The Long Goodbye Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  I.

  CHAPTER ONE - {love}

  CHAPTER TWO - {descent}

  CHAPTER THREE - {the particulars}

  CHAPTER FOUR - {anticipation}

  CHAPTER FIVE - {caretaking}

  CHAPTER SIX - {the end}

  II.

  CHAPTER SEVEN - {yearning}

  CHAPTER EIGHT - {observing grief}

  CHAPTER NINE - {spring}

  CHAPTER TEN - {reckoning}

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - {reevaluation}

  CHAPTER TWELVE - {abundance/abandonment}

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - {the return of the dead}

  III.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - {anniversaries}

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - {the new year}

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN - {so that nothing was lost and nothing ever went away}

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - {hasten slowly}

  Acknowledgements

  {a note on further reading}

  The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from the following:

  ALSO BY MEGHAN O’ROURKE

  Halflife: Poems

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. New York 2011

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2011 by Meghan O’Rourke

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

  Material from The Long Goodbye has appeared in different form in Slate and The New Yorker.

  Page 307 constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  O’Rourke, Meghan.

  The long goodbye / Meghan O’Rourke.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-48655-9

  1. O’Rourke, Meghan. 2. Poets, American—21st century—Biography. I. Title.

  PS3615.R586Z

  811’.6—dc22

  [B]

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication.

  Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  “O Gilgamesh, where are you wandering?

  You cannot find the life you seek:

  When the gods created mankind,

  For mankind they established death,

  Life they kept for themselves.

  You, Gilgamesh, let your belly be full,

  Keep enjoying yourself, day and night!

  Every day make merry,

  Dance and play day and night!”

  • THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH, TRANSLATED BY ANDREW GEORGE

  The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.

  • IRIS MURDOCH

  for my brothers and father,

  and

  in memory of Barbara Kelly O’Rourke

  {prologue}

  When I was a girl we visited a town on the banks of the Batten-kill every summer. The cold river cut through a valley in the Green Mountains of Vermont and here the pioneers had stopped and settled, razing the land to make way for corn and cows and building a church and a covered bridge and barns.

  We went in June and stayed till September in a cabin owned by friends. At noon we swam in the chill of the river and at dusk we walked through the fields across Route 7 to pick ears of corn under the massing gray clouds. The rows of corn were taller than my brother and I, and I was sure that one day we would be kidnapped by goblins and forced to save ourselves before becoming benevolent rulers of whatever magic kingdom we’d been transported to. We read books on the porch all afternoon. As night fell my father built a pyramid of charcoal on the grill and lit it and my mother cut vegetables and he opened a bottle of wine and she sat and talked with him while the coals burned down to a fine gray shine. I could hear the sounds of their voices filtered through the screen windows and into the sentences of my book like a prayer. My brother sat on the other side of the couch drawing or reading or singing nonsense songs and sometimes I kicked him to make him sit farther away from me.

  We were a family.

  I was a child of atheists, but I had an intuition of God. The days seemed created for our worship. There was grass and flowers and clouds. And then there were the words for these things: mare’s tails and a mackerel sky, daylilies and lady’s slippers and lilacs and hyacinth. There were words even for the weeds: goldenrod and ragweed and Queen Anne’s lace. You could feed yourself on the grandeur of the sounds.

  I liked to lie on the grass beside the house before dinner, as the sun faded, and watch the twilight overtake the clouds. In the dusk you could see the white clouds move. The first time, I cried out to my mother that I could detect the earth turning. “I don’t think so,” she said. “That’s the wind blowing the clouds.” I knew she must be wrong. Lying there on the ground gave me a tickling feeling, as if I might fly up into the sky or sink down into the earth itself.

  Each day was holy and lazy and boring. In the mornings I got up and read on the couch in my sleeping bag. The sun would rise and the cloud tips would show over the pines and I would go downstairs with my book to fix a bowl of Raisin Bran. I pretended it was bran mash because I wanted to be a horse. It seemed to me better to be an animal than a human. In those minutes I’d still have the imprint of my mother or my father kissing me good night before turning the light off and I liked to be alone with that feeling of protection in the new day. I liked that protection.

  Sometimes, if it wasn’t too damp with dew, I called the dog and took a tennis ball and set off up the dirt road to explore. The cabin was on the side of a mountain and there were paths cut into the woods that you could walk. On these paths I would throw the ball far into the underbrush for Finn to chase. I wanted to find out how good a tracker he was. He wouldn’t return until he had found the ball. One day I threw the ball so far into a thicket that he didn’t come back. At first I could hear him snuffling around and then I could not. I called and called for him and finally turned for home. I thought of him in the anonymous woods searching and ref
using to face me until he had done what I had asked of him. He might never come back. My stomach got heavy.

  When I got home, I confessed to my mother, feeling ashamed. We took the car to look for him but couldn’t find him. “He’ll come back,” she said, but I knew she was trying to comfort me.

  Later, as we sat reading, we heard a crashing in the woods by the house. Out came Finn from the goldenrod, mud-draggled, adorned in prickers, tail high, tennis ball in his mouth. He dropped it, wagging his tail: Here. Like a woolen blanket, responsibility settled over me, thick and confining. What I loved wasn’t as safe as I thought it was.

  Some afternoons we just messed around in the big field by the cabin. I would run into the shoulder-high grasses and Finn would follow me, darting off to sniff at things, turning back to make sure I was OK. One day, as we were out in the field, Finn began circling wildly, paying me no attention. It was some excitement native to his being. The circles got tighter and smaller and then he stopped stock-still, one foot drawn up.

  I thought he had gone crazy with epilepsy like our old dog, Puck. I started to cry. (I always thought I was tough, with my tomboyish clothes and bare feet, until something went wrong.) Then three wild turkeys rose ruffling up into the sky. He barked and jumped. When they were high in the air he calmed at last. Finn! I yelled, and swatted him hard behind the ears. I went back to the cabin, dragging him by the chain collar.

  I told my mother what had happened.

  “I think he might be going crazy like Puck.”

  “No, sweetie. That’s called flushing and pointing,” she said, setting the table, her thick black hair wet against her back. “That’s what he was bred to do.”

  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. These memories in me of my mother are almost as deep as the memories that led Finn to flush and point. As the fireflies began to rise one summer evening, my mother called to us. Look, she said. See them? Run and get a jar and a can opener. And my brother and I ran in for jars and our mother poked holes in the lids and sent us across the lawn to catch the fireflies. The air was the temperature of our skin.

  I.

  CHAPTER ONE

  {love}

  My mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer shortly before three p.m. on Christmas Day of 2008. I don’t know the exact time of her death, because none of us thought to look at a clock for a while after she stopped breathing. She was at home in Connecticut in a hospital bed in the living room with my father, my two younger brothers, and me. She had been unconscious for five days. She opened her eyes only when we moved her, which caused her extreme pain, and so we had begun to move her less and less, despite cautions from the hospice nurses about bedsores. A bedsore wasn’t going to kill her.

  For several weeks before her death, my mother had experienced confusion from the ammonia that built up in her brain as her liver began to fail. 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. Christmas was her favorite day of the year. She adored the morning ritual of walking the dogs and making coffee while we waited impatiently for her to be ready; she taught us to open presents slowly, drawing the gift-giving out for hours. On that last day, her bed was in the room where our tree was, and as we opened presents, she made a madrigal of quiet sounds, as if to indicate that she was with us. Her hair was swept up behind her, and she looked like the mother of my earliest memories.

  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.

  I know this may sound melodramatic. I know that I am one of the lucky ones. I am an adult; my mother had a good life. We had insurance that allowed us to treat her cancer and to keep her as comfortable as possible before she died. And in the last year of her illness, I got to know my mother as never before. I went with her to the hospital and bought her lunch while she had chemotherapy, searching for juices that wouldn’t sting the sores in her mouth. We went to a spiritual doctor who made her sing and passed crystals over her body. We shopped for new clothes together, standing frankly in our underwear in the changing room after years of being shyly polite with our bodies. I crawled into bed with her and stroked her hair when she cried in frustration that she couldn’t go to work and apologized for not being a “mother” anymore. I grew to love her in ways I never had. Some of the new intimacy came from finding myself in a caretaking role where, before, I had been the one taken care of. But much of it came from being forced into openness by our sense that time was passing. Every time we had a cup of coffee together (when she was well enough to drink coffee), I thought, against my will: This could be the last time I have coffee with my mother.

  Knowing that I was one of the lucky ones didn’t make it much easier.

  In the months that followed my mother’s death, I managed to look like a normal person. I walked down the street; I answered my phone; I brushed my teeth, most of the time. But I was not OK. I was in grief. Nothing seemed important. Daily tasks were exhausting. Dishes piled in the sink, knives crusted with strawberry jam. At one point I did not wash my hair for ten days. I felt that I had abruptly arrived at a terrible, insistent truth about the impermanence of the everyday. Restless and heavily sad, I would walk through my quiet Brooklyn neighborhood at night, looking in the windows of houses decorated with Christmas lights and menorahs, and think that I could more easily imagine myself floating up into the darkness of the night sky than living in one of those rooms like one of those people. I am a transient in the universe, I thought. Why had I not known that this was what life really amounted to?

  I was not entirely surprised to find that being a mourner was lonely. But I was surprised to discover that I felt lost. In the days following my mother’s death, 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.

  Grief is common, as Hamlet’s mother Gertrude brusquely reminds him. We know it exists in our midst. But experiencing it made me suddenly aware of how difficult it is to confront head-on. When we do, it’s usually in the form of self-help: we want to heal our grief. We’ve subscribed to the belief (or pretense) that it happens in five tidy stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. (The jaggedness of my experience hardly corresponded to these stages.) As grief has been framed as a psychological process, it has also become a more private one. 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.

  After my mother’s death, I felt the lack of rituals to shape and support my loss. I was no
t 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 found myself envying my Jewish friends the practice of saying Kaddish, with its ceremonious designation of time each day devoted to remembering the lost person. As I drifted through the hours, I wondered: What does it mean to grieve when we have so few rituals for observing and externalizing loss? What is grief?

  I am writing here about my grief, of course. I don’t pretend that it is universal. Nor do I write about it because I think it was more extreme, more unusual, more special than anyone else’s. On the contrary: I believe that my grief was an everyday one.

  When we talk about love, we go back to the start, to pinpoint the moment of free fall. But this story is the story of an ending, of death, and it has no beginning. A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That’s what makes her a mother: you cannot start the story.

  But, oh hell, you keep trying.

  ONE SATURDAY in May 2006, I took the train to Connecticut to visit my mother. We lived only a couple hours apart, but we hadn’t seen each other in months—both of us too busy with work—and I had become vaguely concerned about her. She was having trouble with her knee—suffering from the arthritis that had plagued her mother before her—and her blood pressure was dangerously high. She retained much of the beauty she’d had as a young woman, a beauty particular for its expression of a serenity of soul and a charged wit palpable below her calm surface. But she had gained weight after the birth of my youngest brother, Eamon, when she was thirty-four, and the doctor had asked her to start taking her blood pressure regularly. I worried that she might have a heart attack; she was unusually anxious because she and my father were selling their apartment and leaving behind their old lives in Brooklyn, where they had worked for decades at Saint Ann’s, an idiosyncratic private school my brothers and I had all attended; they were moving to Westport to work at a new private school, where my mother had become headmaster and my father, who taught Greek and Latin, was running the language program.