The Long Goodbye (26 page)

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Authors: Meghan O'Rourke

BOOK: The Long Goodbye
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“I guess there's none,” my father said.
“Well, next time you go to the grocery, could you buy some, so there's some always around the house?” I said.
“I'm sorry,” he said, real sorrow in his voice. I felt like a total jerk. Here was my father, himself grieving, taking care of my youngest brother and all of us, trying to sell his house in a bad market, worried about money, approaching the age of retirement—and I was complaining that he hadn't bought Claritin so I could feel parented? It was time to grow up.
“It's OK. I should have brought some. I forgot.”
“No, I should have it in the house,” he said, looking tired.
 
 
By the time I got back from the gas station, travel packs of Claritin in hand, my brothers were up. “We still haven't come downstairs!” Liam said. This was an old ritual that we'd extended preposterously into the present day, mostly because Eamon was so much younger than Liam and I: we stayed upstairs and came down with our eyes closed, so our mother could take pictures of us as we saw the heap of gifts under the tree. Eamon would always anticipate how many gifts there would be.
“How big is the pile going to be, Mom?” he'd say.
“I don't know. Pretty small,” she'd say.
“No!” he'd cry out. “There will be mountains!”
Somehow the whole morning was a pleasure—maybe it was just that we were distracted by the joy of stuff. But rather than merely feel my mother's absence, I was buoyed by the fact that we were all there, by the small gestures of kindness and love that glued the morning together. It was as joyous as it could have been.
 
 
We'd made plans to drive to New York to scatter my mother's ashes in Prospect Park—where she had loved to walk our dogs—and have lunch at a quiet restaurant. But as my father started to make breakfast, we realized that we didn't really want to go to the restaurant. “That's fine,” I said, a surge of anxiety in my stomach at the thought that we might not observe her death. “But I think we should scatter some of her ashes anyway. I feel the need to do something. It seems weird to sit here with our stuff as if nothing happened.”
“We'll go to the beach,” Dad said.
“Can we go at three, when she died?”
Eamon looked away. He was upset. I could see that part of him didn't want to deal with the ashes, but wanted just to have Christmas—to siphon what joy he could from our being together, from his new gifts, like a mariner decanting drinkable water from the sea. He wanted to relax and let the holiday be a holiday. Looking up, he said to me, “I'd like more time to sit around. Can we at least come back here afterward, before driving down?”
“Of course,” I said, pained that he even had to ask.
 
 
T
HEY TOOK my mother's body away so quickly. There we all were, touching her, hugging her, kissing her, saying goodbye. A year ago. For twenty minutes she was warm and she didn't look dead. She didn't look alive either. But she didn't have the glazed, absent expression I had expected. Her being seemed present. I could feel it hovering at the ceiling of the room, changing, but not gone. I could have spent days with the body, getting used to it, loving it, saying goodbye to it. Then again, some part of me was terrified it would change and decay and that part wanted it gone. Her hands weren't moving at all and they were so solid, so hers. There was the wedding ring, the long flat nails.
I'm going to miss her hands,
I thought, my throat tightening. I had an idea:
I'll just take her hands and keep them.
For a minute that seemed a real solution.
So when the men came and took her pulse and said they would remove the body I was glad, too. It was as if by removing the body we could remove the pain, the reality, and move on to the next day. Maybe tomorrow she could come back—
I fooled you!—
and walk down the stairs again. They walked heavily around the house. I remember them wearing white T-shirts and canvas jackets and being tall but that is all. Hello, they said, solemnly. We suggest that you say your farewells and then go upstairs. Some family members find it upsetting to see the body removed.
In a daze, I said goodbye. I kissed my mother's forehead—waxy, the way it had been for days now—and pushed her black hair back. I took a pair of scissors and cut off a lock for myself, then another, for my father. My brothers took one too. Then I kissed her again and said: You were very brave, and I love you.
I fled the room, dutifully going upstairs and hiding my eyes in my pillow, as if I were a child. It was a strange reversal of Christmas: Here we were, at the end of the day, moving back upstairs, averting our eyes, waiting not for the arrival of gifts but for the removal of a gift, the gift of our mother, her body.
At the time the speedy removal felt natural, perhaps because I had no idea what to expect. Now, however, there is a blankness at the center of it that troubles me. We're too squeamish for the ritualistic act of cleansing and purifying, the washing of the body, that used to take place in other times, and still does, in other places, but I wonder if it might have helped me to take care one last time of the body I'd cared about for my entire life.
In early December, I began to experience a strange phenomenon. After my mother's death, I fell into a pattern of waking up twenty or thirty minutes after I'd fallen asleep, covered in sweat, shaking with terror. Of late, though, when I startled awake, I was not panicked, but I had the distinct sensation that
I had no hands.
My arms just ended. Eventually, as I lay there, I could imagine my hands again, and move them, and lift one to the other. I suppose it is a metaphor for my loss: by now, grief is not a fever, it's an amputation. Also, my hands look like my mother's.
 
 
S
HORTLY BEFORE THREE, we got in our cars to head to the beach. My brothers came with me, leaving Dad to drive alone, which he seemed to want. The route was the same one where my mother had taught me to drive, heading toward the train station, and it was odd to be taking it on my own now.
The beach was windy and gray clouds pressed low to the horizon as we climbed the pass into the sand. Our father was carrying a small gift bag emblazoned with the words MERRY CHRISTMAS. He let Huck off the leash and the dog bounded in joyous circles, not knowing where to go first. Inside the gift bag was a ziplock bag my father was fiddling with. There were the ashes. We shuffled toward the water.
“OK,” he said, opening the plastic bag.
“We should do it now if we're going to do it,” I said. A family of three was coming down the beach. I didn't want to greet them with handfuls of ash.
Hello! Merry Christmas! We are scattering a dead body on the beach, in the water, amidst your day of joy! Hello! Hello!
And what would they say?
Good luck with your mother! We wish you well! Good luck, farewell!
No, no.
“It's windy,” Liam said. “We should get close to the water. Otherwise it's going to be
The Big Lebowski
all over again.”
“What's
The Big Lebowski
?” my dad asked. We started explaining the Coen brothers movie; Steve Buscemi's character dies, and Jeff Bridges and John Goodman have to scatter his ashes at a cliff, but the wind comes up and their friend's ashes blow back all over them. The ashes! All over them! Terrible to imagine.
“We don't want that,” Dad said.
Liam bent over the slate-gray water and scattered some poinsettia leaves and holly he had gathered from the house before we left. He'd said he wanted something to look at when we put the ashes in, to mark the place. “Otherwise the ashes will just sink. And now these will be with her. She loved these plants.”
We were in unknown territory, each of us making up our own rituals. I'd picked out the opening of Keats's “Endymion” to read. The wind loud in our ears, we huddled around, and I read:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darken'd ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.
Then my father unzipped the ziplock bag. There were my mother's ashes.
The body that I had loved lay in a sandwich bag. It was a dark gray—charcoal gray. The ash was extremely fine, far finer than I had expected, except for the shards of bones scattered in it. They were small and variously shaped. I had thought all the bone pieces would be like pebbles. One tiny piece looked like a miniature bone, long and thin, rounder at the ends.
All year I had been nauseated by the thought that my mother's body had been burned and now sat in a container somewhere in our house. It was unacceptable. I could accept her death, but I couldn't accept the belated fact of her body—the remains. Now they were in my hands and it was as if someone had poured flammable liquid in my arteries. I felt queer and cold and hot all at once.
Leaning out, I spoke a prayer to my mother, a prayer of safety. I didn't know what I meant. The wind was strong and the ashes landed limply and nonheroically at the ocean's edge. But the water was vast and dark. I thought again of safety.
My brothers had taken handfuls. Eamon's eyes were swollen and red. He walked down the beach and squatted by the water's edge. He carefully placed—even patted—the ashes into the water, as if he were stroking my mother's head for a last time. Atomized, we threw the ashes in handfuls, together, alone, a constellation. I wanted to scatter some further out; taking a deep breath, I cast my hand up and out—just as a gust of wind came and blew the ashes all over Eamon.
“Meg!” he said.
His black parka was covered in gray grit.
“I have some in my mouth—
pfft
,” he said.
“Oh no, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to Big Lebowski you.”
“You Big Lebowski'd me!” he said. “I am
covered.
”
“I'm so sorry,” I said.
“It's OK.”
He walked away. Later my father told me he'd looked over and seen Eamon weeping, and he'd walked down to put his arms around him. “You OK?” he asked.
“I'm fine,” Eamon said. “I just have Mom in my eyes.”
 
 
When we got home, I was extremely hungry and terribly sad and tired. I went upstairs and lay down. I did not dream.
When I woke, we all had a glass of wine together. My head was thick and cottony. “I need to go home,” I said to my brothers. As they got their bags, I sat with my father and asked him how he was feeling.
“I feel OK,” he said, looking up from his chair. His eyes were bright. “I think it was an important thing to do, especially for you guys. You know, the Egyptians thought there were two kinds of time, one linear, and one cyclical, one ritualistic, one everyday. After a death, everyday time easily returns to take over and rule your life. It's one of the reasons they had so many rituals, I'm now realizing, to deal with the dead—it was to push back everyday time and make space for contemplation of the cosmic. When you do something like this, you step outside of everyday time for a moment, and that's good.” He paused, looking off to the side the way he does when he is thinking.
“You do this, and it just feels real—it's part of real life, too. There's wind, it's messy. And you realize you can't avoid the Big Lebowski effect.”
I laughed.
“I was saying to Liam in the car on the way home that it's funny: You could wait for the day of perfect weather, for blue sky and warm sun, but then where are you? When does that day come, and why? And what is it once it does come? It made more sense to do it today, even in the bitter cold. And boy, was it cold, my hands were burning. But it's what it was.”
As we drove to Brooklyn, Liam told us that after scattering the ashes, my father had spoken to him about how anxious he'd been about the holiday.
“He told me that he woke up in the middle of the night, flashing on the orange flip-flops he got Eamon, and thinking, ‘He's going to think I'm so stupid. They're going to seem dorky.'”
Tears came to my eyes at the thought of my father waking, restless, because he was trying on a role that he had never played before.
I looked at Eamon in the rearview mirror. “Call Dad and tell him how much you liked your gifts, especially the orange flip-flops.”
Both my brothers groaned.
“No!” Liam said. “That won't help. He'll know I told you.”
“Yeah, really,” Eamon said. “Come on, Meg.”
 
 
The elaborate artifice of the funeral home business repulsed my mother, and it repulses me for all the ways it cynically preys on the neediness of the freshly bereaved. “What did you have in mind? Inhumement, entombment, inurnment, immurement? Some people lately have preferred ensarcophagusment,” says a funeral adviser at Whispering Glades, in Evelyn Waugh's
The Loved One
, a satire of the funeral business in America. “Well, I think we better just have him buried,” responds the hapless British nephew there to perform what he had mistakenly thought was a straightforward duty for his uncle. No: first he must decide whether to get the merely “moisture-proof ” Silent Night casket or to splurge for the “dampness-proof ” Emperor model.

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