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.

When we are learning the world, we know things we cannot say how we know. When we are relearning the world in the aftermath of a loss, we feel things we had almost forgotten, old things, beneath the seat of reason.

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.

I was not entirely surprised to find that being a mourner was lonely. But I was surprised to discover that I felt lost.

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

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

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

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.

(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.”)

Researchers have found that the bereaved are at a higher risk for suicidal thinking than the depressed.

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. As we fail over and over to find the lost person, Parkes suggests, we slowly create a new world, the old one having been invalidated by death. It occurred to me that my metaphor finding was precisely this, a secular mind searching for its lost love.

Later I read that the bereaved often focus on the first loss they ever endured rather than the loss they’d just suffered.

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.

And there was one key difference between my grief and depressions I’d suffered in the past: the world appeared to me in heightened, shimmering outlines, like a mirage. At times it seemed excruciatingly beautiful, a place I never wanted to leave.

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,

Grief isn’t rational; it isn’t linear; it is experienced in waves.

When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity is wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the mental work.

“If mourning is denied outlet, the result will be suffering,” Gorer wrote. “At the moment our society is signally failing to give this support and assistance. . . . The cost of this failure in misery, loneliness, despair and maladaptive behavior is very high.” Maybe it’s not a coincidence that in Western countries with fewer mourning rituals, the bereaved report more physical ailments in the year following a death.

Ritual helps us let go of our identification with the dead. In this way, ritual can contain what Robert Pogue Harrison calls the “crisis” of grief, so that the mourner doesn’t plunge into “sheer delirium.” All this clarified to me what I had been craving: a formalization of grief, one that might externalize 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.

this is in part what such rituals are for. They aren’t just about the individual; they are about the community.

But when people stop mentioning the dead person’s name to you, the silence can seem worse than the pain of hearing those familiar, beloved syllables. Henry James, after the death of his sister, Alice, and his friend James Russell Lowell, wrote in his journal: “The waves sweep dreadfully over the dead—they drop out and their names are unuttered.”

The painful fact behind every ritual and psychological finding is that even a “good” death is rarely good for the survivors. The word grief, I read in my etymological dictionary, derives from an old French word meaning “to burden.”

“The thing is,” Liam kept saying, “she’s the one who made me better when I felt like this. And that only makes this worse.”

I’d copied out a passage from an interview in The Paris Review with the novelist Marilynne Robinson that gave me some solace. The interviewer recalled Robinson’s having once observed that Americans tend to avoid contemplating “larger issues.” Here is what Robinson, who is a practicing Protestant, said in response: The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of it, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.

It was why I kept finding myself drawn to the remote desert: I wanted to be reminded of how the numinous impinges on ordinary life.

The psychologist and bereavement expert Therese Rando argues that mourning requires people to recollect and reexperience the deceased before relinquishing the old attachments.

If children learn through exposure to new experiences, mourners unlearn through exposure to absence in new contexts. Grief requires acquainting yourself with the world again and again; each “first” causes a break that must be reset.

And so you always feel suspense, a queer dread—you never know what occasion will break the loss freshly open.

I thought I was prepared for my mother’s death. I knew it would happen. Yet the reality of her being dead was so different from her death.

AFTER A LOSS, you have to learn to believe the dead one is dead. It doesn’t come naturally.

Three-quarters of a year after a loss, the hardest part is the permanently transitional quality: you are neither accustomed to it nor in its fresh pangs. You feel you will always be wading the river, your legs burning with exhaustion.

I will carry this wound forever. It’s not a question of getting over it or healing. No; it’s a question of learning to live with this transformation. For the loss is transformative, in good ways and bad, a tangle of change that cannot be threaded into the usual narrative spools. It is too central for that. It’s not an emergence from the cocoon, but a tree growing around an obstruction.

ONE OF THE GRUBBY TRUTHS about a loss is that you don’t just mourn the dead person, you mourn the person you got to be when the lost one was alive.

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

One study found that people are often admitted to the hospital on the anniversary of a death, even many years later.

After we had dinner, I walked home from the subway in a snowstorm, past all the houses with their holiday decorations. I snapped a photo on my phone of the snow falling through the holiday lights by the brownstones. The snow was falling so fast that in the picture the flakes resembled scores of ghostly tiny comets streaking to the mantled ground. What if our minds are cameras set to a narrow aperture, unable to perceive the full reality around us, and we are in the midst of a complicated storm, one that is ongoing, dynamic, imperceptible? And what if my mother were in that storm? It was in the haze of such chimeras that I found hope.

Maureen said, “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.”

The moment when I flash upon my mother’s smile and face and realize she is dead, I experience the same lurch, the same confusion, the same sense of impossibility. A year ago collapses into yesterday in these moments. Periodically for the rest of my life, my mother’s death will seem like it took place yesterday.

The snow was truly flurrying now. It was eerie and witchy out and the sadness in my heart grew more swollen, but it was the swell of mystery: What strange beauty surrounds us, and how impermanent our vision of it, how palpable our loss when those we love no longer can view the world they would adore.

I love C. S. Lewis’s metaphor: A loss is like an amputation. If the blood doesn’t stop gushing soon after the operation, then you will die. To survive means, by definition, that the blood has stopped. But the amputation is still there.

I was thinking of the lines from the end of “Song of Myself”: “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.”

Perhaps it is fitting, too, that while my grief has lessened, my sense of being motherless has intensified. I hadn’t anticipated this. The first grips of grief were so terrible that I couldn’t wait to get beyond them, to a state I hoped might be “better.” But as each new day arrives I find myself, though suffering less acutely, feeling more unmothered. Strange. I have a piercing sense of empathy for friends who lost a parent when they were young. Even at my age, I still have so many questions, about children, about cooking, about what my mother thought of her life’s work.