The Long Goodbye/Meghan O'Rourke: Reflections

One expects from poets deeply lyrical, language-invested
memoirs, especially when the topic is grief, or at least I do.  But in The Long Goodbye, this very personal but also
deliberately universal story about losing her own mother to cancer at the age
of fifty-five, the poet Meghan O’Rourke chooses language that is almost stark, rarely
buoyed by metaphor, and frequently amplified by the words of experts, to
retrace her journey through loss.  O’Rourke
wasn’t prepared for her mother’s absence. 
Can anyone be?  She has lost
something, and she continues to look—avidly, stonily, ragingly,
insistently.  She reads the
literature.  She talks with friends.  She risks bad behavior simply to find the prickle of living again.   




But O'Rourke, like all of us, has to live
her grief alone, and the worst thing about grief, in the end, is this: there is
no cure. When someone we have loved is gone, we cannot get them back.  As one who lost her own mother a few years ago, who watched her life force peel away, I find these words, toward the book’s
close, to be powerful and true—the poet working alongside the daughter here,
the facts lifting toward metaphor:

The bond between a mother and child is so unlike any other
that it is categorically irreplaceable. 
Unmothered is not a word in my
dictionary, but I often find myself thinking it should be.  The “real” word most like it—it never
escapes me—is unmoored.  The irreplaceability is what becomes
stronger—and stranger—as the months pass: 
Am I really she who has woken up again without a mother? Yes, I am.  Some nights I still lie awake, nerves
jangled, in the velvet dark, staring out the window, listening to the cars pass
by like echoes of other lives lived, my breath shallow, my toes cold, my mind
drifting in the shallows and currents of the past, like a child wading in a
stream.                         

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