The Long Goodbye (28 page)

 

 

I walked back to the cars with my grandmother. I had two different sensations: first, that this was really real, and my mother was
really
dead, and second, that the ceremony felt like a performance from someone else's life, and we'd get home, and there my mother would stand in the kitchen, my mother, like normal.

The snow was truly flurrying now. It was eerie and witchy out and the sadness in my heart grew more swollen, but it was the swell of mystery: What strange beauty surrounds us, and how impermanent our vision of it, how palpable our loss when those we love no longer can view the world they would adore.

“That was good. We scattered her ashes and she has a place to be.” She paused, and added, with typical Kelly deflection, “And now we're all going to get pneumonia.”

 

 

W
HEN I GOT home that night, I called my dad. “They found a beautiful spot,” I said, “one that Mom would have liked. It's near where you grew up—right by Grandma and Grandpa's house, just off Navesink River Road, above a horse farm.”

“You know what?” Dad said slowly. “This is really crazy. But when Mom and I first met, and no one knew we were together, that's where we would go. We'd park, and we'd sit under a great big tree. We used to call it the farm. We'd say, ‘Let's go to the farm.' We'd just go to this tree, and we'd sit there and talk for hours. We'd go there and be alone and smoke pot.” Dad laughed. “It was the summer before we got married. I was a dopey first-year teacher. Mom was still a high school student. All that stuff wasn't there—it wasn't a public park. The people who owned the farm never said anything to us.” He broke off. “Where was the tree again? Do you drive down and go over a tiny bridge, and then take a left?” he asked.

“Yes. I'm looking here at the map again. It's called ‘Browns Dock Road.' ”

“That's it,” he said. “We had this tree we'd sit under, and we would look down at the river.”

He pauses, thinking. “That makes me glad I didn't go today,” he says. “Because I would have been like, ‘Holy shit, this is where we used to go smoke pot before you knew we were together!'” He sounded young and amused when he said that, the father I remember from my childhood.

On my mother's second birthday since her death I found myself calculating: She was two in death years, fifty-seven otherwise. Last year I had forgotten it was her birthday, remembering only after returning from work. It had been five weeks since she had died. When I got home and saw the date—with a knife-twist of pain—I read Tennyson's memorial for his friend Arthur Henry Hallam:

That idea of the grace of a “day that is dead,” a grace I'd too often taken for granted, haunted me. How could I have failed to appreciate that I still lived a life before loss?

Now I wondered if forgetting my mother's birthday last year was a form of self-protection. This year, the eight-day period between my birthday and my mother's birthday was excruciating. I felt unreasonably angry. I was cold all the time. A winter chill had settled over New York—but it was more than that. I felt cold all the time. One day, as I walked down the street, having wrapped a big black scarf up over my nose, I passed a man who joked, “It's not that cold, honey.”

I really wanted to punch him. It's not cold for you, asshole.

People kept saying to me, “It gets better at a year, doesn't it?” Or, “I hear it gets better at a year.” It did. It got “better” in that I could go for days without thinking too much about the fact that someone I still loved as dearly as I ever did was dead. But to expect grief to heal is to imagine that it is possible to stop loving, to reconcile yourself to the fact that the lost one is somewhere else. So
heal
isn't the right word. I love C. S. Lewis's metaphor: A loss is like an amputation. If the blood doesn't stop gushing soon after the operation, then you will die. To survive means, by definition, that the blood has stopped. But the amputation is still there. (Complicated grief, it seemed to me, was more like an amputation that wouldn't stop bleeding, threatening your very survival; I could understand why therapists have wanted to designate it as a psychiatric disorder in the
DSM- V
, though it made me nervous that more people would just think of grief as something that ought to be treated by doctors, rather than supported by everyone.)

Her birthday, of course, was one of the days she had told me she would miss, that afternoon in the hospital when we talked about her death. I'd planned to spend the night with my father and my brothers in Connecticut. My car got towed in the afternoon and I spent an hour and a half trying to find it and get it out of the lot while snow flurries came down. I got home at seven at night, exhausted, frustrated by the stress of dealing with city government bureaucracy—on this, of all days?—and I didn't drive up, as planned. Guilt hovered around me, as if I had failed my mother. She had made the point of telling me how she would miss her birthday. And here I had gone and missed it. Perhaps I had given up on her too soon in the hospital. Perhaps if I had not “prepared” myself for her death, she would still be here. That night, a terrible pain struck my hip, and I lay sleeplessly in pain.

At one point earlier that day, an image of my mother in the hot tub at Isabel's—the hot tub used to help with her pain—had flashed into my brain. When memories you haven't thought of since the death first come up, they hurt. But I kept finding that it hurt less to remember things a second time. I think this is why people always say that it gets better after a year—even though after a year you're not
done
with mourning, you have cycled through the seasons, through holidays, family rituals, living through them for the first time without the person who's gone. And in this sense I've come to feel that Freud's description from “Mourning and Melancholia” is somewhat accurate, however programmatic it seems: you do go through the memories and alter them, because now they've been accessed in the context of separation. Of course, certain memories remain particularly vivid—whenever I remember them they feel like razor icicles, burning my mind.

Once asleep, I had weird tangled dreams and woke with a headache. Resolving to try to move forward, I wrote on my computer:
This little period is now behind us
. Only I mistyped it: This little period is
not
behind us.

I'd never before considered the closeness of “not” and “now.”

My mother is not now.

But she was, and she is now, in the minds of those who remember her: her smile, her voice, her little intonations, her smell—all in us.

 

 

I
N THE SUMMERS when we used to go canoe camping for a week or two on Moosehead Lake, we would drive up from New York City in a station wagon packed to the brim with boxes and bags and two canoes precariously strapped to the top of the car. My brother and I were each allowed to bring a “crate”—a wooden wine box—of books. “One crate,” my mother said firmly. I would line my crate carefully with paperbacks, rearranging to get everything in. Once, after the long drive without air-conditioning—our cars, the castoffs of friends, never had such niceties—my dog jumped out an open window when my parents stopped to get our camping license. “Finn!” I cried in fright, thinking he'd finally had enough of us. But all he did was shoot down the hill to the dock and then jump straight out into the blue water. He had never seen a lake before.

The lake was huge, stretching lakily out to the horizon, and it changed you to see it, after the hours of asphalt and the car climbing huge hills and descending them, climbing again and descending, hemmed in by hundred-year-old oaks and maples. When you got to the shoreline and saw the trees curving away over the water you felt free. I would open the tent, insert the flexible metal wires that gave it shape, and hammer in the supporting pegs with a rock or a book, my brother doing the same, his blond head bent over a peg. He was young and slower than I was and I'd shove him aside in the end to do it myself. Then we got inside and read. I read
The Scarlet Pimpernel
by flashlight one night when I was ten. It all seemed exciting and dastardly and terrifying; the ground was rotting under me as I read. How could these people want to murder lords and ladies? Lords and ladies were the heroines of my storybooks. I didn't understand how the book took for granted these casual dealings in blood and terror. I found it terrifying to learn that this had been real. I remember my confusion, the night pressing against the tent, and the mahogany light cast by the flashlight against the yellowing book. Now all those books have yellowed; they sit on the rec-room bookshelves in my dad's house, some moth-eaten and mildewed, others brittle, the corners of the pages breaking as you turn them.

In the morning we paddled out, I with my father, my brother with my mother, each with a dog and packs and crates of books in the center of the canoe. Finn and Jesse (my mother's German shepherd) didn't like to settle in the canoe; they'd stand wagging their tails, startling as the canoe tipped. “Down!” my father would say sternly. They would lie down and then we paddled for what felt like hours. First you'd set out for a point that seemed impossibly distant. Then you would get there. Then you would paddle around that point and paddle to another impossibly distant point. Finally you would stop and make camp, setting up the tent. Usually, if we found a spot we liked, with good swimming, we'd stay a few days, reading and swimming all day long, cooking dinner on our little “convection oven” at night—usually some kind of baked beans, Spam, and brown bread. On these trips, and only on these trips, my brother and I were allowed to drink Kool-Aid, which we'd make from mix packets. There was a panoply of flavors and we lingered over them in the supermarket, savoring the idea of each exotic new one, like Lemon-Lime and Watermelon-Cherry.

Every summer we went—three or four summers, I can't remember—my brother and I begged to get to Fox Island. It was a remote spot with a great rock about twenty feet out from the shore. You could climb on the rock and read, or you could use it for diving. I liked to swim out there with my mother and practice diving. I wanted to be a great diver or gymnast. My mother encouraged me in this; she was athletic and tensile and elegant in the water and she'd watch my brother and me jump and do flips with as much interest as if we were performing miraculous jackknives, when in fact we were just tipping downward off the rock with our legs piked.

In the morning my mother used the solar water shower—a big black plastic jug, designed to absorb the sun's heat and be hung on a tree—to shave her legs. I used to hover near her and watch. Why are you doing that? I remember asking.

To get the hair off my legs, she said.

Can I do it?

No.

Why not?

You don't need to.

But I have hair on my legs.

Little girls don't need to.

And I went away and threw some rocks in the water and watched her over my shoulder: a woman, bending in the sunlight, taking the hair from her legs.

After she died, we were going through boxes of memorabilia she kept about each of us—typically disorganized. One of the things I found was a card I made her on her birthday when I was about six:

How come you are so nice
. I think I really wanted to know.

In that moment, my mother's death is a flat thing, impossible to accept. The spring after she died, my father sent me this passage, by a scholar of ancient Egypt:

The passage consoles me. The idea of time as a pool brings an actual solace, conjuring up the peculiar fact that our brains so often make the past as vivid as the present, without our choosing. Our memory is our weather, and we are re-created by it every day.

Mostly I don't believe much in an afterworld, but I find myself thinking a lot about the notion that we have some kind of after-being—if not after-consciousness. And maybe after-being is a consolation. Certainly my mother seemed to find it so. In those last days she seemed to be looking across a barrier, into a space I couldn't see, couldn't imagine. She talked about wanting to look at old things. Once when I drove her home from chemo two springs ago—in the months she was intuiting for the first time that this cancer was the thing that would kill her—she wanted me to take her to the Cloisters. I had a hard time looking at her because her skin was so gray. We walked through the colonnade—like an old monastery—and studied the art. This has been in the world for so long, she said. See how carefully it was made. In the sun, emerging from the dark, limping because her knee hurt, she bent to the herbs and flowers just coming up—lupine, myrtle, columbine. Here comes the spring, she said, as if she knew she would never see it again. Later, I would sit next to her, rubbing her feet, watching her look out the window—she looked past us, like an X-ray machine. Already left behind, I was angry at moments, wanting to call out: Come back! Come back! But my desire felt obscene. It was clearly wrong—spiritually wrong. It denied nature. And nature is, as far as I can tell, spirit.