The Long Goodbye (14 page)

“A metaphor?”

“Have you found your metaphor for where your mother is?”

As she said it, I realized I had. It was the sky—the wind. The cynic in me cringed, but it was true.

I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics, which is to say, I am not religious. I was bothered when people offered up the—to me—empty consolation that whatever happened, my mother “will always be there with you.” But when my mother died, I did not believe that she was gone. As she exhaled a last time, her face settled into repose. Her body grew still, but I felt she had simply been transferred into another substance; what substance, and where it might be located, I wasn't sure. I went onto my parents' porch without putting my coat on. The limp winter sun sparkled off the frozen snow on the lawn, and I asked the air to take good care of my mother. I addressed the fir tree she liked and the wind moving in it. “Please keep her safe for me.”

Later, after talking to Dana, I asked Isabel whether she had a metaphor for where my mother was. She unhesitatingly answered: “The water. The ocean.”

The idea that my mother might be
somewhere
rather than nowhere is hard for the skeptical empiricist in me to swallow. But there it is. At times I simply felt she was just on a long trip. I was reminded of an untitled poem by Franz Wright, which reads in full:

At lunch one day, after flying home, as velvety snow coated the narrow Brooklyn streets, I tried to talk about this haunted feeling with a friend whose son died a few years ago. She told me that she, too, felt that her son was with her, and she frequently talked to him. She is an intellectually exacting person, and she said that she had sometimes wondered about how to conceptualize her persistent intuition. 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.

That was a kind of comfort. But I resisted the therapist's view. I needed to experience my mother's presence in the world
around
me and not just in my head. Every now and then, I saw a tree shift in the wind and its bend had, to my eye, a distinctly maternal cast. For me, my metaphor was—as all good metaphors ought to be—a persuasive transformation. In these moments, I did not say to myself that my mother was
like
the wind; I thought she
was
the wind. I felt her: there, and there.

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:

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.

One day, I sat up in shock when I felt my mother shake me out of a pervasive fearfulness that was making it hard for me to get on the subway. Whether it was the ghostly flicker of my synapses or an actual ghostly flicker of her spirit, I don't know. I would be lying if I said I wasn't hoping it was the latter.

 

 

I
N THE FIRST WEEKS after my mother's death, I became intensely obsessed with M., my high school boyfriend. Partly it was that I craved the connection of sex; he had come to Connecticut after my mother's death and stayed the night, and the whole time I felt a weird nerviness around him. While we watched TV, I was formal and polite with him at first; I kept making sure there was some distance between us on the couch. I felt I could pull him into me, like a black hole, in my exhausted derangement, and this seemed unfair, inappropriate, indecorous. When I touched him then pulled away, he said, in a low voice, “That's right. God forbid you touch me.”

The funeral was the next day. The prospect of it hung heavily at the edge of my mind.

“Do you want to stay in my room?” I asked.

“Whatever you want,” he said.

What I wanted was to be demolished. I pulled him onto the bed, with the sensation of diving into deep black water. In the morning I was dressing for the funeral and he looked up from the bed, eyes still clouded with sleep, and said, “You look lovely,” and for a moment it seemed the years had reeled back, and I was in high school.

M. and I had gone out my senior year. I met him when I was around the age at which my mother had met my father, and in the most infatuated, idyllic moments of our relationship, I fantasized that we, too, would run off and get married. At the end of my freshman year of college, though, I broke up with M.; I loved him, but I thought I was doing the wrong thing by keeping myself tied to someone far away. I had absorbed the idea that I was supposed to be independent, that I was supposed to explore, that I was growing up in an age of freedom for women. For years I thought of our relationship nostalgically, because in it I had known a kind of youthful joy and optimism that I never experienced as vibrantly again.

His reentrance into my life had intersected eerily with my mother's illness. We'd run into each other in a coffee shop the day I found out my mother's cancer had returned, and made plans to see each other. When we did, we talked nostalgically about our relationship and the curious vividness it had for both of us all these years later. There was still something between us, but everything was kept at bay for some time, until one fall night, not long before my mother died, he kissed me. He smelled the same, and I had the sensation of dropping into a vortex; the past was present.

Since then, there had been something ghostly about our encounters. In the time before her death he floated into my life, then disappeared, then came back again, and I did the same. But after the death, I suddenly wanted to clutch him close. After my mother's funeral, we had dinner a few times, and one night he came over when I called him in tears, and soothed me. But he always seemed to be holding back—why, I did not know. I fretted about this evasiveness, wishing that he would plunge into my grief with me, even though I knew that was unrealistic, unwise. When I talked to friends in those first weeks, I often talked about him, not my mother. By some strange internal math, he had become part of her disappearance: if I could hold on to, reconnect, with him,
she
might return. We could travel backward through time, and I could choose not to leave him, and my mother would still be alive. It was like an algebraic equation whose variables I couldn't keep straight. Even if I couldn't reclaim her, if I ended up with him, I might somehow
become
her—I could have a version of her life, her newly valuable, lost life.

One night, we went out to celebrate my birthday; unable to bear the odd intensity of my feelings, I said to him, after we'd gone to my apartment, that perhaps this was not the time to be seeing each other. I was in a strange place; I didn't want him to pity me or to be afraid to call things off if he wasn't interested. Inwardly I was hoping that he would assure me he wanted to be with me. And he did. Then he lifted me in the air and hugged me, and gave me a birthday present.

After this, he pretty much vanished. When I called, he didn't call back. Weeks passed. A few weeks later, he phoned to say he would be coming to the memorial service we were holding for my mother. At the service itself, he acted odd, avoiding me at the reception. Leaving early, he said, “We should talk.” I raised an eyebrow, and he said, “I didn't mean it like that, I just meant I had to apologize for not calling sooner.” But he never called.

You motherfucker, I thought. My mother died. Now you're going to make it feel like you died, too—like everything I touch will disappear.

This second vanishing of someone I loved haunted me; it seemed so strangely
symbolic
.

I began to wonder if I had invented it. I began, too, to have dreams that he called to explain what had happened, why he had disappeared; in them, I experienced a curiously intense sense of relief.

It didn't occur to me at the time that these dreams were really about my mother, concocted, in the strange logic of the dreaming brain, to continue to make me think some reunion
was
possible. Later I read that the bereaved often focus on the first loss they ever endured rather than the loss they'd just suffered. I found that to be true.
M., M.,
I would pine, lying in bed at night, or taking a bath.

 

 

In February, there was a two-day snowstorm in New York. For hours I lay on my couch, reading, watching the snow drift down through the large elm outside, wondering what had happened to M., the sky going gray, then eerie violet, the night breaking around us, snow like flakes of ash. A white mantle covered trees, cars, lintels, and windows. It was like one of grief's moods: melancholic; estranged from the normal; in touch with the longing that reminds us that we are being-toward-death, as Heidegger puts it. Loss is our atmosphere; we, like the snow, are always falling toward the ground, and most of the time we forget it.

But grief left me perhaps too aware of the transience of everything. In its heightened moments I revered the world—light gracing the corner of a building, the wind on the beach. At other times, the awareness that everything disappears was nightmarish. On the second night of the blizzard, I slept restlessly, waking at three a.m. in a cold sweat, my heart racing. I had dreamed that I was walking up and down a dirt road overhung by ancient elms, dashing from the grasp of wraiths that were pursuing me, trying to make me one of them. The wraiths were evil, and it was my job to walk up and down the road and their job to envelop me. I couldn't sleep afterward; sometimes you can't make it better even with the lights on. It was hard in these moments to wake up utterly alone, to realize that both my marriage and my mother were truly gone.

 

 

 

O
NE NIGHT, I was talking to my father on the phone when he mentioned a “loss of confidence” that we had all experienced. I asked him what he meant. I'd felt strangely off-balance and insecure since my mother died, but I'd always been nervous, especially compared with my brothers, and I was in the midst of reconstituting my life as a single person whose friends were mostly married and having babies. “Your mother is not there,” he explained. “And we are dealing with her absence. It makes us feel, I think, a loss of confidence—a general loss, an uncertainty about what we can rely on.”

I counted it as lucky that I did not have to work full-time in the first months after my mother's death. But helping launch the new Web magazine was intense work and demanded a level of focus that was beyond me. In the past, I had been good at keeping track of details, but now I couldn't. Often it took all my energy simply to get to the office, and at meetings I found it hard to concentrate. Instead, my brain ran through my mother's last days over and over. I intensely wanted to write down the story of her death or tell it, over and over, to friends; I read and reread the journal I'd kept during her illness.

I wasn't sure why, except that the habit of writing things down to understand them had been planted in me by her. When I was five, she gave me a red corduroy–covered notebook for Christmas. I sat in my floral nightgown turning the blank pages, wondering what on earth I was supposed to do with it.

I still remember the way she said that sentence:
Today I saw a woman with purple hair crossing Montague Street
. It was one of those memories my mother gave me that I carried around, and always would, like the shard of a shell that falls out of a bag you took to the beach that long happy summer.

I hadn't seen a woman with purple hair crossing Montague Street, of course. But in that sentence was my mother's sense that one might want to capture the extraordinary, her intuitive grasp for children's love of the absurd, her striking physical
presence
(she was leaning toward me, backlit, her long hair falling toward and over me), her knowledge that my seriousness, already, needed to be leavened with playfulness.

I also felt that if I told the story of her death, I could understand it better, make sense of it—perhaps even change it. 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.

If I could find a flaw in the story, I thought, if I could find the right turning point, then perhaps—like Orpheus—I could bring the one I sought back from the dead.
Aha: Here she is, walking behind me.
But some part of me understood I could not bring her back. The story of Orpheus, it now occurs to me, is not just about the living's desire to resuscitate the dead, but about the ways the dead drag us along into their shadowy realm because we cannot let them go. So we follow them into the Underworld, descending, until one day we turn, and return.