The Long Goodbye (17 page)

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. My friend D.'s best friend had recently lost her husband; D. was anxious to feel that there was something she could
do
to help that didn't seem to diminish or trivialize her friend's pain.

Even so, ritual mourning does not appeal to everyone, I know. A friend raised her eyebrows when I said how drawn I was to the idea of public mourning. “I just went to my uncle's funeral,” she said, “and I was horrified by the way some of the women who knew him least were wailing the most. It was hypocritical. The whole funeral seemed stale and false.” Perhaps. But, I said, those women were also mourning their own prior losses, and this is in part what such rituals are for. They aren't just about the individual; they are about the community.

I got my own taste of this at a memorial service we held for my mother at Saint Ann's at the end of February. The service was held at the church around the corner, where we used to have choral concerts, and where the school's graduation ceremonies were held; the last time I'd been there was for Eamon's graduation. It was a cold, clear day, and when we arrived the church was nearly full. My father, my brothers, and I spoke, along with Isabel and Diana and a few of my mother's close friends. I felt nervous about speaking, but also strangely subdued; I kept looking around, seeing people from my childhood—a woman who'd been the assistant teacher in one of my mother's early second-grade classes; students my mother had taught when I was in kindergarten. The charge of contact I felt at seeing old faces carried more weight than I'd expected. What I actually said about my mother barely captured anything about her, or our relationship, but the coming together of all these people gave me a sense of solace. Even seeing them cry opened up a knot in me: my mother's death meant something to them. Students from the school where my mother worked sobbed so loudly that later my friends told me they were taken aback. But I understood the sobbing. They were putting their grief
into
the service. A few months later I was talking to my friend Katie, whose father had died after a long illness, and she said that it had been comforting to see other people cry at her father's memorial service. “It sounds strange or awful to say,” she told me, “but my brother and I would poke each other and say, ‘See that person? See how sad he is?' It made us feel part of a community of mourners.”

 

 

It is human to want our friends and family to recover from pain, to look for a silver lining—or so I reminded myself. 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.” I thought of the famous letter Abraham Lincoln had sent to the woman who lost all her sons in the Civil War; while he wanted to tell her what a gift her sons had given to the nation, he also wrote that he did not want to “beguile” her out of her grief. Likewise, I wanted my distress acknowledged, rather than beguiled away with promises that one day I'd “heal” or “move on.”

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.” For this reason, the matter-of-fact mordancy of Emily Dickinson, the supreme poet of grief, provided more balm to me than did the glad tidings of those who talked about how death can enrich us. In her poem “I Measure Every Grief I Meet,” the speaker's curiosity about other people's grief ends up conveying how heavy her own is:

It was a cold spring. A bitter rain came down for days on end, as if the gods knew my sorrow. In literary criticism, the term for this association is “pathetic fallacy,” coined by the art critic John Ruskin to describe the attribution of human emotions to nature and inanimate objects; the harsh, angry moors in
Wuthering Heights
mirror the characters' lives. At work on the website, I was often irritable, and I'd decided that after its launch I would take the summer off, then go back to teaching. I couldn't fall asleep until late in the night. When I did sleep, I had violent dreams about people I loved. I dreamed that a friend told me I was doing a bad job at work; furious, I tore out a clump of her long blond hair.

This friend had been nothing but kind to me after my mother's death.

In a different dream, I got angry at a friend who told me that I had forgotten to prepare a presentation for her class.
You have no idea what this is like,
I wept.
My mother died. My mother died.

My
mother
died.

In the dreams, when I said this, I experienced the shock all over again: My mother had died. It was hard to take it
in
; she was the very being who once contained me. As Adrienne Rich wrote, a mother is “beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival—a knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.” When you separate a puppy from its mother temporarily, it goes into protest mode; when you separate it from its mother permanently, it goes into despair. We need love and security as children, or else we wither.

Another psychoanalyst, René Spitz, wrote about a miniepidemic of orphans becoming sickly in the 1940s. It turned out that, caught up in the new mania for hygiene, orphanages were no longer handling or playing with babies; they merely fed them and kept them warm and clothed. Many of the babies grew sick and some died. All had become much more susceptible to the very infections the hygienic approach was supposed to protect them from. (An allegory for mourning: The more we hygienically avoid messy emotions, the more they infect us?) It was from this work that John Bowlby developed his concept of attachment theory—the idea that infants are born with “an instinctive behavioral bond with mothers. That bond produces distress when a mother is absent, as well as the drive for the two to seek each other out when the child is frightened or in pain.” You find the same process in other young mammals, “who also cry and cling and seek out their mothers when danger looms.”

“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.”

 

 

Around Easter, I began to experience some respite from my sorrow. The daffodils were peeking up out of the seemingly still-frozen ground. The magnolias had come into bloom, their spoon-size petals opening wide. And I started feeling less beset. Not “recovered.” But more even-keeled. In this, I conformed to the clinical norm: many mourners begin to feel less depressed around four months after the death. (A part of me was annoyed: I didn't want to conform to a chart.) The main difference was that I had more energy; still, when I was sad, the pangs were just as painful—perhaps more so, since it had been longer since I've seen my mother, and the reality of her death was beginning to intrude in new ways.

Some researchers say grief comes in waves, welling up and dominating one's emotional life, then subsiding, only to recur—an experience I recognized as my own. As George A. Bonanno, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University, has written, “When we look more closely at the emotional experiences of bereaved people over time, the level of fluctuation is nothing short of spectacular.” This oscillation, he theorizes, offers relief from the stress grief creates. That made sense. I thought of one of the lines from Lewis's
A Grief Observed
: “Sorrow . . . turns out to be not a state but a process,” he wrote. “It needs not a map but a history.”

Easter itself was terrible. I spent the day being reminded of the ghosts of Easters past: the many times my mother would hide eggs and then forget where she had put that last one. A week later, moldy and soft, it would turn up in someone's shoe. (At the time, I couldn't understand how she could forget: those precious eggs!) I walked around my quiet neighborhood, pained by the sight of parents and their children sauntering about in lazy togetherness.

The truth was that even four months after my mother's death, I still privately believed she was coming back. Deep down, I felt that—like Dr. Manhattan in
Watchmen
—she would, through some effort of mind, reconstitute herself and appear to me, even as a ghostly form.

On one of those warm spring days that come and vanish, I went for a run in Prospect Park. I finished the loop after a long hill near the entrance. At the top of the rise, there is a stand of magnolias and a view of what's called the Long Meadow. Exhausted, I sat on the grass and granted myself ten minutes to put aside the to-do lists invading my head and think. (One downside of feeling better had been that it was easier to pretend I was OK. Then work I couldn't do would pile up.) I felt the sun on my face. The grass tickled my hands. An ant crossed my pinkie.

As I relaxed, I thought of first one memory of my mother in this park, then another, and then, like a BlackBerry that has tuned in to its signal after a long flight, I was flooded by a dozen distinct memories of being with my mother here. There was the August day in 1994 when she and I met Diana, and we sat in the grass; I read books for school as they talked about their summers. There were the many mornings my mother and I would go running together in the park before school. We listened to running tapes we made and traded; we talked. One morning she had told me that her younger sister—who had a new baby—had colon cancer. Running in the cool air, I imagined myself to be her friend as well as her daughter.

So I sat there, thinking of her and looking around. I had for a moment the distinct feeling that she had asked me to do this—that she had said, somehow: I can't look at it; will you look for me? And as I sat, a robin hopped toward me. Its red breast was shiny, and it had bright, bold eyes. And I thought: OK, so, resurrection; I don't know. But what in the world—in the universe—made this creature? Can evolution account for the mystery of life? As a theory, it doesn't go as far as I'd like toward explaining the world. I wanted the sky to open up and reveal universal secrets to me. My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures. And here I was, ready to learn! But: silence. A robin hopping closer. I watched it for some time, half wondering if in any way it could be my mother. What MADE you, robin? my mind practically shouted. Then the bird lost interest in me. I stood up. I brushed the dirt from my pants and jogged out of the park, thinking about that bird. How could I disregard the bubbly, foolish sense of beauty I felt looking at it? And: How could I reconcile that with the pain my mother endured before she died?

The poet Anne Carson wrote that after her mother died she suddenly felt that everything she read was in
font. I understand what she meant. I write and want to strikethrough. I smile and want to strikethrough. It is as if, for some time, the world exists mostly in strikethrough. Over time, the strikethrough gets lighter, and you can see the words underneath more clearly. But it's still