The Long Goodbye (22 page)

This was careless of me, I now know, but I was not capable of taking care. Because I had few barriers—I felt I had no skin—it must have seemed as if I was open, confiding, needing to reveal myself, and this quality seemed to draw others in. But my primary romance was with my dead mother. And when, after I moved on, a few of them got angry with me, it surprised me: Didn't they understand that their pain was small and manageable, nothing compared with losing your mother to illness and oblivion? I hadn't meant to spread pain, but I had.

In August, a man I dated after my mother's death texted me about how important it was “not to avoid.” I told him I wasn't avoiding him; I just had other things going on. I needed to see my father and my brothers; that was my priority. When he talked about the importance of not avoiding things I wanted to laugh bleakly, because every nerve in my body still hurt from everything I
hadn't
avoided; arrogantly, I thought that whatever his need, it was nothing in the scheme of loss that I had endured. And I didn't want to take responsibility for it—that was the ugly truth. Over and over I found myself resenting anyone who tried to impose his feelings, his demands, on me; couldn't he see it was all I could do to keep myself moving forward, that whatever energy I had left had to be devoted to my family? A person who did come to see this was Jim. One day when we were talking on the phone, I suddenly said, “I have to go,” and hung up. When we spoke the next day, he said, “It's OK. I get it. You just don't want to be accountable to anyone else.” It was true; but that was because I felt I
couldn't
be.

For all the solicitude in the world, it would be impossible for anyone else to understand what I had gone through and how depleted it had left me. When a man I'd dated asked me to recommend a book that would help him understand “this whole grief thing” I found myself shaking with anger. My mother died, I thought, it's not a “thing.” Every piece of fury I'd carried in my body over the past year was now irrationally directed at him. He
couldn't
understand. He had not made a home with a husband and then disassembled it while his mother was slowly killed by metastasizing cells. But—but—it was not his fault my mother died, I thought, calming myself. And it was not the fault of my friends, whom I still sometimes snapped at when they reassured me that one day I'd feel better. I didn't get to punish them just because I wanted to smash a stick over someone's head. This man had been kind to me; what he didn't understand wasn't a crime. I was ornery and judgmental, ready to pick a cosmic fight over scraps. Sometimes, loss seemed to have enlarged me; at other times, it shrank me to this position of wounded, baffled anger.

In August, my friend C., an artist, called me with a proposition. He told me if I was in mourning, I should visit Detroit. It was a strange thing to say but I liked it; it gently reminded me how small my grief was without diminishing its reality. On arriving, I shivered to see how desolate the city was. Entire blocks were given over to abandoned parking lots and buildings. There is no center, no comforting “good neighborhood,” the way there is in New Orleans or Chicago. Instead, even the “best” blocks are studded with abandoned buildings and open concrete lots. The mood oscillates from building to building. The whole city is in grief.

On a cool late-summer day, C. and I drove out to Cork-town, the oldest surviving neighborhood in Detroit. “I want to show you something,” he said, wheeling the car to the left. “This is going to blow your mind.”

“What?”

“Can't you guess?” He nodded his head to the side of the road. I saw a looming structure behind the commercial buildings. “Your mind is going to be so blown. It is going to be in little pieces everywhere.”

“The train station,” I said.

He had told me about the abandoned train station. He is from Zimbabwe, and his accent turns the word “abandoned” into the word “abundant.” I misheard him the first time he'd mentioned it. No, he said,
a-ban-doned
.

The building is a majestic example of Beaux-Arts architecture. At the base you see the grand arches typical of train stations built in the early twentieth century. Above it rise ornate upper floors that used to hold offices. Implacably, it looms over the landscape, and yet every window is broken, the arches boarded, barbed wire surrounding it, a reminder of doom and glory at once. It's a temple of confidence—architectural confidence, civic confidence, urban confidence—in gap-toothed decay, at once monstrous and magnificent. As we looked at it, a couple of German tourists pulled up to take photos.

The train station took me back to something I had read in Harrison's
The Dominion of the Dead
. Ruins remind us that mortal time is only one kind of time, because, in their transitional state, they dramatize death. They embody what we know to be true only abstractly: that we and the things we make decay, and our whole history is a dot in time. As John Updike once put it, generally “disappearance has no appearance.” Ruins also represent an idea of a future that has not come to pass, an alternate universe in which things didn't happen this way—one of the mourner's preoccupations.

The decline of a city is not the same as the death of a human. But the visual decay of Detroit resonated with me. In the midst of all that emptiness reverberated what I could think of only as a desolate resilience. People were taking advantage of government stimulus money to buy homes, and artists and farmers were repurposing old buildings. And in the midst of all the urban ruin, green trees were everywhere. I asked C. about them.

“Those are called ‘ghetto palms' because they grow in neglected corners of the city,” he said. “Owners hate them: Their roots grow so deep and so fast they crack the foundations of buildings.”

At C.'s apartment, I read more about the ghetto palm in one of his books. The tree was imported to California during the nineteenth-century gold rush by a wave of Chinese immigrants, who treasured it for its medicinal properties. But it took to the soil and climate all too well and now it grows all over. It can grow pretty much anywhere because its roots are deep and because it has long wide leaves that scoop up water. It also smells bad, so it stinks up the city. Its original name was far more poetic: Back in the days when it was prized, it was called the “tree of heaven.”

The ghetto palm reminded me of the mourner's biological impulse to survive. New bereavement research has found that many mourners are highly resilient. Of everyone who suffers a loss, almost ninety percent experience what psychiatrists call normal grief. Most of these people do return to functioning well soon after a loss. But what does being “resilient” mean? The tree of heaven survives its transplantation in the new world; it does so because its roots are deep and grow so quickly. The resilient are the ones who have the most “secure attachments,” in psychiatric parlance. Even so, we feel like ghetto palms; the shine of the tree of heaven has rubbed from our leaves.

The way C.'s accent turned “abandoned” into “abundant” got me thinking about whether abandonment can be an opportunity as well as a loss. One part of grief felt like utter abandonment—a sensation of having no place in the world. But I had begun to ask myself whether we were meant to feel that within personal abandonment (if not within the horrific economic abandonment of Detroit) lay a strange abundance: the paradoxical wealth that comes with emptiness. I suppose that Buddhists would understand this, would say, “Of course.” With so many beliefs shaken, I could see things freshly; I supposed that somewhere lurking in my loss was the opportunity to create, not unlike the way artists in Detroit were reinhabiting dead buildings and laboriously reconceiving them.

Of course, I was skeptical of this train of thought. It struck me as a form of American “positive thinking” at its most embedded. Yet according to the researcher George Bonanno, the bereaved often take comfort in what is termed “benefit finding”—a tendency to focus on the so-called silver lining inside the dark cloud. Bonanno notes that people whose loved ones die painfully from cancer often say later, “I am just thankful I had the chance at least to say goodbye.”

In the midst of pain, optimism may indeed be a necessary survival tactic. But I wanted to think that the lift I had felt of late was spiritual, not merely predictably psychological.

 

 

E
IGHT MONTHS after my mother's death, I went back to Marfa to spend some time in the desert before I started teaching again that fall.

On the day of Ted Kennedy's memorial service, Liam called me; he was upset. “These commentators are so dumb,” he said. “Can you write something about this? How dumb people are? How little they understand about grief?”

I had no TV in Marfa. “What's up?”

“They are just speculating, they're not thinking. They think they know something, but they're just blithering idiots who work for ABC and who feel free to share their uninformed speculations with the whole nation.”

I asked what he meant.

“The way they talk about Kennedy's cancer—it's both sensationalizing and minimizing. They say things like, ‘The family has had a year to prepare for this day, and they seem quite calm.' I went on Facebook to post a complaint about how awful this coverage is. I told the guy: You are a dumb commentator who's not thinking about what comes out of your mouth. Prepared? They lost their
father
. Or their
husband.
They are not prepared. He is
dead
. This is a solemn moment, and only they know what they're feeling, not this idiot TV commentator. Everyone's just so freaked out by grief! What do they know? Stop telling us how we feel! Stop speculating!”

 

 

Three-quarters of a year after a loss, the hardest part is the permanently transitional quality: you are neither accustomed to it nor in its fresh pangs. You feel you will always be wading the river, your legs burning with exhaustion. Today I wrote a note to someone who just lost her father. In it, without thought, I began to write,
The loss doesn't pass, but the anguish does—it subsides
. Then I thought: Who am I to say?

I returned to New York last week, where memories suffused every corner. Having dinner with Jodie, I said something about how I need to move forward, not look back.

“But you are moving forward.”

“What do you mean?”

“You're meeting people who didn't know your mother and developing relationships with them. You might wish they knew your mother, but you get to know them, you do it in good faith. You're moving forward.”

But it had started to feel untenable, the memories everywhere. The next day, on a run, we were going past the school where my mother worked, when I saw two administrators walking up the block toward us. They stopped to ask me how I was, to see how my father was, to say we should get together. I answered, explained, agreed. As we turned from them to get coffee, we ran into Diana, who's now head of admissions at Saint Ann's. Jodie knew her from my wedding and from the memorial service. We waved. As we crossed the street Jodie said: “Point taken. Maybe you should move to Manhattan.”

 

 

 

I
HAD TRIED to find a metaphor for my loss in the weeks after my mother's death. Lately I have been thinking about a different metaphor: a metaphor for the self after loss. We have a word for the wife who's lost her husband—widow—but it's not a metaphor; it's an identity. And we don't really have a word for having lost a parent—except when we speak of children who have lost both parents as “orphaned.” Walking to a party in Tribeca the other night—on one of those smoky, resonant autumn evenings—I caught a glimpse of my face in the window of a hotel. I was thinking about how hard it was to say how much I missed my mother, yet how central the feeling was. It is heartsickness, like the sadness you feel after a breakup, but many times stronger and more desperate. I miss her: I want to talk to her, hear her voice, have a joke with her. I am willing for us to be “broken up” if she'll just have dinner with me once. And as I was walking I thought:
I will carry this wound forever.
It's not a question of getting over it or healing. No; it's a question of learning to live with this transformation. For the loss is transformative, in good ways and bad, a tangle of change that cannot be threaded into the usual narrative spools. It is too central for that. It's not an emergence from the cocoon, but a tree growing around an obstruction.

Suddenly it was fall, the season of death, the anniversary of things-going-to-hell. Because Halloween fell on a Saturday, the day had an especially festive quality, with more people out on the streets in the daylight. I passed a caveman couple with their Superman son. A sexy kitty mom accompanied a young vampire of five or so.

I was struck by how few ghosts and goblins there were. In Mexico, November 2 is celebrated as the Day of the Dead. The holiday is an occasion to remember and venerate the dead, to give them their proper due. People build altars honoring the deceased. They visit graves with marigolds and sugar skulls and the deceased's favorite foods, much the way the Egyptians did in the Beautiful Feast of the Valley. By contrast, the American Halloween is mostly about candy and horror films. Even the plastic ghosts fluttering from doorways seem goofy rather than ghoulish.

One Halloween, when I was about seven, my mother was irritable after school and took a short nap before we went trick-or-treating. I got that crestfallen feeling children get. I was going to be a bad fairy, but I had no wand. Looking around, I spied my father's Szechuan peppers drying on the door, upside down. I broke one off, bright red, slick with the oil of its spices, and wrapped it in a funnel of tinfoil. Sometimes in those days my father would try to amuse me by wrapping tinfoil into a ball and telling me it contained magic.