The Long Goodbye (29 page)

When my mother was dying, I prayed for the first time in my life, and the world returned something to me: a vibrational awakening, a gift of energy that loosened the snake grip of pain and, blessedly, also shook me out of the numbing anger settling in my brain. Later I read Virginia Woolf's aborted memoir,
Moments of Being
, and was drawn to a passage recalling the paralyzing shocks that sent her into a depression, and how her experience of imperilment and recuperation through writing led her to conclude that there is an order behind our existence:

This is the closest description I have ever come across to what I feel to be my experience. I suspect a pattern behind the wool, even the wool of grief; the pattern may not lead to heaven or the survival of my consciousness—frankly I don't think it does—but that it is
there
somehow in our neurons and synapses is evident to me. We are not transparent to ourselves. Our longings are like thick curtains stirring in the wind. We give them names. What I do not know is this: Does that otherness—that sense of an impossibly
real
universe larger than our ability to understand it—mean that there is meaning around us?

Time does now feel like what Madeleine L'Engle calls, in
A Wrinkle in Time
, a tesseract. L'Engle describes it as being akin to when your skirt folds, and two disparate places in the fabric suddenly touch. A memory reaches out and touches my mind and I live proximate to it all day long—talking, writing, working, hearing my mother's voice saying, “Here comes the spring.” And I will keep hearing her voice every spring until I, too, see my last spring.

 

 

S
ITTING HERE among my precarious stacks of books about death and grief, trying to get “a handle” on what this loss means, trying to collect the information and set it all down, I am struck suddenly by the ridiculousness of my endeavor. I have felt that, as Flaubert wrote, “language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.” But life is out there in the world, in the hum of enterprise, flirtation, engagement, watching a sunrise, the sand under your feet, and the green in your eyes; life is in the moths fluttering up at dusk into the candle flames on a porch in summer.

I sit here in my tiny study, bills dropped on the floor, books piling by the desk—
Death and Western Thought
,
Death's Door
,
The Denial of Death
,
This Republic of Suffering
—believing in some primitive part of my brain that if I read them all, if I learn everything there is to know, I'll solve the problem. I will find the answer to the equation. And when I look up from my dutiful work, my head bowed to the page, there will be my mother again, saying,
Good night, Meg,
from the door, the dog at her heels, her hair loose around her face, her eyes that were so particular, so
hers
—there she will be.

Where is she?

She is gone, and I will be, too, one day. I wake to my warm room, the wind roaring outside and the sun just coming up on another ordinary Tuesday when I will teach my class and go out to get coffee and eat some salad for lunch. But all the while my brain will be preoccupied by the question of death. And that makes it hard, at times, to pay my bills or pay attention to concerns of this world.

I can't find the information I want in all these books. Not even in the Bible, which sits there, too, a fat red tome full of old wisdom. And that is my answer: I need to walk in the streets, through the bracing, chill air, to know it, to feel it, because it cannot be merely
thought
about.

Later, I go to an engagement party and dance with a friend, the little blades in my heart clicking, shuffling, quieting.

 

 

I
T HAS BEEN fifteen months and one week since my mother died. A year, three months, a week.

Tomorrow, it will be a year, three months, a week, a day.

And so forth. What can I say? There is nothing “fixed” about my grief. I don't have the same sense that I'm sinking into the ground with every step I take. But there aren't any “conclusions” I can come to, other than personal ones. The irony is, my restored calm is itself the delusion. I'm more at peace because that old false sense of the continuity of life has returned.

I have learned a lot about how humans think about death. But it hasn't necessarily taught me more about my dead, where she is, what she is. When I held her body in my hands and it was just black ash, I felt no connection to it, but I tell myself perhaps it is enough to still be matter, to go into the ground and be “remixed” into some new part of the living culture, a new organic matter. Perhaps there is some solace in this continued existence.

When I was talking to my father about my mother's decision to be cremated, one spring night after dinner, sitting at the kitchen island, drinking wine together, he said, “She just kept saying, ‘I don't want to be buried in the ground,' and she said, ‘I want to be everywhere.' And I brought up the fact that you kids might want to have a place to visit, to be with her—I thought of that. But ‘I don't want to be buried in the ground' is all she would say.” He paused and drank some wine. Every time I looked at him I had the impression of a streak of white paint disappearing into a colorfully painted wall. It was almost as if he couldn't focus on us, or I couldn't focus on him. His eyes were walled and melting at once, circles dripping down under them into his face. “Knowing your mother, I would think she thought there was something sad about cemeteries. Sure, a grave is a place where we can go remember the dead when we want to, and that is important. But the rest of the time the grave just stands there unlooked after, segregated from the living, and you're there alone with all the other dead.” He stroked his beard, like the professor that he is. “She would have thought that was sad,” he said.

“I can see that,” I said. “I can see that she would've wanted to be like the Whitman version of the dead, all underfoot.” I was thinking of the lines from the end of “Song of Myself”: “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.” One never has the impression that Whitman means look for him under your boot-soles
in the cemetery
; he means in the living world.

“Exactly,” my father said. He rubbed his eyes. They were red and full and watering.

Once upon a time, there was a little girl who stayed too long in the bath. Her mother warned her that she would wrinkle up like a raisin and go down the drain. She looked at the whorls of her fingers, puckered and pink. When she looked up, her mother had left the room. Mother? she called, and called again. The fluffy white towel had fallen to the ground. She heard nothing. She stood up and pulled the towel from the ground. And pink from the heat, she stepped out of the bath at last and into the cool and shocking air.

In the second spring since my mother died, the tiny furled buds are appearing once more on the trees. Seeds have sprouted. The daffodils are coming up. Walking down the street near my apartment, I pass the house where I lived when I was two and three. My first memories are from this house—my socks being scrabbled, the dream of the parade, my mother holding me up to look out the window on a scrubbed gray day like this one. The tree branches swung close to our second-floor window. On their spidery fingers bulged green pods. I asked what they were.

Those? Those are buds, she said. Do you see their green tips? Those will grow bigger and unfurl into leaves and then the trees will be all green like last summer. They grow in spring.

And she explained the cycle of seasons to me—that it had been winter, and would be summer, and that this happened every year.

It is fitting—it is cyclically fitting—that my mother should disappear from this planet before I do. I know she would prefer it that way. It is fitting, too, that one day as the winter gave way to spring I woke up to realize that I wanted to feel pleasure—that I missed reveling in the world.

Perhaps it is fitting, too, that while my grief has lessened, my sense of being motherless has intensified. I hadn't anticipated this. The first grips of grief were so terrible that I couldn't wait to get beyond them, to a state I hoped might be “better.” But as each new day arrives I find myself, though suffering less acutely, feeling
more
unmothered. Strange. I have a piercing sense of empathy for friends who lost a parent when they were young. Even at my age, I still have so many questions, about children, about cooking, about what my mother thought of her life's work.

One thing that helps is summoning up her words and her jokes—even her little rebukes; when I get annoyed by something trivial, I catch myself saying (often out loud) the very refrain of hers that used to so irritate me: “Lighten up, Meg.” In fact, I have begun to feel my mother
inside
me—usually on holidays or in groups. My brothers have more of her blithe and freewheeling spirit. But lately there are these moments when it's as if her spirit enters and inhabits me; it's palpable, like being possessed. The word
inspiration
comes from the Latin preposition
in
and the verb for “to breathe,”
spirare
(which also gives us our word “spirit”). Perhaps I have breathed my mother in. It is true that the other day, as I was driving to work, someone cut me off; I rolled down my window and called out into the air, “You asshole,” just as she used to.

On Easter, Isabel and Diana and their families came over to my father's, and I went too. I found myself making a little joke that I thought my mother would've liked over dinner. I hid Easter eggs with Diana for her three young sons. The chaos of life suddenly seemed more absurd than it ever had—for example, when the dog started eating the Easter egg I'd thought I'd cunningly placed behind the barbecue. (A week later, I was having dinner with an old friend who lost her father almost ten years ago. I asked her how her life had changed following his death. She paused and thought. “Mostly, the world seems funnier,” she said.) That weekend both Isabel and Diana said that at moments I had reminded them of my mother.
If only,
I thought. Then I thought,
If so, it's not my doing , it's hers
.

I think about my mother every day, but not as concertedly as I used to. She crosses my mind like a spring cardinal that flies past the edge of your eye: startling, luminous, lovely, gone. A holiday—even something like Mother's Day, a holiday she hated—always leads me to remember her, to think about what she is missing, what I am missing. This Easter, I think about all the things I never said along the way, about how much her example meant to me, about the way she never let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and nearly always made a joke out of the situation.

The bond between a mother and child is so unlike any other that it is categorically irreplaceable.
Unmothered
is not a word in my dictionary, but I often find myself thinking it should be. The “real” word most like it—it never escapes me—is
unmoored
. The irreplaceability is what becomes stronger—and stranger—as the months pass: Am I really she who has woken up again without a mother? Yes, I am. Some nights I still lie awake, nerves jangled, in the velvet dark, staring out the window, listening to the cars pass by like echoes of other lives lived, not lived, my breath shallow, my toes cold, my mind drifting in the shallows and currents of the past, like a child wading in a stream.

With my mother's death the person who brought me into the world left it, a portal closing behind her, a line of knowledge binding her body to mine in the old ways. Who else contained me, felt me kick, nursed me, held the towel out to me when I got out of the bath, age thirteen, the last time she helped me bathe. I remember, because she had wanted to come in and wrap me in the towel and I was resisting it. When she did, holding up the sheet of white cloth, she said, “You're growing breasts, Meg,” and then—and God, it made me so uncomfortable at the time—“They're pretty.” Who else do I share this history with? No one. Because she is not here, I must mother myself.

We were with her when she died, her breath deepening, the oxygen machine wheezing, making more noise than anything in the house, her skin going yellow, pebbly, her body numbingly diminished. And there she was, breathing, still breathing, and when her breath changed and the hospice worker came to take her pulse and her blood pressure, he turned to us and he said, “The only thing keeping her alive right now is her heart.” And of course it was her heart keeping her alive, moving the blood, causing her to sing to us from her coma all that morning as we unwrapped presents as we always have and always will until we do not. It was heart that moved her and heart that led us to gather by her and give witness to the breath rasping and pressing forward as it is designed to do. In the beginning there was the wind, the wind made by breath, the word of the wind, and in our hearts we kept telling the story over and over of how we loved her and were there, there, there, once we were all there, and she took a breath like a gasp and her eyes opened and she took us in, all of us there, and then she breathed once more, the last breath, and we were there and she was not, and even now I think, Come on, Mom, stay another night, stay the night—