The Long Goodbye (25 page)

She was living gamely despite her approaching death and it hobbled my heart. I still find it terrifying to imagine. It is like picturing one's slow self-erasure, noticing the disappearance, one day, of a pinkie, the next of a toe, then slowly, all the toes, all the fingers, a hand.

I have been thinking of a story my mother used to tell me when I was a little girl. I loved baths and resisted getting out. One day, when I was about three, my mother, impatient, said, “If you stay in the bath any longer, you'll turn into a raisin.”

“No I won't.”

“Look at your fingertips.”

I looked. They were wrinkled and pruny.

“That's just my fingers. Fingers always wrinkle.”

“You don't know the story of the little girl who turned into a raisin?” my mother asked, holding up a towel.

“No.”

“There was a little girl in New York who loved to take baths. She never wanted to get out when her mother asked her to. One day, her mother asked her over and over to get out, but the little girl wouldn't. So her mother threw up her hands and went downstairs. The little girl kept playing, but she was getting smaller and smaller. First her fingers and toes wrinkled up, then her hands and feet, then her whole body, until she had shrunk to a raisin. Her mother came upstairs and looked for her but she wasn't in the bath. ‘Oh, she must have gotten out,' the mother said, and she pulled the plug out of the drain. ‘Oh no!' cried the girl, but her mother couldn't hear her. And as the bath water swirled out of the bath, so, too, did the little girl, going down the drain.”

“Was she OK?”

“She went down the drain and out the house through the pipes under the streets and came up in a grate on the street. Meanwhile, her mother and father searched for her everywhere, very upset. They wanted their little girl back! But they couldn't find her. The next evening they went to a friend's house and passed the grate where the girl was lying. It was a very quiet night and as the mother walked she thought she heard something. She looked down. ‘Look, it's a raisin,' she said to her husband. ‘How strange!' and she picked it up. It moved in her hands and when she looked she saw it was their little girl. She cried with joy and went inside and took out a hair dryer and dried the raisin girl until slowly she plumped back up, first her fingers and toes, then her hands and feet, until she was herself again.”

My mother gave me her look. “Now do you want to get out?”

“Yes!” I said.

And I stepped out into the scratchy old white towel and her arms came around my body.

 

 

I
KNOW I need to do something with your mother's clothes,” my father said to me one night after dinner. “I just don't know what to do. I started to look through them and I thought OK, all this can go. But then I found some formal clothes, and I thought, I can't just go dump these at Goodwill. I have memories of your mother wearing them, at Saint Ann's events, at parties, at weddings”—mercifully he didn't say “at
your
wedding”—“and it seems odd to just leave them there with everything else.”

“Do you want to keep them?” I said.

“Yes, I want to keep some, just to, just to,” he faltered, “have.” He rubbed his hair, which is fine and soft, like a duckling's, a pale white that could almost be a newborn's blond corona. “I also want to do this
mindfully
, and I don't think that just dropping all of her stuff off at Goodwill is mindful. It seems mindless,” he said. “I want people to have things of hers. I just don't know how to do it. I don't want to do anything rash.”

Holding on indefinitely to the possessions of the dead, and keeping rooms just as the dead left them, are symptoms of complicated or pathological grief, I'd learned. That my father was thinking about letting go of her clothes was a good sign. He hadn't cleaned out her closet or her study, though he didn't seem finicky about keeping her possessions exactly in place. Mostly, he just seemed overwhelmed. “We could help you,” I said. “We could take stuff to Goodwill for you.”

“Oh, I have no problem taking stuff to Goodwill,” he replied. “I don't find it upsetting or anything. I just don't know what to do.”

I thought how different men and women are—how clear it was that he did find it upsetting, but simply wouldn't say so. Even knowing this, I was hurt to hear him say that dumping my mother's possessions at the Goodwill didn't upset him.
It is upsetting,
I thought.
And you should be able to say so
. We're always judging one another, we mourners.

 

 

M
Y MOTHER had given me a novel for Christmas many years ago, which I found myself wanting to reread, about a young woman who loses her father, whom she's been taking care of for eleven years. Because she is devastated by the prospect of losing love again, she prefers to retreat than risk love. It is easier to live in emotional hiding than with the likelihood of a future heartbreak.

I remembered the book on one of those days when I thought how easy it would be to lie around sleeping and eating mindlessly for the rest of my life. I wanted to reread the end of the novel, where the heroine who has grown depressed in her seclusion decides to reject her fearful penitence and return to a life of pleasure—to sex, to love, to her friends, to the chance of joy. But I couldn't find the copy my mother had given me. One night, walking home from teaching, I saw an old paperback copy of it on a dollar table on Sixth Avenue and bought it. I read it that night, feeling I was understanding both something about my experience and my mother's, since she had loved that book. I think I will always look for clues to her in books and photographs. A mourner is always searching for traces of the lost one because they bear testimonial force: This person existed.

We were now in the anniversary of the last week of her life. On my way uptown to meet my friend Anat, my childhood best friend, who was in town from Palo Alto to see a play, I did some shopping, meandering down to the West Village to Three Lives, the kind of bookstore we used to all browse in for hours as a family, where my mother would slowly introduce us to the books she had loved and now thought we should read. Looking at a book about science and the Enlightenment, I thought how much it would interest her. “It's perfect,” I decided. “I'll get it.” Then I remembered. But still I thought, stupidly:
Surely if I buy it for her, she will read it
.

“Anniversary reactions” are common among mourners on any date that reminds them of the loved one: birthdays, holidays, and especially the first anniversary of a death. One study found that people are often admitted to the hospital on the anniversary of a death, even many years later. But in the days leading up to Christmas, I had been sleeping better than I had all year. I went to friends' holiday parties in a daze of gratitude that I was not “numbed out.” I found myself picking up the old routines, putting on makeup, realizing I had to go to the gym. I felt lightness again, a true sense of savoring the everyday, especially when I saw Anat, whom I'd known since I was twelve. My mother had been instrumental in our friendship. As the principal of the middle school, she'd assigned me to be Anat's “guide” on the first day of seventh grade, when she was a new student. I apparently started talking, quite fast, as soon as we met, and didn't stop all day. We have been close since then. Peculiarly, it happened that the play we went to had been written by an old colleague of my mother's and was about the anniversary of a death. It seemed as if the universe were conspiring to show me: Look! People move on. Or perhaps these signs had been there all along, only now my brain was ready to see them.

After we had dinner, I walked home from the subway in a snowstorm, past all the houses with their holiday decorations. I snapped a photo on my phone of the snow falling through the holiday lights by the brownstones. The snow was falling so fast that in the picture the flakes resembled scores of ghostly tiny comets streaking to the mantled ground. What if our minds are cameras set to a narrow aperture, unable to perceive the full reality around us, and we are in the midst of a complicated storm, one that is ongoing, dynamic, imperceptible? And what if my mother were in that storm? It was in the haze of such chimeras that I found hope.

 

 

I also found myself seeing freshly all the ways our family had changed. A few days before Christmas, Isabel mentioned that Eamon had had an epileptic seizure. No one in my family had told me, and I was annoyed. As my father and I talked on the phone, my annoyance erupted and I snapped at him. He snapped back, his voice rising. I knew I was doing exactly what I shouldn't do—I knew I was being hard on my father—but he was the center of the family now. I needed him to tell us what was happening, the way my mother would have told us. Of course, this line of thinking was fruitless: he would never be my mother.

In the past, we might have hung up still angry. (A year earlier, while my mother was sick, my father had done exactly that, cutting me off mid-sentence; infuriated, I told my mother I would never speak to him again.) Today, we both paused, and backed down.

“I don't want to fight with you,” I finally said.

“I should have called,” he said, quietly. “It's just hard to remember all the things your mother used to do.”

On Christmas Eve, our father came to the door looking tired and happy to see us. He had been searching the cupboards for canned tomatoes to make the traditional Christmas Eve pizza. Our Christmases had always been heavily ritualized in a secular manner. Every year, we went to a movie and then my father made pizza as we wrapped gifts. This year we hadn't made it to the movie—we got home too late—but we were going to have the pizza. Except my father had forgotten to buy tomatoes. I went upstairs to wrap presents, and Liam came in my room twenty minutes later to tell me that our father, who had gone to get more tomatoes, had just called to say none of the stores were open. I said maybe we could order pizza.

“I doubt anywhere is open. That's the difference between Fairfield and Brooklyn. Poor dad. He must be upset.”

We went downstairs to see what else we could eat, but found only some cheese and crackers, stale cereal, canned soup, and puckering red peppers. It was getting late when our father finally returned. He'd found tomatoes after driving around for an hour. The next day, he told Liam, “Last night, when I couldn't find the tomatoes for the pizza, I just thought, ‘I ruined everything. I was trying to make Christmas go on, but I failed.'”

 

 

As the sauce simmered, we belatedly gathered to decorate the tree, which felt comforting and terrifying at once. My father always had preferred to listen to Renaissance carols—it went with his affection for old cultures—but my mother had loved carols sung by Sinatra or Bing Crosby, so he cleaned a scratch on a
Christmas with the Rat Pack
CD and put it on. Everything had become fodder for nostalgia.

My parents had collected Christmas ornaments for years, and as we rummaged through the boxes we came across ornament after ornament our mother had handpicked. They were like bridges to the past: the plastic replicas of Secretariat and Smarty Jones she'd purchased from the New York Racing Association; a mummy for our father; numerous deer and the feathered birds she favored, some looking the worse for wear. And then there were the misshapen felt ornaments we had made with our mother's help—we would go to the Woolworth's on Court Street and pick out felt, glitter pens, and sequins. Holiday joy now comes with shards of pain.

Soon the pizza—oily, with sharp cheddar cheese on top—was ready. Eamon called out, “Dad, where are you?” as my father fussed in the kitchen. We sat together for dinner, one fewer plate at the table. I had spent so much of this week avoiding thinking about my mother, and I was doing it even as we sat there. The mind is like an ocean that we sometimes look into, and sometimes not, staring at the sun, distracted by the clamorous beach around us. I noticed that my father had a bad cough. Huck, our golden retriever, anxiously licked our feet under the table, as if sensing the odd energy in the air.

But something about being together was buoying. After dinner, I persuaded my brothers to watch
Scrooged
instead of a goofy boy comedy; we'd watched it back in 2005, the Christmas before my mother received the diagnosis, when we still could find safety in the bright shadow of holiday promise. Now we piled on the couch where my mom used to rest after her chemo. Huck squeezed in among us and licked our feet, and our father sat on the edge of the fireplace. After a bit he went up to bed. We watched together, a makeshift family: the siblings and the dog.

 

 

Christmas was cloudy. I woke early and went downstairs to make tea. As I passed my father's open bedroom door, I saw a large, square white cardboard container on a side table. My heart beating faster, I went in. The box bore a plain label that read, in neat type, BARBARA JEAN KELLY O'ROURKE. If the box had always been there, I had managed never to see it. Now, the morning of the anniversary of her death, I recognized it as the container of my mother's ashes.

My father was sitting in the living room—the room where my mother died—wrapping presents. It had the air of a stage set. I was sniffling from the dog.

“Do you have any more Claritin?”

“I don't know. Is there any in the cabinet?”

I rummaged around, but all that was in the cabinet was stale food and old receipts for my mother's medicine. There was no Claritin. If my mother were alive, there would be Claritin when I came home, and tissues everywhere, and she would have vacuumed the house herself even after the cleaning lady did. My mother was not obsessed with cleanliness. But that was one of the things she did for me. She vacuumed up the dog hair.