The Long Goodbye (21 page)

On my last Sunday in Paris, I went to Notre Dame and lit a votive candle for my mother, then sat as they began the Vespers service.
I know you would hate this,
I whispered to her.
But I don't know what else to do. I want to remember you. And the last time I was here we came here together. And you marveled at the height of the ceiling and the beauty of stained glass. You wanted to look at old things before you died and this is old.

The bells rang for Vespers, and I listened to the music, tears running down my face.

When I returned to my hotel a light rain was falling. I was restless so I went back out, murmuring to the concierge, “Be back soon,” as if he were my father, then wandered past the gay bars to an old gelato place as the rain fell on me.

I thought I was prepared for my mother's death.

I knew it would happen.

Yet the reality of her
being dead
was so different from her death.

 

 

I
WENT to New Hampshire for four weeks that reminded me of my childhood summers. I read and wrote all day, swam in the afternoons, and spent the nights eating and talking late into the dark. For the first sustained period, I felt my old self plump up and the shadows shrink.

Then my father called me on a Friday night in July, as I was studying the way the setting sun had turned the clouds pink against the light-blue sky. He sounded distraught. “Meg, I wanted to tell you that Ringo isn't doing so well,” he said. “He's standing around, panting, and I can't get him to eat much. And I have to go to this wedding tomorrow, and I have never done something like that without your mother. She was always the one who could get me out the door.”

I told him that he should do whatever felt comfortable, that everyone would understand. He exhaled and said, “I'm just worried about Ringo. I was talking to Eamon, and he said it seems that Ringo has changed an enormous amount since Mom died. It's true. Some nights I go outside and Ringo is standing on the driveway, just standing there, looking out, like he is waiting for someone, searching for them.”

There was not much I could say to comfort him. I had the distinct sense that Ringo was going to die soon. When I had stopped at my dad's on my way to New Hampshire, I'd seen Ringo and thought:
It's going to happen any day
. Diana and I had been throwing balls for Ringo and her dog, Ajax, and he came trotting back to us at an odd angle. “He looks like a drunken sailor!” Diana laughed.

Ringo had been a present for Eamon when he was a boy. But my mother was the real animal lover in our family. She had wanted to be a vet when she was young. She'd always been the one to feed our dogs and groom them and train them. She took Ringo to obedience classes; sweet-tempered by nature, he became the gentlest dog I'd ever spent time with. He was afraid of small spaces under furniture. My mother used to love to watch him look at a ball under a chair and whine.

You big baby, she would say. You big baby. What are you doing? Get it. Get the ball!

And sometimes, after standing there for minutes looking at the tennis ball, he would. Then he would look up at her as if he was proud.

“Anyway, I got a different kind of food,” my dad said, “and when I gave it to him, he ate it quickly, like he was starving. I just have to pay attention. Ringo is going on twelve. Big dogs get sick when they get that old. But it makes you feel that you are up against the inevitability of things. After what we went through this winter, it makes you feel you are up against the inevitability of things.”

His voice broke. “I have this crazy feeling of ‘What can I do?' Because I went through this before, and the outcome was one I was not happy with. I did what I could, everything I could, and the outcome was really not an outcome I'm happy with.”

He paused. I heard him breathe in.

“When are the gods going to stop?”

Two days later he called back.

“I had to put Ringo to sleep,” he said. His voice was hoarse.

He'd taken the dog to the vet for a set of tests, and one came back showing that Ringo had a tumor in his chest. “They could have operated, but he would have been in extreme discomfort and pain afterward,” my father said. He was almost in tears. “I couldn't put him through more.”

At first I thought Ringo represented my mother to my father, and that in Ringo's sickness my father was reliving my mother's—finding better food, adjusting medicines. But now it seemed to me that
he
identified with Ringo. We were all talking about ourselves.
We
are ailing. We lurch like drunken sailors even when we come together for a birthday or a holiday.

 

 

Y
OU REMEMBER her in flashes. The flashes hurt. They light up your stomach. Then you breathe, look out again.

At a party, you say
my dead mother
. You explain,
She died at Christmas
.

Christmas? Ohh . . . comes the pitying response.

Yes
.

It hurts. Then you explain:
But it's good. We can all be together if we want to. We will never forget this is the day our mother died.

You are learning the narrative. You are establishing the catechism, responses to the questions:
And you are thinking in some chamber inside your heart:
Fuck, fuck, fuck
.
How dare you turn pain to reason?

In those moments I
want
to hurt, like an outraged child in a sulk. But quickly a day passes and I've enjoyed myself in the sun, or at dinner, having a glass of wine, talking to friends, reading, talking, not thinking about death.

Yesterday, while I was brushing my teeth, I raised my face to the mirror and unexpectedly saw myself. And I thought: I am becoming someone whose mother is dead.

Then a cool sadness flooded me. It was true. I was getting used to her being dead. My mother was gone. And I: letting her go.

 

 

Then, one morning in New Hampshire, I see a river moving lazily in the sun and I start to cry, because the water is moving so fast. I am doing laundry with two older women and they talk about how hard it is to buy gifts for your mother and I get a lump in my throat and excuse myself to get detergent. I am always wanting either to hide away or to plunge into a “systematic derangement of the senses,” as Rimbaud would have it. I drive too fast. When running, I cross the street in front of cars. With other people, with strangers, I count the hours until I can go be alone and get back to my secret preoccupation, my romance with my lost mother. This is what I need to do, remember her, puzzle over her, understand the difference between us. I trust that one day I'll stop needing to do this.

One night I am lying in bed in my room in a creaky old house. It is a warm summer night. Mosquitoes buzz around me. The light is on, I have been reading
Remembrance of Things Past
, I nod off and wake up. I have a profound, spreading sense that I have been here in this room before. I have felt this pain before. I have seen this very light, I have felt this very temperature, I have known this very feeling of loneliness—except this time I know it is part of the pattern, I am at one with the universe, everything is interconnected. I feel an extreme peace. I am OK. My mother is there. I am in a vision of the universe I love. Nothing need be disturbed, and I could—perhaps I should—die now and all would be well. It is like a waking dream and for a second I have the distinct sense of a voice telling me this is right, it is the moment, I
could
die, all is well, and this is the moment to end on. The “world” seems very far away. Furniture and its edges; light; all seems in retreat, disposable.

 

 

A
FTER A LOSS, you have to learn to believe the dead one is dead. It doesn't come naturally. One July day, I went for a swim in Willard Pond, now an Audubon preserve, where there is a family of nesting loons. I'd spent time reading in the sun, and my arms were getting brown. I had gained weight in the months after my mother died—I kept eating ice cream and cereal late at night when I missed her—but for once I wasn't totally unhappy about the feeling of extra flesh, detecting in the weight a comforting, maternal presence, as if I were mothering my own body.

She would like this pond, I thought. So today I'll go there for her. Driving out, because driving was still so new to me, I imagined who she was when she was thirty-three, what the experience of those summers in Vermont was like for her. I realized she would have had two kids in tow (my brother and me) and was about to become pregnant with her third. I would have been ten. She would, on an afternoon like today, have been driving us down to the covered bridge to swim. I wondered if perhaps she sometimes felt shy, exploring new places with two children and no other adults around—a question I'd never asked myself before. It was because I felt shy going by myself to swim. And then I thought, having children means you have a clear reason for being wherever you are in the summer—at the beach, at the store. There we would be, tugging at her hands, saying, “Mom, Mom—did you see? There was a frog on that rock.” And she would tease and say, “A frog? No, you didn't see a frog.” And we would point and she would pretend not to see and then she would dive into the freezing water, and swim against the current, goofing around with us.

I went to the pond for her. Diving in, I felt for a moment that I
was
my mother. But I was aware that she was dead; I could feel it in the shadows in the green leaves.
This is where the dead live,
I thought,
in the holes in the leaves where the insects are biting through.

 

 

One warm day I went running. I passed a field where horses shuddered in the heat, flicking flies with their ears, and sheep were lying down and grazing at the same time, a vision of laziness. The trees rustled in the breeze, black and green, steeped in sun; there was a lazy buzz of airplanes far overhead. The sheepdog was stretched out on the crest of the hill in repose, a ball of white fluff in the shimmer of the hazy sun. Two nights earlier, after a hard day, I'd had a dream in which my mother held up a ladybug in spectral, gray fingers and said: “When you feel heartsick, just remember this: You are really
eye
sick. You are not looking at things closely enough.”

As I looked, everything moved, jingling slightly against everything else; the world, quietly, brightly alive.

 

 

A
MONTH after Ringo died, my father called. I'd driven back to New York, where it was muggy, and I'd opened the window and was leaning out the fire escape, watching people across our backyards move around in front of their TVs, making dinner.

“The Perseid meteor showers are here,” he told me. “And I've been eating dinner outside and then lying in the lounge chairs watching the stars like your mother and I used to”—at some point he stopped calling her Mom—“and that helps. It might sound strange, but I was sitting there, looking up at the sky, and I thought, ‘You are but a mote of dust. And your troubles and travails are just a mote of a mote of dust.' And it helped me. I have allowed myself to think about things I had been scared to think about and feel. And it allowed me to be there—to be present. Whatever my life is, whatever my loss is, it's small in the face of all that existence.

“Last night Uncle Stephen and Aunt Barbara came over for dinner,” he continued. “A few months ago a night like this would make me feel bad the next day; it was so obvious your mother wasn't there. But not this time. The meteor shower changed something. I was looking the other way through a telescope before: I was just looking at what was not there. Now I look at what is there.”

I knew that death terrified him, and I imagined that my mother's death terrified him about his own death, though he made only oblique references to it, talking about how “one doesn't want to be forgotten.” Sometimes when we were all together at dinner he sat quietly as we blathered about the latest movie and shouted over one another boisterously, and he picked at the food on his plate, bags drooping under his eyes, and I felt sorry that we were not making more effort to say,
Dad, Dad, we are not forgetting you
. But we're not used to talking this way.

 

 

O
NE OF THE MOST confusing manifestations of grief was a flickering on-and-off relationship to sex. At many points after my mother's death I felt a slight aversion to it. It seemed exhausting, all that touching. What was wrong with me? I wondered. After M. had disappeared, something in me got locked away, and for a while I reverted to a distanced, frozen place. Part of me felt terror at the prospect of intimacy. And yet part of me was compelled to seek it out. I drifted into disconnected encounters and relationships I had no business being in. There was something experimental about the way I did this, a conviction that nothing mattered very much—although maybe I was also hoping to find out, through sex, that this conviction might be false. In all of these encounters it was as if I stood on a high plain and a black wind whipped through me, a wind of need; I had the feeling that I was falling down a rabbit hole to Wonderland. Or rather—I was already in Wonderland and, come hell or high water, these would be my companions. I threw myself into a man's life, eager to get beneath whatever mask he wore, even when I felt nothing specific toward
him
. I was absorbed in the cathartic contact that would end, once again, with my own spreading sense of loneliness. It may be that what I really wanted was to find a way to reenact that loneliness, and I got it each time I closed the door on someone. Or perhaps I wanted, cruelly, for them to feel the pain I felt. Whatever the case, at all times, I had an intensified—intoxicated—sense of my own aloneness. Mostly I was pretending. I was capable of being convincing, since I was already role-playing all the time. And then one day I would wake up to the falseness of my own storytelling, and walk away.