The Long Goodbye: A Memoir

by Meghan O'Rourke

I managed to look like a normal person. I walked down the street; I answered my phone; I brushed my teeth, most of the time. But I was not OK. I was in grief. Nothing seemed important. Daily tasks were exhausting. Dishes piled in the sink, knives crusted with strawberry jam. At one point I did not wash my hair for ten days. I felt that I had abruptly arrived at a terrible, insistent truth about the impermanence of the everyday.

I was surprised to discover that I felt lost.

The real indignity, it seemed, was dying where no one cared for you the way your family did, dying where it was hard for your whole family to be with you and where excessive measures might be taken to keep you alive past a moment that called for letting go.

“Frosty the Snowman,” that least dignified of all carols, the Asti Spumante to the Champagne of “Silent Night.”