The Long Goodbye (24 page)

“I just feel like I'm standing in place, and everyone else, all my friends, they're moving on,” Eamon said to me one day, the fall after her death. I told him, “No, not at all—you're young. Your whole life is in front of you. You just need to figure out what you want to do—apply to school, travel, what.” He was sitting next to me at the school my mother used to help run, watercoloring a poster he made for the door of his classroom. He had drawn a castle and moat, a deep moat, with a dragon attacking it from on high. Around the castle he'd printed all the names of the kids in the class.

“Yeah,” he said. The paintbrush scratched over the print. “I don't know.”

But I was telling him partial lies. Because his friends
are
moving on, many of them with their mothers and fathers at their backs, giving them allowances, helping them buy clothes, showing up at graduation with gifts and flowers, and when he should have been preparing to leave school he was in a hospital saying, I think they're giving her too much Ativan, too much morphine.

What are the last words of hers that Eamon remembers? After she died he went red-eyed into the living room and curled up on the couch and wrote in his notebook. Later he left it open and I saw in his handwriting, still so like a little boy's, large-lettered and round, MOM DIED TODAY. SHE . . . and I stopped reading, I picked up the notebook and closed it and put it to the side before the funeral. That night after her death—after that Christmas dinner I barely remember—I found him on the couch looking at a picture of her and him when he was three, the two of them on boogie boards on Cape Cod, and they're tan and he's all blond hair and baby curls and blue eyes and he's grinning as children do and she is smiling as mothers do and the ocean sweeps around them, foaming and aquamarine, and you can almost see it move. He was hitting his hand to his forehead over and over. I went over and I took the picture from his hands and I said, I know you need to feel this, but I think you need to go to sleep right now, darling. It's late and you're exhausted. The picture will be here tomorrow. And he let me slip the picture from his hands and give him water and an Ativan.

Now he was silent and curved away from me over the drawing.

I didn't know you could draw so well, I said, lamely.

Yeah, he said.

 

 

A few months after my mother died I was reading a memoir by my great-uncle David, my grandfather's youngest brother, a priest who lives in Berkeley. In it he wrote that he was “especially aware of having moved from the ground rules of one world into a new world with completely different rules.” These new rules were connected to “a sense of entitlement”:

I realized it was what I'd been feeling—
I have suddenly become an outsider among my peers
. Because many had not gone through a terrible loss or a major illness, they were still operating as planners, coordinators, under the star of entitlement, from which I had been abruptly banished. I had felt that, however benignly or unconsciously, the world around me wanted my grief stifled and silenced; it threatened a particular lie of the moment and class I lived in, the myth of self-improvement and control, the myth of meritocratic accomplishment leading to happiness and security. I drew close to those who'd gone through an experience that ruptured this way of seeing the world, because those who hadn't often left me feeling keenly alone. A year after my mother died, my friend Jodie's father was in the hospital; I told a mutual friend, who went silent, then said, “You always think these things are going to happen to someone else, but I guess that one day they're going to happen to us.” I didn't know how to respond.

 

 

My first memory is of waking up from a dream about balloons, a street fair, being on my father's shoulders. My mother comes into the room.
Where was the parade we went to last night?
I ask her.
Hmm?
she says, pulling my pajamas over my head.
We went to a parade.
The cotton shirt lassoes my arms. No, honey, that was a dream, she says.

Some days still, the memories come. And I can't read, or think, or do anything but want her.

 

 

I
N MY MIND, Thanksgiving marked the beginning of the end of my mother's life. I had a cold hollow in my stomach thinking about its arrival. A few days before, I went for a walk on the Brooklyn Bridge, looking out over the metallic water. Gazing out beyond the Statue of Liberty and the Buttermilk Channel to the Verrazano, beyond the loading docks and derricks, I felt, viscerally, the interweaving of industry and nature and people, the layers of history. It helped me slip out of the grip of obdurate individuality and into the grip of something larger: a sense that I was part of a system. That morning I had reread a section of John Ashbery's “The New Spirit”:

Walking home, thinking about the silent changes that had occurred in me over the last year, I reached the intersection of Atlantic Avenue and Court. As I stood at the light I heard a thud. Something feathery rolled along the hood of a black sedan to my right and hit the ground, and there were feathers, a leg, another leg—had the driver hit a pigeon?—and even as I wondered, the feathers slowed into a tawny hugeness and the thing rolled over and I saw amber eyes look at me and blink. It was a hawk—a large, magnificent hawk. Struggling to raise itself up, it shook its wings but fell back. It lay panting on the pavement two feet from me, huge, badly hurt. I began to shake. Seeing it jostled some sensation loose in me that had been tamped down since my mother's death—the panic of witnessing vulnerability, a creature struggling not to die.

The car that hit it drove on. Now the light was red. A man advanced into the traffic and waved at the bird. I stepped into the street and waved, too, as if it could be shooed. It strained but couldn't get off the ground. “Come on,” I said, powerless. Cars were honking and people were turning to stare and the traffic pressed forward. What should I do? What could I do? Could I call 911? Confusedly, I stepped back on the sidewalk and called Jim. “There's a hawk in the street,” I said nonsensically, crying, as if he could do something about it. The man nudged it again and then the light changed once more and the cars surged forward. “Oh no,” I said. “Oh no.”

But as I held the phone to my ear the hawk strained once again and this time it lifted up, unfurling its long wings and rising, heading from the ground to the sky majestically. “What's happening?” Jim said. “It's flying,” I said. Hanging low, it looped to the left and changed direction. “It's flying. I don't know if it's OK, but it's flying.” And I hung up and ran after to see, still shaking. One minute it had been on the ground, wounded, mortal, and the next it had risen, and a burden lifted from my shoulders.

 

 

Thanksgiving itself was cloudy and mild. I bought apples for pie at the local store before driving up with my brothers; the Brooklyn streets were quiet, as after a storm. Worried about my father being alone, we arrived at his house in the late morning. He was glad to see us. The rest of our guests—Emily, our cousin Rachel, her husband, Doug, and their two-year-old daughter, Sasha—arrived in the mid-afternoon. We began cooking, and I found that in the chopping of apples and the smells there was a strange, pleasurable tug of connection to the past.

Earlier that year, I had had to make an apple pie for a video for the Web magazine about the everyday lessons mothers teach their daughters. The idea filled me with dread, and for a day or two before I made the pie I was gloomy, resentful that I had to make this pie, a pie I wished she were teaching me to make once again.

On the day of the shoot, I pulled out the old recipe book my mother and father had given my brothers and me—the 4A Cookbook, they called it, after the apartment we lived in. And, step-by-step, I made the pie. I didn't let the dough chill for long enough and it came apart as I tried to roll it out. The result looked messier than usual. But it had been strangely comforting to read my mother's words and revisit her way of making things. At the end of the recipe for pastry (butter, Crisco, flour, sugar, water) she had written, philosophically: “This will constitute the dough,” a phrasing I would never have paid much attention to in the past. As the pie was cooking, I got flustered. I was supposed to turn the heat down from 425 degrees. But to what temperature? I reached for the phone. And realized—I couldn't. From now on, I would have to answer my pie questions myself, through trial and error.

Afterward, I called my dad and asked him why he thought making the pie had brought me so close to my mother. He listened, then said, “A few months ago, you were talking about how you were envious of cultures where there are rituals for mourning. And it just seems to me that within our family, when things happened, whether good or bad, we tended to get together. And when we got together, we ate together, which meant cooking. So you learned from your mother how to make pie. It is a concrete thing she gave you. But it's also that when you make it, you are part of a tradition. Someday you're going to be the person to teach someone else.”

I told him about the impulse to call her, and he said something that stayed with me. “The making of the pie
is
the phone call. To make pie was to call your mom.” Then he added, “Come Thanksgiving, you've got to make the apple pie.”

“What do you mean
I've got to
?” I asked.

“Well, the common thing across societies is this idea of yearly commemoration—Easter, the empty chair at the Seder, the Egyptian festival called the Beautiful Feast of the Valley, when the Thebans crossed the Nile to picnic at the mortuaries that held their ancestors and recent dead. It's almost like forced remembrance. So next Thanksgiving, you've got to make the apple pie.”

And so here I was on Thanksgiving, making the pie. With family around, cooking the same things we always cooked, creating the same smells we'd always created, my mother's death no longer seemed a bleak marker of “Before” and “After.” I felt her absence around us but I also saw how, too, she was embedded in us.

The next day, a couple and their daughter came to see the house, which now, to my shock, had a For Sale sign outside. They walked around and asked questions; upon entering, the realtor asked me, “Are you the owner?” “No, I'm their—his daughter,” I said, stumblingly. “The owner is Paul, my father.” As the realtor talked to my father, the family wandered through, opening cupboards, peering into my mother's study. “This is cute!” the wife said. “It's like a little study, it could be my work room.” They wandered back into the dining room.

“We'd want to put a pool back there,” the husband said, gesturing to the part of the yard where my parents had planned on putting one. “So why is your dad leaving?”

“I think he has too much space,” I said, semi-truthfully.

III
.

I knew that a Christmas carol would make me cry this season. I just didn't know it would be “Frosty the Snowman,” that least dignified of all carols, the Asti Spumante to the Champagne of “Silent Night.” I was driving to Trader Joe's on a rainy Sunday to buy poinsettias and eggnog for a small party I was having. As I distractedly pressed the radio buttons, I heard the familiar bumptious chorus, and my stomach turned with nostalgia: “Thumpety thump thump, thumpety thump thump, look at Frosty go.” But it was when Frosty, knowing of his imminent demise, tells the kids, “Let's run, and we'll have some fun now, before I melt away,” that tears leaked down my face.

The holidays brought a feeling of togetherness that my mother loved. After Christmas, before going back to school, she would sit for days on the couch reading the books she'd been given, playing with a new camera, and take us for walks with the dogs, imbued with joy at the week's quiet wintriness. Though my parents never had much money, she always went overboard, searching out gifts that we didn't know we wanted.

I still can't bear the idea of anyone knowing she is about to die, least of all my mother. Last year at this time, she was climbing the stairs with me to the attic to gather the Christmas decorations. She had already had radiation surgery for her brain tumors, but it had left her weak and confused (and on the verge of descending into a steroidal delirium) and she kept trying to pick up full, heavy boxes and carry them downstairs.

“Mom, put the box down.”

“But I want to decorate.”

“I know, but we don't need all that.”

“But I want
all
the decorations,” she said, stubbornly.

It was like managing a child. As I turned away, she picked up a large box containing the heavy tree stand, and, when she caught me looking at her, regarded me with truculent defiance. I realized that my idea of decorating the house while my brothers and father were at school was a bad one. Wanting to get my mother away from the television, I'd built up a Norman Rockwell vision of cozy togetherness, in which hanging up the old red ribbons and the white lights could stave off the death that was sniffing around our house, looking for a point of entrance. But she was far too confused and fragile for this exercise in nostalgia.