The Long Goodbye: A Memoir

by Meghan O'Rourke

Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me. A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable. And because my mother was relatively young—fifty-five—I feel robbed of twenty years with her I’d always imagined having.

The world frightened me: when there was lightning outside my window, I took it personally. It seemed that everything was here only to be lost. The world was beautiful and it would be taken from me; I would die, and so would everything I loved.

I already missed her. I was irrevocably aware that the Person Who Loved Me Most in the World was about to be dead. Of course, I had my father, too. But fathers love in different ways than mothers do.

My mother was dying and she had not, for one moment in the last twenty-four hours, acted like my mother; she’d acted like someone who disliked me. In all my various imaginings of the awful end I knew was to come, I had never pictured an estrangement such as this.

ONE OF THE IDEAS I’ve clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out. If I work hard, I will be spared, and I will get what I desire, finding the cave opening over and over again, thieving life from the abyss.

The main difference was that I had more energy; still, when I was sad, the pangs were just as painful—perhaps more so, since it had been longer since I’ve seen my mother, and the reality of her death was beginning to intrude in new ways.

I just think about how I miss her. I’m sorry for myself, sorry about losing a life where I always had a mom to go to. Whatever the case, in grief you’re not just reconstituting the lost person, recalling her, then letting her go—you’re having to grow into the shocking new role you play on a planet without her.