The Long Goodbye (20 page)

If one doesn't believe in an afterlife, then one is faced with letting go—really and truly letting go—of the hope of ever seeing your beloved again. I for one had not been able to truly accept that I would never see my mother again, except in the mad, three a.m. moments when I woke with a start, the apprehension settling around me: She is dead—
dead
—and I too will be dead.

One would think that living so proximately to the provisional would ruin life, and at times it did make it hard. But at other times I experienced the world with less fear and more clarity. It didn't matter if I was in line for an extra two minutes. I could take in the sensations of color, sound, life. How strange that we should live on this planet and make cereal boxes, and shopping carts, and gum! That we should renovate stately old banks and replace them with Trader Joe's! We were ants in a sugar bowl, and one day the bowl would empty.

 

 

O
UR ANXIETY about death is so powerful that it seems hard to believe that it isn't timeless and universal. But as Philippe Ariès shows in
The Hour of Our Death
, a history of how Western culture views death, people in the past thought differently about what death was and how it should be dealt with. It's not that people ever greeted the death of their loved ones with indifference: mourning seems to be a permanent part of the human condition. (And not just the human condition; elephants and chimpanzees mourn, too.) But in the medieval period, Ariès shows, death in the West was “tame,” that is, it seemed “close and familiar” rather than terrifying. The tame death could exist because the “distance between life and death was not traditionally perceived as a ‘radical metamorphosis.'” The dead were thought to be sleepers awaiting a future resurrection (hence the phrase “Rest in peace”). Death was part of everyday life, and individuals prepared for it calmly, with the aid of family and community, making themselves right with God. Over time, the rise of individualism made people more attached to this world, and therefore more anxious about their own mortality. But even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, death was not yet seen as something to be looked away from: indeed, for the Romantics, death was “beautiful,” carrying with it an exalted narcotic sweetness, something to be longed for as well as feared.

Ariès suggests, though, that the cult of the beautiful death was in part the product of a rising anxiety about death. In the twentieth century, that anxiety—the one most of us live with every day—grew so pronounced that death was silenced. For most of us, death is an absolute break: a form of extinction too painful to consider. And so, Ariès says, we look away from it, pretending we might vanquish it one day through better nutrition and superior medical care. Where earlier cultures thought it crucial to contemplate death—“it is of the utmost importance for mortals to listen to the lessons of the dead,” wrote the Abbé Porée in the eighteenth century—we push it aside.

Tolstoy's
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
, written in 1886, captures this shift. The book opens with the announcement that Ivan Ilyich has died. His colleague Pyotr Ivanovich visits Ilyich's wife. “Surely he wasn't conscious?” Pyotr Ivanovich asks. “ ‘He was,' she whispered, ‘until the last moment.'” Pyotr Ivanovich is horrified at the thought of “the suffering of a man he had known so well”:

This passage may be the first modern description of the psychological process, familiar to us all, of silencing our fear and distancing ourselves through repression.

Ivan Ilyich's death is also “silent”—and modern—in another sense: everyone knows he is dying and no one will acknowledge it. They treat him like a child, infantilizing him. This repression makes him angry:

In the past, ministering to the dying was an important, even cherished part of life. But attitudes toward caretaking, too, have shifted. As the extended family fell apart—and as dying became something to be silenced rather than something holy and even transcendent—people began to fear that their deaths might be “burdensome.” One of the most upsetting facts I've come across since my mother's death was in a 2004 survey about end-of-life attitudes among Nebraskans. In the section titled “Very Important Aspects of Dealing with or Thinking About Dying,” “not being a burden” was a concern of eighty-three percent of those surveyed. Our squeamishness about death has impoverished the way we die, it would seem. The ill body gives the lie to our repression of death; it exposes the lie that medicine will offer a
solution
to the body, dissolving it, one happy day, into pure spirit, or allowing us to survive as a brain in a jar.

 

 

I
KEPT REMEMBERING days I'd forgotten. One summer, when I was eight, my father took Liam and me fishing on Moosehead Lake in Maine, where we went canoe camping sometimes. It was a hazy and hot day. We had practiced casting on the shore. I asked my father why he fly-fished instead of using a regular rod like ours and he said it was because flies didn't hurt the fish. You could catch a fish with a fly and throw it back. I liked to study the flies in his kit with their bright green threads. They were almost toys. But the barb on the end of our lines would likely go through the fish's throat and kill it one way or another.

By the time we got in the canoe and paddled out, the lake was getting flat and the sun was low in the sky by the bluish pines. We were going where the fish were, and I was wondering how I could have let this happen. I didn't want to fish. I had wanted to do it only because it was what my father did. But he fished in a way that didn't hurt the fish. I trailed my hand in the water and let the brown and green plants slide past. The sky was bright. Liam was excited but I was quiet and for once didn't care to compete. “What's wrong, Meg? Do you need help?” my father said. No, I said, and told them I was going to watch. I sat quietly. I was ashamed for wanting something without understanding what wanting it meant. I sat quietly and looked at the nesting loons, eager to get back to shore.

 

 

As I've mourned, I have been surprised by how few people asked what to me is the most pressing question of all: Where do you think the dead go? What happens to the dead? Over fifteen months only two people, both of them men I had just met, asked me this question. In the past, it would have been clear to each of us what the other believed. But in this world we may not know what our peers and friends think about this most pressing of questions. Many nonreligious people, I've found, believe that there is some kind of after-existence. Some religious people make it clear that they don't know what to believe the afterlife will be like. A “transcendental, psychedelic trip,” one of the men, a regular churchgoer with a penchant for drugs, said he was hoping it might be. Even the spiritually minded are uncertain about the contours of life after death. And most of us remain attached to the pleasures of
this
world: the calling of the loons at dusk, the soothing wind over a lake.

In July, I went to Paris to give a poetry reading. I spent the first two days in a jet-lagged daze, afraid to leave my hotel. The room was dirty and cold, and ants congregated around the minibar. I closed the curtains and slept through the morning and afternoon. I woke, exhausted. I was supposed to read in two hours. I felt leaden. I have no idea how to continue, I thought, in bewilderment. It will never get better. “I'm not mourning. I'm suffering,” the French theorist Roland Barthes wrote after his mother died. Yet I was ashamed of my pain; it seemed abnormal.

When I'd been in the airport, waiting for my plane, my friend Vanessa had called me. “You've been handling this with grace,” she said, kindly. “You deserve to have some fun.”

Now I was stupid with anger at myself for thinking I was handling anything well. It just meant I was hiding everything.

 

 

I walked up the rue des Saints-Pères and went to Café de Flore to order a hard-boiled egg and a café crème. The waiter asked if I liked croissants. Yes, I said, uncertainly. He brought two croissants. I looked at them. They looked like alien maggots. I drank the café crème, spooning sugar in. It was sweet and comforting. Finally I got in a taxi and went to the reading. The building was locked, and I couldn't figure out how to get in. I began to panic, tears rising to my eyes. Finally, two men approached and pressed a buzzer I hadn't seen, and the door opened; I followed them, chagrined at my lack of inner resources. The rest of the world had its feet on the ground. I didn't even notice the buttons you were supposed to press.
Just press the buttons,
I told myself.

That night, I slept quietly for the first time since arriving. The next day, I made myself get up early and go to the Musée d'Orsay.

The only other time I'd visited Paris I had been with my mother, who'd been chaperoning a school trip. Fresh out of college, I tagged along. We shared a hotel room. I remember being disturbed by our proximity. Paris was the home of the exiles—where writers went to be writers, wild and narcotic and alone. Instead, here I lay, listening to my mother breathe asthmatically.

My most vivid memory was our visit to the Musée d'Orsay, where she marveled at Monet's
The Magpie
, which neither of us had ever seen. The painting depicts a snowy field by a barn and a single magpie in the midst of the barren stillness. Monet painted relatively few snowscapes. He was more interested in the summer's wildly various light than in the equalizing neutrality of winter's. The tones of
The Magpie
are cool and monotonous—whites, browns, grays, yellows. But to the left, the eye notices a startling dab of black and focuses to see a magpie sitting on the fence. The bird is the only black in the painting. It is unusual; most paintings, if you look closely, rely heavily on black for shadows and depth. The landscape organizes itself around this dab, once you've noticed it.

My mother was fascinated. “Do you see how there is no black?” she said to me.

“I do,” I said.

“It changes everything,” she said. “It is amazing to me how such a simple thing could change everything.”

And we were very happy standing there.

 

 

The mourner's mind is superstitious, looking for signs and wonders. At the museum once again, I secretly felt that if I found
The Magpie
, my mother would be resurrected beside me to look at it once more, like a
Star Wars
hologram recording you could play over and over. But the physical space did not cooperate: the paintings were hung on different walls, in different rooms, and I couldn't find it. Tired, I started for the exit. Looking at the floor map, I saw I'd missed a room holding paintings by Manet and Monet on the first floor. I climbed past the sculptures toward the room. And there it was.

In a spring landscape, you might never notice the magpie, but in this wintry image it stands out. There is an exaggerated sense of solitude; the bird is the only sign of life in all the stillness. Most Impressionist landscapes were painted
“en plein air,”
with an emphasis on capturing the moment in which they were made. But the art historian Charles S. Moffett points out that
The Magpie
couldn't have been painted entirely this way. It is a painting from memory, even though it appears to capture a specific moment: the shadows striking the snow just so. The painting summoned absence—and yet as a piece of art it was entirely present. There was something witchy about it. My mother was that winter light, it occurred to me—reconstituted only in memory. And the little bird on the gate, perched in quietude, what was that? I suppose you could see it as hope: a sign of continuity. Later I discovered that the gift shop sells more postcards of
The Magpie
than of any other painting in the museum. People flock to
Starry Night
, but they take
The Magpie
home with them. Months afterward, I went into my mother's office—left mainly as she'd had it—to find some batteries. There, on the shelf to the left, were her books—
A Guide to Great Gingerbread
;
Yoga and You
—and photos of her dancing with my brothers. In the middle stood a postcard of
The Magpie
. I hadn't even known. She had it, I said, right by her desk.