The Long Goodbye: A Memoir

by Meghan O'Rourke

I did not know what I was supposed to do, nor, it seemed, did my friends and colleagues, especially those who had never suffered a similar loss. Some sent flowers but did not call for weeks. One friend launched into fifteen minutes of small talk when she saw me, before asking how I was, as if we had to warm up before diving into the churning, dangerous waters of grief. Others sent worried e-mails a few weeks later, signing off: “I hope you’re doing well.” It was a kind sentiment, but it made me angry. I was not “doing well.” And I found no relief in that worn-out refrain that at least my mother was “no longer suffering.” Mainly, I thought one thing: My mother is dead, and I want her back. I wanted her back so intensely that I didn’t want to let go. At least, not yet.

In our culture of display, the sadness of death is largely silent.

After my mother’s death, I felt the lack of rituals to shape and support my loss. I was not prepared for how hard I would find it to reenter the slipstream of contemporary life, the sphere of constant connectivity, a world ill suited to reflection and daydreaming.

I fenced in my terror of the abyss with the pretense that information was control.

Time doesn’t obey our commands. You cannot make it holy just because it is disappearing.

In the weeks after my mother’s death, I experienced an acute nostalgia. This longing for a lost time was so intense I thought it might split me in two, like a tree hit by lightning. I was—as the expression goes—flooded by memories. It was a submersion in the past that threatened to overwhelm any “rational” experience of the present, water coming up around my branches, rising higher.

No one was telling me that my sadness was unseemly, but I felt, all the time, that to descend to the deepest fathom of it was somehow taboo. (As my dad said, “You have this choice when you go out and people ask how you’re doing. You can tell the truth, which you know will make them really uncomfortable, or seem inappropriate. Or you can lie. But then you’re lying.”) I was struck, too, by how much of Hamlet is about the precise kind of slippage the mourner experiences: the difference between being and seeming, the uncertainty about how the inner translates into the outer, the sense that one is expected to perform grief palatably. (If you don’t seem sad, people worry; but if you are grief-stricken, people flinch away from your pain.)

A psychiatrist reframed it for her: he said the people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.

One book about grief that I found convincing—and strangely consoling—was by Colin Murray Parkes, a British psychiatrist and a pioneer in bereavement research. Drawing on work by another researcher, John Bowlby, he argued that the dominant element of grief was a restless “searching.” The heightened physical arousal, anger, and sadness of grief resemble the anxiety that children suffer when they’re separated from their mothers. Parkes speculated that we likewise continue to “search” illogically (and in distress) for a loved one after a death. He states the mourner’s predicament clinically and as clearly as anyone: In his heart of hearts he often believes that the dead do not return yet he is committed to the task of recovering one who is dead. It is no wonder that he feels that the world has lost its purpose, and no longer makes sense.

What had actually happened still seemed implausible: A person was present your entire life, and then one day she disappeared and never came back. It resisted belief. Even when a death is foreseen, I was surprised to find, it still feels sudden—an instant that could have gone differently.

there seem to be certain universal aspects. And one is this ameliorating influence of watching your loved one accept his or her death. (Another is that the dominant feeling after a loss isn’t anger or denial but yearning, exactly the feeling I’d had.)

Acceptance isn’t necessarily something you can choose off a menu, like eggs instead of French toast. Instead, researchers now think that some people are inherently primed to accept their own death with “integrity” (their word, not mine), while others are primed for “despair.” Most of us, though, are somewhere in the middle, and one question researchers are now focusing on is: How might more of those in the middle learn to accept their deaths? The answer has real consequences for both the dying and the bereaved. For one thing, the terminally ill make clearer decisions about their end-of-life medical care when they have acknowledged their impending death; for another, watching them acknowledge their death helps us, in turn, accept it, too.

Some researchers have found it is “easier” to experience a death if you know for at least six months that your loved one is terminally ill. But this fact is like orders of infinity: there in theory, hard to detect in practice.

Grief isn’t rational; it isn’t linear; it is experienced in waves. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear,” C. S. Lewis had written at the beginning of A Grief Observed, and scientists have in fact found that grief, like fear, is a stress reaction, attended by deep physiological changes. Levels of stress hormones like cortisol increase. Sleep patterns are disrupted. The immune system is weakened. Mourners may experience loss of appetite, palpitations, even hallucinations. Just as I had, they sometimes imagine that the deceased has appeared to them, in the form of a bird, say, or a cat. Addressing

The first systematic survey of grief, I read, was conducted by Erich Lindemann. Having studied 101 people, many of them related to the victims of the Cocoanut Grove fire of 1942, he defined grief as “sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing, and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power, and an intensive subjective distress described as tension or mental pain.” Intensive subjective distress. Yes, exactly:

Its physicality is also what makes grief so hard to communicate to anyone who hasn’t experienced it.

stage theory isn’t a very accurate description of what it’s like to grieve. There is little evidence suggesting that most people experience capital-letter Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance in simple sequence. Instead, according to a study that Prigerson, the Dana-Farber researcher, worked on, Kübler-Ross’s stages seem to be more like states.

A mourner’s experience of time isn’t like everyone else’s. Grief that lasts longer than a few weeks may look like self-indulgence to those around you. But if you’re in mourning, three months seems like nothing—going by Prigerson’s research, three months might well find you approaching the height of sorrow.

My pervasive loneliness was a result, I believe, of what I now think of as the privatization of grief. For centuries, private grief and public mourning were allied in most cultures.

As Darian Leader, a British psychoanalyst, argues in The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia, and Depression, mourning—to truly be mourning—“requires other people.”

The British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, the author of Death, Grief, and Mourning, argues that, at least in Britain, the First World War played a huge role in changing the way people mourned. Communities were so overwhelmed by the sheer number of dead that the practice of ritualized mourning for the individual eroded.

The rise of psychoanalysis shifted attention from the communal to the individual experience. In 1917, only two years after Émile Durkheim wrote about mourning as an essential social process, Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” defined it as something essentially private and individual, internalizing the work of mourning.

By the 1960s, Gorer could write that many people believed that “sensible, rational men and women can keep their mourning under complete control by strength of will and character, so that it need be given no public expression, and indulged, if at all, in private, as furtively as . . . masturbation.”

I longed for rituals not only to indicate I was still in mourning but also to have a nonpsychological way of commemorating and expressing my loss. Without ritual, the only way to share a loss was to talk about it—foregrounding the particularities of my own emotions, my own bereavement. At times, though, this sharing felt invasive. I did not want to be pitied. In those moments, I wanted a way to show my grief rather than tell it.

One of the reasons many people are unsure about how to act around a loss is that they lack rules or meaningful conventions, and they fear making a mistake. Rituals used to help the community by giving everyone a sense of what to do or say. Now, we’re at sea.

As George A. Bonanno, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University, has written, “When we look more closely at the emotional experiences of bereaved people over time, the level of fluctuation is nothing short of spectacular.” This oscillation, he theorizes, offers relief from the stress grief creates.

My grief was not ennobling me. It made me at times vulnerable and self-absorbed, needy and standoffish, knotted up inside, even punitive. I

Most people don’t know how to be angry at the dead. It seems ignoble and perhaps beside the point to speak (or think) ill of them. And so, Leader notes, bereaved people often “become angry with colleagues, friends, and lovers without linking this displacement consciously to their loss,” while idealizing their relationships with those who have died.

In the past, ministering to the dying was an important, even cherished part of life. But attitudes toward caretaking, too, have shifted. As the extended family fell apart—and as dying became something to be silenced rather than something holy and even transcendent—people began to fear that their deaths might be “burdensome.”

With other people, with strangers, I count the hours until I can go be alone and get back to my secret preoccupation, my romance with my lost mother. This is what I need to do, remember her, puzzle over her, understand the difference between us. I trust that one day I’ll stop needing to do this.

Over and over I found myself resenting anyone who tried to impose his feelings, his demands, on me; couldn’t he see it was all I could do to keep myself moving forward, that whatever energy I had left had to be devoted to my family?

A mourner is always searching for traces of the lost one because they bear testimonial force: This person existed.

“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.

one of the reasons they had so many rituals, I’m now realizing, to deal with the dead—it was to push back everyday time and make space for contemplation of the cosmic. When you do something like this, you step outside of everyday time for a moment, and

“These are the eighteen months when you find out who can really go there and who can’t. This is a vulgar way of putting it, and there are many wonderful things about our culture, but I’m sorry, it is a phobic culture. People do not want to confront the existential mess that is life. They want to check things off—OK, you’re OK. And just because you can talk about your grief, you know,” she said, looking sharply at me, “doesn’t mean you are in control of it, or that you know what’s going on. You are in the ocean. And what you think, what you analyze, that is just the descanting of that ocean. Your mind is an ocean and it has scary things in it. While you may be able to analyze your grief at three p.m., that has nothing to do with how you feel at three a.m., in the dark center of night.”

Listening to her, I realized that I had been on some level confusing speech—or language—with feeling all year. I had thought, If only I can speak about this, I can understand it, or contain it. But language is the epiphenomenon of a phenomenon that is like waves. The waves aren’t the whole of it. They are a small part of a larger entity.

But perhaps we should think of time as a deep, still pool rather than a fast-flowing river. . . . Instead of looking back at time, we could look down into it . . . and now again different features of the past—different sights and sounds and voices and dreams—would rise to the surface: rise and subside, and the deep pool would hold them all, so that nothing was lost and nothing ever went away.