The Long Goodbye (19 page)

I wanted to be the one to hold him. I sat on the cold linoleum floor of the office, in thin cotton shorts, and got Finn calm on my lap. They gave him a sedative and he yelped. Then came the needle as I petted him. He relaxed in my hands, the chemicals started their work, and I felt—felt—the life go out of him, drifting and then slamming
, gone.
For days I couldn't get that feeling out of my body. On the way home I didn't cry. But when I got to the house my mother looked at me and she was red-eyed. After dinner I went to bed so I could pull the blankets over my head and weep alone, the only way I ever could, and in the dark came footsteps and my mother at the edge of the bed said, “It's sad, Meg, I'm sad too,” and stroked my shoulder.

I didn't feel better. But I remember that she tried.

When I was a freshman in college, the thirty-three-year-old daughter of one of my parents' friends died suddenly. I remember coming home over Thanksgiving break and finding my mom deeply upset. At the time we had a habit of giving each other the new Dick Francis mystery for Christmas. She took me out to buy a winter coat and as we walked down Fourteenth Street, she told me how shaken she was by Liza's death. Then she suddenly said, “I have a present for you,” and pulled out of her bag the new Dick Francis mystery, a big yellow hardback.

“But it's not Christmas.”

“I know,” she said. “Liza's death made me feel anything can happen. Something terrible could happen tomorrow. I want you to have this now. Why do we wait for holidays to give gifts?” Her voice was shaky, and it was the first time as an adult that I really felt that one day she would be gone.

 

 

The day after the dream, I woke with my lungs burning. It was difficult to breathe. I couldn't help thinking that my dream and my condition were related.

I had just been reading a passage in Darian Leader's
The New Black
about “killing the dead”—the theory that a mourner has to make a choice between holding on to her grief and moving forward by killing the dead. The fact that we feel both affection and hostility toward the ones we love complicates mourning. Most people don't know how to be angry at the dead. It seems ignoble and perhaps beside the point to speak (or think) ill of them. And so, Leader notes, bereaved people often “become angry with colleagues, friends, and lovers without linking this displacement consciously to their loss,” while idealizing their relationships with those who have died. To “kill the dead” metaphorically is a way “of loosening one's bonds to them,” Leader observes, and in fact many mourners do dream about murdering or witnessing the murder of the person they have lost.

Certainly, I'd been angry at my mother for not—in the word I kept returning to—“supporting” my divorce. But now that she was gone, I did not want to kill her; I was not ready to loosen the bonds. Kill the dead? No, no, no. I did not want my mother dead. I felt the same insistence that the child feels in
Green Eggs and Ham
. I do not like green eggs and ham; I do not like them, Sam I am. I will not eat them in the rain, etc.
I do not want my mother dead. I will not accept it in my head.
But was this partly because I was refusing to accept her in all her complexity, because I was idealizing her? Over the next days, my chest got tighter. I developed an itch in my throat, which became a dry, insistent cough, making it hard to breathe deeply. It didn't occur to me to go the doctor, and I went to work, where I was wrapping things up before leaving. But I experienced an apathy nearly as intense as the one I experienced right after my mother's death. I couldn't focus, and whenever I slept I dreamed of her.

I thought of what the painter Dora Carrington wrote in her journal after her beloved, the writer and critic Lytton Strachey, died in 1932:

Carrington killed herself a few weeks afterward. I had not lost my spouse; it was my father who had. But like Carrington, I was experiencing the loss of a home—even if it was more a remembered than an actual home. My divorce intensified my sense of dislocation.
I have no home,
I would think selfpityingly to myself when I was unable to sleep.

I didn't go to the doctor because I wanted my mother to come back.

If I did not take care of myself, I imagined, she would have to.

One night, I went to a movie at a multiplex in Chelsea after going to see my therapist, who heard my cough and told me to go to the doctor. My throat began to itch as I sat in the theater. I coughed until I thought I might pass out. I gathered my things, but, growing light-headed in the foyer, I sat in one of the leather chairs strewn about and laid my head back. As I did, I thought,
I might die here
. I thought it semi-facetiously, the way one does when fending off a fear.

Then I had a pang:
What if my lungs were filling with fluid and I
was
going to die here, in the upper lobby of the Chelsea movie theater?

I stood up and got myself through the rain to the subway. When I got home, I called my doctor for antibiotics. My mother wasn't coming back, and if I kept hoping she would, I might end up with pneumonia.

When I woke the next day, I was flooded by the physicality of my body and my mind.
How odd that this body is going to wear out!
I thought. Then:
One day this body is going to wear out
. I lay back in the sheets and enjoyed the sensation of cotton, of morning, of my body, even of the chest muscles sore from coughing. Death and the sun are not to be looked at steadily, La Rochefoucauld wrote. Mother, I am confronting yours, here, as I write. But I have not come to terms with my own.

 

 

The idea of self-extinction is terrifying to most of us. “There is no death, there is only me—me who is going to die,” wrote André Malraux. It makes my stomach turn thinking about it. The dread of death is so primal, it overtakes me on a molecular level. In the lowest moments, it produces nihilism. If I am going to die, why not get it over with? Why live in this agony of anticipation?

I first understood death when I was eight. It was the summer. School had just gotten out and the warm June air was rich with anticipation. Soon we would be in Vermont, and I would do nothing but read, swim, and eat corn and ice cream. A few days before we left, my friend Katie came over for the afternoon. She and my brother and I played freeze tag in the apartment. She was “it,” and she trapped me behind the dining room table. I called out to my brother to come get me. Frozen, I put my hand down on its edge and idly fitted my finger into the narrow groove that connected the oak table leaves to a border of lighter wood. As I did, a shock struck me, like cold lightning. It ran up and down my body and grounded me to the linoleum.

I am going to die,
I realized.

I would die, and I wouldn't see my mother or my father or my dogs or my house when that happened. I would simply . . . not exist. This had never occurred to me before.

And my mother and father were going to die! Before I did, most likely. This was not what I had been promised. I had been promised sun and summer and green trees and water and books and then cooling air and fall and wind and chill and snow and Christmas lights and New Year's slush and ice and then balminess and rain and the green buds of trees and summer all over. Not this gift of life and then, abruptly, an
end
.

I waited in a panic for my brother to unfreeze me—and in a mess of hurtling kinetic energy, he did, bumping into me, squealing, running away. And I ran to my mother, who was trying to read while we played, and hugged her and tried to crawl into her lap, a rare act, which she met with both bemusement and annoyance, saying, “Go on, it's rude not to be a good host,” and pushed me away. Then, noting some sadness in my eyes, she kissed the back of my hand.

All that summer, death haunted me. Before, I'd liked to stay up late to read after my parents put me to bed. I pretended to be scared of the dark, and they would leave the hall light on; I could read by angling my book toward the door. Now, though, I lay in bed, wracked by thoughts of extinction. The idea that I wouldn't exist terrified me. I imagined it as being buried alive, a senselessness that could nonetheless be felt. How could my parents have brought me into a world that would only be snatched from me? Yet they had. Better, it seemed, never to have been born.

On these nights, I would listen to the traffic swooshing by outside, wrapped in my quilt, and work myself into a state of horror so profound that I would become nauseated and run to the bathroom to throw up. It continued into the fall. “What's wrong?” my mother would say, emerging from the dining room where she'd been sitting with my father, wineglass in hand. “I feel sick to my stomach,” I said.

I had a terror that my parents would die in an accident. They often went out with friends after work and if they were late—as they always were—my heart would begin to pound.
Where are you?
I would ask when they called.
Don't worry, we're coming,
they'd say breezily, bar glasses clinking in the background.

When I went back to school, I looked around at my classmates, wondering if they had experienced a similar terror during summer break. At Hwa Yuan, a Chinese restaurant my family went to nearly every Friday night, I gazed at all the well-dressed professionals and felt sick, as if I were looking at corpses rotting around me. “I have to throw up,” I blurted, and hurtled down the narrow stairs of the restaurant to the disgusting, undersized toilet, and retched. I couldn't make anything come up.

When I got upstairs, I looked around and told myself,
I am younger than everyone else here, and they are managing to eat and enjoy themselves. So I have to just assume I am going to live a long life. And I will bookmark this fear for later. I can worry about it when I'm forty or fifty
. And gradually my fear abated.

One night, the old dread returned. My parents came home to find me awake and in tears. As my father walked the babysitter home, my mother took me on her lap, her perfume (Shalimar) and her hair enveloping me, and she, too, began to cry.

“Why are you crying?” I asked through my tears.

“Sometimes even grown-ups cry, Meg,” she said. “Sometimes grown-ups are sad too.”

Why was she sad that night? It is lost now. My mother was two years younger than I am today.

 

 

I
WAS unable to push these questions aside: What are we to do with the knowledge that we die? What bargain do you make in your mind so as not to go crazy with fear of the predicament, a predicament none of us knowingly chose to enter? You can believe in God and heaven, if you have the capacity for faith. Or, if you don't, you can do what a stoic like Seneca did, and push away the awfulness by noting that if death is indeed extinction, it won't hurt, for we won't experience it. “It would be dreadful could it remain with you; but of necessity either it does not arrive or else it departs,” he wrote.

If this logic fails to comfort, you can decide, as Plato and Jonathan Swift did, that since death is natural, and the gods must exist, it cannot be a bad thing. As Swift said, “It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind.” And Socrates: “I am quite ready to admit . . . that I ought to be grieved at death, if I were not persuaded in the first place that I am going to other gods who are wise and good.” But this is poor comfort to those of us who have no gods to turn to. If you love this world, how can you look forward to departing it? Rousseau wrote, “He who pretends to look on death without fear lies. All men are afraid of dying, this is the great law of sentient beings, without which the entire human species would soon be destroyed.” Philip Larkin puts it even more directly, calling the fear of death the “special way of being afraid / No trick dispels”:

And yet without death our lives would lose their shape: “Death is the mother of beauty,” Wallace Stevens wrote. Or as a character in Don DeLillo's
White Noise
says, “I think it's a mistake to lose one's sense of death, even one's fear of death. Isn't death the boundary we need?” It's not clear that DeLillo means us to agree, but I think I do. I love the world more because it is transient.

 

 

Studies have shown that faith helps Americans fear death less. But believing in heaven doesn't protect you from the intensities of grief. To contemplate death in any serious way, even as a believer, is to wonder what change death wreaks upon us. In the occasional moments when I believe in forces we cannot see, I still find it impossible to believe in the cinematic image of loved ones waiting for me just like normal—if slightly diaphanous and shimmering—as I cross a river into their yearning embrace. It simply does not make sense that so enormous a transition would lead to so similar an existence.

And even if death doesn't lead to extinction, it still means that, in the best of circumstances, one will never see one's loved one again in this form—never be able to share jokes, hug, have a glass of wine. I don't just miss my mother's soul, after all. I miss her laugh, her sarcasm, and the sound of her voice saying my name. I miss her hands, which I shall never see again, for we have burned her body into fine, charcoal ash and small white bones, and that is what is now left of her voice and her eyes and her fingernails. That loss is not recuperable, regardless of what one believes about the afterlife. That's what, I think, C. S. Lewis, a practicing Christian, was wrestling with when he wrote this about the death of his wife: