then I thought with queer excitement: My mother wrote that word! It was her handwriting! My brain backtracked: She had studied for a master's at NYU. I might have a book she read. And I started frantically flipping through the book, searching for more penciled words in her hand—as if they were messages left behind.

The idea that the dead might not be utterly gone has an irresistible magnetism. I'd read something that described what I had been experiencing. Many people go through what psychologists call a period of “animism,” in which you see the dead person in objects and animals around you, and you construct your false reality, the reality where she is just hiding, or absent. This was the mourner's secret position, it seemed to me:
I have to say this person is dead, but I don't have to believe it
.

One psychologist whose work I consulted had written, “Bereaved people, driven by the pain and yearning of grief, imagine signs of communication.” His cut-and-dried language did not convey how powerful that imagining could be. What words could I use to convey how much I wanted her back?

The night is very long and my mother is lost in it. I can see the world below the plane, the aurora borealis shifting to my right, just outside my field of vision, just beneath the surface of my consciousness, a cold sea, a bright star.

One of the things I did after my mother died was talk to people who might help me make sense of my grief. Among them was a woman named Holly Prigerson, a clinical researcher on grief at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard, who told me something that has stayed with me: When a terminally ill patient “accepts” her death, the bereaved typically find their grief more manageable than when a terminally ill patient is in “despair” about her death. It is, of course, difficult to study “grief” because a salient feature of grief is that it's not monolithic or singular; it's personal and variable. That said, there seem to be certain universal aspects. And one is this ameliorating influence of watching your loved one accept his or her death. (Another is that the dominant feeling after a loss isn't anger or denial but yearning, exactly the feeling I'd had.)

Needless to say, witnessing the acceptance is painful in its own right. I thought about all the Buddhist books that had been recommended to me after my mother's death, among them Gehlek Rimpoche's
Good Life, Good Death
and Sogyal Rinpoche's
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
. These books stress the importance of accepting the impermanence of life. At times, this notion (as filtered through Western self-help) strikes me as cruelly sanctimonious—you routinely encounter the story of the angry cancer-riddled woman who consults a monk, learns to accept her death and attend to her spiritual needs, and, voilà!, is healed. But I take to heart what a book like
Good Life, Good Death
has to say about what acceptance and a “good death” might be, even if its ideas are not novel: Gehlek Rimpoche counsels mainly acknowledgment of what is taking place and a letting go on the part of both the ill and the soon-to-be-bereaved.

This is good advice, but not every temperament is able to heed it. Acceptance isn't necessarily something you can choose off a menu, like eggs instead of French toast. Instead, researchers now think that some people are inherently primed to accept their own death with “integrity” (their word, not mine), while others are primed for “despair.” Most of us, though, are somewhere in the middle, and one question researchers are now focusing on is: How might more of those in the middle learn to accept their deaths? The answer has real consequences for both the dying and the bereaved. For one thing, the terminally ill make clearer decisions about their end-of-life medical care when they have acknowledged their impending death; for another, watching them acknowledge their death helps us, in turn, accept it, too. Cancer is not a gentle disease, and my family and I witnessed my mother in traumatic, painful moments we might all rather forget. But in this one regard, at least, my mother had what Buddhists and psychologists would call a good death. Which is to say: She accepted it that day in the hospital when the doctor told her she was going to die.

Later that day, her four sisters and her mother came to say goodbye. My mother sat in the living room of her hospital suite, with her legs poking out from her hospital pants. She and her sisters sat and joked and reminisced. My mother had been nervous about the visit beforehand, but now she relaxed. One sister asked my mother what her favorite color was. (Blue.) My grandmother was quiet. At one point, she gave my mother a garden angel and a piece of paper. “I couldn't sleep last night,” she said. “And in the middle of the night I remembered this prayer I had taped above your bed when you were a little girl, and I wrote it down for you.” My mother often bridled at religious gestures but now she didn't. She read the prayer and said, “I remember this. I'll put it by my bed.”

Overwhelmed, I went back to the house to take a run and to let them be together. When I returned, my mother was alone, sitting in bed, looking contemplative.

“Hi, Mom,” I said. (How many more times will I say that, I wondered.)

“Wasn't that nice?” she said.

I sat at the end of the bed and gave her a foot massage, which I did a lot in those last three weeks—it helped take her mind off her pain, which increased every day, and gave me something to do. “I thought so,” I said. “That's why I left for a while.”

“It
was
nice,” she said. “We laughed a lot. I want them to remember me with a sense of humor.” She grew quiet. “It was hard to say goodbye to them.” She paused and stared at her hands. She had begun to have a pronounced inward quality, a withdrawn beauty, as if she were already on her way to another world. “But not the way you'd think.” Then she looked at me and said, “It's good to have time to contemplate the end of your life. I mean, when else do you do it? When do you really think about death?”

“It
is
good?” I asked, as I rubbed lotion into her cracked soles.

“It's not what I would have thought,” she said. “I'm not afraid. I feel I will still be here.” Then she began to talk about what she wanted in her last days. She wanted her hospital bed to be in the living room, so she could look out the picture window at things that “would last a long time.” She wanted to look at the fir tree on the lawn. And the pond. Just that year, a great blue heron had made a habit of stopping in the pond to fish. We would see him rise up out of the water, his wingspan at once awkward and magnificent. It was nearly Christmas, and she wanted us to buy a tree to be in the room with her bed. She talked about my brothers, and my dad, and said again that she wasn't afraid, though she was sad about “sappy” things.

“Like what?”

“Like Christmas. And my birthday.” I took some lavender oil and put it behind her ears. She tilted her chin up so I could sweep her hair back. She loved lavender, and it was supposed to be calming. “I'm sad about the things I have a lot of memories of, of the days when the whole family was together,” she continued. “That's why I'm sad about Christmas and my birthday.”

I began to cry. Through tears, I said, “I'm going to miss you so much.” I expected that she would get tears in her eyes or melt in that special way that mothers melt—or, at least, that
she
usually melted when she saw one of us kids in pain. Instead, she looked at me and said, “I know,” with a quiet calm. She had a funny look on her face, a look I had never quite seen directed at me, of appraisal and remove. In that moment, I had the sense that she was letting me know something, that she thought I would be OK. Even if we both felt the moment had come too soon, this was what happened: Parents died, while children lived, and in some sense it was meant to be. It was not the response I wanted, but the authority of her look stilled me. I wiped away my tears. “I know,” she said again.

Now, in the worst moments, my mind often goes back to that night in the hospital. I think of when she said, “I know,” and it calms me. Her voice had the strange motherly knowledge that nothing approximates.

“I don't want anyone to be afraid to ask me questions,” she told me. We had no idea that three days later she would lapse back into a coma-like state and never speak again. How could we? Even in the midst of acceptance, we were always bargaining for more time. We still lived inside Zeno's paradox—the idea that if you go halfway toward something over and over, you never actually arrive.