The Long Goodbye (30 page)

Stay the night.

{
acknowledgments
}

I would like to thank Eleanor Chai and Andrew Beer for their support and friendship, without which this book would not have been written; Jerome Groopman, whose remarkable generosity and expertise helped me and my family through my mother's illness; Carin Besser, Henry Finder, Dana Goodyear, Katie Kitamura, Cressida Leyshon, Jodie Morse, Michael Specter, Darin Strauss, and Julia Turner for taking the time to read my work and offer their editorial insight; Ann Hulbert, and Katie Roiphe, for first encouraging me to write about grief; David Remnick, David Plotz, and Jacob Weisberg, for publishing sections of this book in
The New Yorker
and
Slate
; Chris Calhoun and my editor, Megan Lynch, for their invaluable wisdom and support; and my father and my brothers and James Surowiecki, my family: lights along the way.

I read many books and poems in the year after my mother died, in the hopes of better understanding my experience. Not all the books I consulted are mentioned in the text. Nevertheless, the following books informed aspects of both my intellectual and my emotional experiences of grief, and I am indebted to them. Because my reading was guided by emotion, I took a highly subjective and idiosyncratic approach, and, needless to say, this list is not comprehensive. I hope it will be of use to those looking to understand more about loss.

Ariès, Philippe.
The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes Toward Death over the Last One Thousand Years
. Trans. Helen Weaver. New York: Vintage, 1987.

______.
Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present.
Trans. Patricia M. Ranum. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1974.

Barthes, Roland.
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography.
Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill &Wang, 1981.

Becker, Ernest.
The Denial of Death.
New York: The Free Press, 1973.

Edelman, Hope.
Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss
. New York: Delta, 1994.

Enright, D. J., ed.
The Oxford Book of Death.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Faust, Drew Gilpin.
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.

Foucault, Michel.
The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception
. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1973.

Gehlek Rimpoche.
Good Life, Good Death: Tibetan Wisdom on Reincarnation
. New York: Riverhead, 2001.

Gilbert, Sandra.
Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve
. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.

Gill, Derek.
Quest: The Life of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.
New York: Harper & Row, 1980.

Gorer, Geoffrey.
Death, Grief, and Mourning in Contemporary Britian.
London: The Cresset Press, 1965.

Groopman, Jerome.
The Anatomy of Hope: How People Prevail in the Face of Illness
. New York: Random House, 2005.

Harrison, Robert Pogue.
The Dominion of the Dead
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Nuland, Sherwin.
How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.

Rich, Adrienne.
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976.

Sogyal Rinpoche.
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.
New York: HarperOne, 2002.

Bonanno, George A.
The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss.
New York: Basic Books, 2009.

Bowlby, John.
Loss: Sadness and Depression (Attachment and Loss)
. New York: Basic Books, 1982.

Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia,” in
General Psychological Theory: Theories on Paranoia, Masochism, Repression, Melancholia, the Unconscious, the Libido, and Other Aspects of the Human Psyche.
Ed. Philip Rieff. New York: Collier Books, 1963.

Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth.
On Death and Dying.
New York: Macmillan, 1976.

_____, ed.
Death: The Final Stage of Growth.
New York: Touchstone, 1975.

_____, and David Kessler.
On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss.
New York: Touchstone, 2005.

Leader, Darian.
The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression.
London: Hamish Hamilton, 2008.

Lewis, Thomas, et al.
A General Theory of Love
. New York: Random House, 2000.

Martin, Terry L., and Kenneth J. Doka.
Men Don't Cry . . . Women Do: Transcending Gender Stereotypes of Grief
. London: Taylor & Francis, 2000.

Parkes, Colin Murray.
Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life.
New York: International Universities Press, 1972.

_____.
Love and Loss: The Roots of Grief and Its Complications.
New York: Routledge, 2009.

Rando, Therese A.
How to Go On Living When Someone You Love Dies.
New York: Bantam, 1991.

Horowitz, Mardi J., et al. “Diagnostic Criteria for Complicated Grief Disorder.”
Focus
1 (2003), 290–298.

Lindemann, Erich. “Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief.”
American Journal of Psychiatry
101 (1944), 141–148.

Prigerson, Holly G., and Paul K. Maciejewski. “Grief and Acceptance as Opposite Sides of the Same Coin: Setting a Research Agenda to Study Peaceful Acceptance of Loss.”
British Journal of Psychiatry
193 (2008), 435–437.

Davis, Lydia. “Head, Heart,” in
Collected Stories
. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010.

Eggers, Dave.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Gilbert, Sandra.
Inventions of Farewell
. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001.

Gordan, Mary.
Final Payments.
New York: W. W. Norton, 2001.

Hemingway, Ernest. “Indian Camp,” in
In Our Time.
New York: Boni & Liveright, 1925.

Jansson, Tove.
The Summer Book.
Trans. Thomas Teal. New York: New York Review of Books, 2008.

Maxwell, William.
They Came Like Swallows
. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937.

Proust, Marcel.
Swann's Way
. Trans. C. K. Moncrieff. New York: Vintage, 2009.

Shakespeare, William.
Hamlet.

Tolstoy, Leo.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
Trans. Hugh Aplin. London: Hesperus Classics, 2005.

Washington, Peter, ed.
Poems of Mourning
. New York: Everyman's Library, 1998.

Young, Kevin, ed.
The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing.
New York: Bloomsbury, 2010.

Barnes, Julian
Nothing to Be Frightened Of.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.

Barthes, Roland.
Mourning Diary
. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010.

Broyard, Anatole.
Intoxicated by My Illness, and Other Writings on Life and Death
. New York: Fawcett/Columbine, 1992.

Didion, Joan.
The Year of Magical Thinking
. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.

Dillard, Annie.
Holy the Firm.
New York: Harper & Row, 1977.

Ehrlich, Gretel.
The Solace of Open Spaces
. New York: Viking Penguin, 1985.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “The Crack-Up,” in
The Crack-Up
, ed. Edmund Wilson. New York: New Directions, 1956.

Gornick, Vivian.
Fierce Attachments.
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987.

Jamison, Kay Redfield.
Nothing Was the Same
. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.

Lewis, C. S.
A Grief Observed
. New York: Harper & Row, 1961.

Manguso, Sarah.
The Two Kinds of Decay
. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008.

Quindlen, Anna.
Living Out Loud
. New York: Ballantine, 2004.

Rieff, David.
Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir
. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.

Romm, Robin.
The Mercy Papers: A Memoir of Three Weeks.
New York: Scribner, 2009.

Roth, Philip
Patrimony: A True Story
. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

Strayed, Cheryl. “The Love of My Life,” in
The Sun,
September 2002; and in
The Best American Essays 2003
. Ed. Anne Fadiman. Boston: Mariner, 2003.

Styron, William.
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
. New York: Vintage, 1992.

Wieseltier, Leon.
Kaddish.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.

Williams, Marjorie. “Hit by Lightning: A Cancer Memoir,” in
The Woman at the Washington Zoo: Writings on Politics, Family, and Fate.
Ed. Tim Noah. New York: Public Affairs, 2006.

Woolf, Virginia.
Moments of Being
. New York: Harcourt, 1985.

 

“The New Spirit,” by John Ashbery, published in
Three Poems
, copyright © 1972, 1997 by John Ashbery. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., for the author.

 

“Aubade” from
Collected Poems
by Philip Larkin. Copyright © 1988, 2003 by the Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.