The Long Goodbye: A Memoir

by Meghan O'Rourke

Like a woolen blanket, responsibility settled over me, thick and confining. What I loved wasn’t as safe as I thought it was.

Yet I am irrationally confident that she knew what day it was when she died. I believe that she knew we were around her. I believe she chose to die when she did.

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.

she believed in the validity of a child’s experience of the world.

And the last year of my mother’s life was a chaotic one for me.

In the face of the future erasure of a specific soul—the erasure of my mother’s soul—words about beauty and truth seemed necessary, almost ravishing.

Hell, I thought bitterly, was technology in the presence of inevitable death.

If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.

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.

Inside me, some last plank of steadiness broke. There was nothing motherly about her. The mother in her would have noticed my desperation; she would have put her hands on my shoulders and said I’m sorry you feel this way, honey, I’m sorry. This was not my mother. This was a shuffling alien with scary hair.

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

Other people—friends, colleagues—got used to my mother dying of cancer. But I did not. Each day, sunlight came like a knife to a wound that was not healed.

Even though it was obvious by Thanksgiving that my mother was extremely sick, the swiftness of her final days came as a surprise.

And yet we were all acting as though she were going to be around forever, if in an increasingly diminished state.

Those were strange, delirious days.

I heard a lot about the idea of dying “with dignity” while my mother was sick. It was only near her very end that I gave much thought to what this idea meant. I didn’t actually feel it was undignified for my mother’s body to fail—that was the human condition. Having to help my mother on and off the toilet was difficult, but it was natural. 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. I didn’t want that for my mother. I wanted her to be able to go home. I didn’t want to pretend she wasn’t going to die.

I also held the delusion that the imperfect could be fixed by attention.

I have devoted myself to understanding death so that afterward I can say that I was there, fully there.

When people are hurting they cannot always comfort one another; it was true of us. We had the same injury and different symptoms.

You don’t get to decide, not just because I’m thirty-two years old, but because to live is to worry, to wonder when the last hour comes, as it one day will.

But to get through the awful days I had to be persuaded of the absolute reality of the tunnel I crawled through. Otherwise I might have merely fallen to the ground in despair.

(I want to be near things that are much older than I am, she’d told me in the hospital, things that will be here after I’m gone.)

But we all know that for us there will never be an as usual again.

the space between them getting longer and longer—think,

and at last they talk; they cannot sleep, but the conversation and consumption bind them to this world.

The world seemed to push me away. I felt that I was pacing in the chilly dark outside a house with lit-up windows, wishing I could go inside. But I also felt that the people in those rooms were shutting out the news of a distant, important war, a war I had just returned from.

I hated being alone. I hated time.

we had been seeing each other, sort of; I had gravitated toward the solace of a shared past—and

What was most difficult was that I myself didn’t know what to expect. How long would I feel like this? Would this yearning ever pass? And—did I want it to?

Instead, I read, turning to books to understand what was happening to me.

Grief is paradoxical: you know you must let go, and yet letting go cannot happen all at once. The literature of mourning enacts that dilemma; its solace lies in the ritual of remembering the dead and then saying, There is no solace, and also, This has been going on a long time.

He is radically dislocated, stumbling through the days while the rest of the world acts as if nothing important has changed.

For the trouble is not just that Hamlet is sad; it is that everyone around him is unnerved by his grief.

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.)

But Hamlet, I thought, is less searching actively for death than wishing futilely for the world to make sense again. And this, too, was how I felt.

we slowly create a new world, the old one having been invalidated by death.

sometimes you can’t make it better even with the lights on.

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.

I couldn’t wait to get to her office because there, at least, I didn’t have to feel self-conscious about my sorrow, my desire to talk about my mother, my need to tell the story of her death over.

The idea that the dead might not be utterly gone has an irresistible magnetism.

“Bereaved people, driven by the pain and yearning of grief, imagine signs of communication.” His cut-and-dried language did not convey how powerful that imagining could be. What words could I use to convey how much I wanted her back?

I wasn’t living in China, though, and in those weeks after my mother’s death, I felt that the world expected me to absorb the loss and move forward, like some kind of emotional warrior.

My pervasive loneliness was a result, I believe, of what I now think of as the privatization of grief.

“If mourning is denied outlet, the result will be suffering,”

After my mother died, I kept thinking, “I just want somewhere to put my grief.”

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.

In those moments, I wanted a way to show my grief rat...

The disappearance of mourning rituals affects everyone, not just the mourner. 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.

It made us feel part of a community of mourners.”