The Long Goodbye: A Memoir

by Meghan O'Rourke

The rituals of public mourning that once helped channel a person’s experience of loss have, by and large, fallen away. Many Americans don’t wear black or beat their chests and wail in front of others. We may—I have done it—weep or despair, but we tend to do it alone, in the middle of the night. Although we have become more open about everything from incest to sex addiction, grief remains strangely taboo.

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

My mother grew up on the Jersey shore, in a large Irish Catholic family, good at merriment, teasing, and storytelling, bad at expressing serious emotions.

I had gone dead inside. Psychiatrists, I read later, call this “numbing out.” When you can’t deal with the pain of a situation, you shut down your emotions.

We were in a circle now, hugging. Eamon was slouched over, wiping tears away and looking away, and I was, at once, in ruinous joy and pain, and somehow it was all mixed together like paint, like old stains and water cracks and new color.

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

to live is to worry, to wonder when the last hour comes, as it one day will.

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.

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.

I still have these dreams, and every time I wake from them, I am reminded of those passages from epics in which the hero goes to the Underworld and sees his father but cannot embrace him.

It is, of course, difficult to study “grief” because a salient feature of grief is that it’s not monolithic or singular; it’s personal and variable. That said, there seem to be certain universal aspects. And one is this ameliorating influence of watching your loved one accept his or her death.

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

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.

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.

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.

Death and mourning had been largely removed from the public realm.

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.

I did not want to hurt myself, or to die. I just wanted to create some embodiment of the heartbreak eating me up.

We need love and security as children, or else we wither.

A: She was sick for two years. A: Yes, cancer. A: She died on Christmas Day. A: We were all with her.

A: She was young—I mean, she was relatively young , fifty-five. A: She was a teacher and then an administrator. A: She grew up in New Jersey. A: My father is OK. A: My brothers are doing OK. [Pause] It is very hard for all of us. A: No, that’s OK.

And you are thinking in some chamber inside your heart: Fuck, fuck, fuck. How dare...

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.

For all the solicitude in the world, it would be impossible for anyone else to understand what I had gone through and how depleted it had left me.

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.

“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.”