I had been sent healing workbooks and Buddhist texts about how to die. I had been sent On Grief and Grieving and On Death and Dying and the Bible and memoirs about deaths of parents. I read nearly all of them; I was hungry for death scenes. C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, his slim account of the months after his wife’s death from cancer, was the most evocative. Grief is paradoxical: you know you must let go, and yet letting go cannot happen all at once. The literature of mourning enacts that dilemma; its solace lies in the ritual of remembering the dead and then saying, There is no solace, and also, This has been going on a long time.
But the book I was most preoccupied with those first nights was Hamlet. I returned over and over to key speeches as if they were prayers or clues. I’d always thought of Hamlet’s melancholy as existential. His sense that the world “is out of joint” came across as vague and philosophical, the dilemma of a depressive young man who can’t stop chewing at big metaphysical questions. But now it seemed to me that Hamlet was moody and irascible in no small part because he is grieving: his father has just died. He is radically dislocated, stumbling through the days while the rest of the world acts as if nothing important has changed.
For the trouble is not just that Hamlet is sad; it is that everyone around him is unnerved by his grief. When Hamlet comes onstage, his uncle greets him with the worst question you can ask a grieving person: “How is it that the clouds still hang on you?” Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, tries to get him to see that his loss is “common.” No wonder Hamlet is angry and cagey; he is told that how he feels is “unmanly” and unseemly. This was a predicament familiar to me. No one was telling me that my sadness was unseemly, but I felt, all the time, that to descend to the deepest fathom of it was somehow taboo. (As my dad said, “You have this choice when you go out and people ask how you’re doing. You can tell the truth, which you know will make them really uncomfortable, or seem inappropriate. Or you can lie. But then you’re lying.”) I was struck, too, by how much of Hamlet is about the precise kind of slippage the mourner experiences: the difference between being and seeming, the uncertainty about how the inner translates into the outer, the sense that one is expected to perform grief palatably. (If you don’t seem sad, people worry; but if you are grief-stricken, people flinch away from your pain.)
Hamlet also captures an aspect of loss I found difficult to speak about—the profound ennui, the moments of angrily feeling it is not worth continuing to live. In A Grief Observed, Lewis captures the laziness of grief, how it made him not want to shave or answer letters. Hamlet’s famous soliloquy invokes that numb exhaustion:O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ’gainst self-slaughter. O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
“Weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable”: yes. I shared with Hamlet the pained wish that I might melt away.
Researchers have found that the bereaved are at a higher risk for suicidal thinking than the depressed. But Hamlet, I thought, is less searching actively for death than wishing futilely for the world to make sense again. And this, too, was how I felt.
I took a trip to California, to visit my friend Dana and go to the Mojave Desert for a few days. I needed a break, a different landscape; the holidays had hardly been a “vacation.”
On my way to Joshua Tree National Park, a vast wind farm loomed on the left. The turning windmills were eerie, like machines from another world, and their strangeness made my stomach hurt with something like homesickness. The desert was dry and majestic and it calmed me; I was empty and it was, too. The open sky over the land, the juxtaposition of the minute and the majestic—it all expressed the dissonance I felt, and having my sense of smallness reflected back at me put me strangely at ease. How could my loss matter in the midst of all this? Yet it did matter to me, and in this setting that felt natural, the way the needle on the cactus in the huge desert is natural.
Hiking alone under the warm blue sky I had a sense that my mother was nearby—a vivid sensation I had had on several occasions since she died. I imagined I could detect her in the haze at the horizons, and so, for the first time since Christmas, I talked to her. I was walking along past the cacti, when I looked out into the rocky distance. “Hello, Mother,” I whispered. “I miss you so much.” Then I started crying. Ridiculously, I apologized. “I’m sorry. I don’t want you to feel bad. I know you had to leave.” I didn’t want her to feel guilty that she couldn’t be here with us.
A part of me knew this concern was foolish.
But it was intrinsic to the ritual, to the lingering belief that she was there, listening. I was powerless over it.
The solitude quickly turned painful. In a café, I ordered a coffee just so I didn’t have to go back to my hotel room. In Brooklyn it had been hard to be around people, especially when they seemed uncomfortable talking about my mother, who was all I thought about. But it was also hard to be alone; one night, I spent hours writing to near strangers on Facebook, as if that would create the connection I was searching for.
I drove back to L.A. to see Dana. That night, we stayed up late, talking about the difficulty of grieving, its odd jags of ecstasy and pain. Dana’s father had died several years earlier, and it was easy to speak with her: she belonged to what more than one acquaintance who’s lost a parent has now referred to as “the club.” It’s not a club any of us wished to join, but it makes mourning less lonely. I told Dana that I felt my mother’s loss was curiously unrecognized; I envied my Jewish friends the ritual of saying Kaddish. She talked about the hodgepodge of traditions she had embraced in the midst of her grief. And then she asked me, “Have you found a metaphor?”
“A metaphor?”
“Have you found your metaphor for where your mother is?”
As she said it, I realized I had. It was the sky—the wind. The cynic in me cringed, but it was true.
I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics, which is to say, I am not religious. I was bothered when people offered up the—to me—empty consolation that whatever happened, my mother “will always be there with you.” But when my mother died, I did not believe that she was gone. As she exhaled a last time, her face settled into repose. Her body grew still, but I felt she had simply been transferred into another substance; what substance, and where it might be located, I wasn’t sure. I went onto my parents’ porch without putting my coat on. The limp winter sun sparkled off the frozen snow on the lawn, and I asked the air to take good care of my mother. I addressed the fir tree she liked and the wind moving in it. “Please keep her safe for me.”
Later, after talking to Dana, I asked Isabel whether she had a metaphor for where my mother was. She unhesitatingly answered: “The water. The ocean.”
The idea that my mother might be somewhere rather than nowhere is hard for the skeptical empiricist in me to swallow. But there it is. At times I simply felt she was just on a long trip. I was reminded of an untitled poem by Franz Wright, which reads in full:I basked in you;
I loved you, helplessly, with a boundless tongue-tied love.
And death doesn’t prevent me from loving you.
Besides,
in my opinion you aren’t dead.
(I know dead people, and you are not dead.)
At lunch one day, after flying home, as velvety snow coated the narrow Brooklyn streets, I tried to talk about this haunted feeling with a friend whose son died a few years ago. She told me that she, too, felt that her son was with her, and she frequently talked to him. She is an intellectually exacting person, and she said that she had sometimes wondered about how to conceptualize her persistent intuition. A psychiatrist reframed it for her: he said the people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.
That was a kind of comfort. But I resist
ed the therapist’s view. I needed to experience my mother’s presence in the world around me and not just in my head. Every now and then, I saw a tree shift in the wind and its bend had, to my eye, a distinctly maternal cast. For me, my metaphor was—as all good metaphors ought to be—a persuasive transformation. In these moments, I did not say to myself that my mother was like the wind; I thought she was the wind. I felt her: there, and there.
One book about grief that I found convincing—and strangely consoling—was by Colin Murray Parkes, a British psychiatrist and a pioneer in bereavement research. Drawing on work by another researcher, John Bowlby, he argued that the dominant element of grief was a restless “searching.” The heightened physical arousal, anger, and sadness of grief resemble the anxiety that children suffer when they’re separated from their mothers. Parkes speculated that we likewise continue to “search” illogically (and in distress) for a loved one after a death. He states the mourner’s predicament clinically and as clearly as anyone:In his heart of hearts he often believes that the dead do not return yet he is committed to the task of recovering one who is dead. It is no wonder that he feels that the world has lost its purpose, and no longer makes sense.
As we fail over and over to find the lost person, Parkes suggests, we slowly create a new world, the old one having been invalidated by death. It occurred to me that my metaphor finding was precisely this, a secular mind searching for its lost love.
One day, I sat up in shock when I felt my mother shake me out of a pervasive fearfulness that was making it hard for me to get on the subway. Whether it was the ghostly flicker of my synapses or an actual ghostly flicker of her spirit, I don’t know. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t hoping it was the latter.
IN THE FIRST WEEKS after my mother’s death, I became intensely obsessed with M., my high school boyfriend. Partly it was that I craved the connection of sex; he had come to Connecticut after my mother’s death and stayed the night, and the whole time I felt a weird nerviness around him. While we watched TV, I was formal and polite with him at first; I kept making sure there was some distance between us on the couch. I felt I could pull him into me, like a black hole, in my exhausted derangement, and this seemed unfair, inappropriate, indecorous. When I touched him then pulled away, he said, in a low voice, “That’s right. God forbid you touch me.”
The funeral was the next day. The prospect of it hung heavily at the edge of my mind.
“Do you want to stay in my room?” I asked.
“Whatever you want,” he said.
What I wanted was to be demolished. I pulled him onto the bed, with the sensation of diving into deep black water. In the morning I was dressing for the funeral and he looked up from the bed, eyes still clouded with sleep, and said, “You look lovely,” and for a moment it seemed the years had reeled back, and I was in high school.
M. and I had gone out my senior year. I met him when I was around the age at which my mother had met my father, and in the most infatuated, idyllic moments of our relationship, I fantasized that we, too, would run off and get married. At the end of my freshman year of college, though, I broke up with M.; I loved him, but I thought I was doing the wrong thing by keeping myself tied to someone far away. I had absorbed the idea that I was supposed to be independent, that I was supposed to explore, that I was growing up in an age of freedom for women. For years I thought of our relationship nostalgically, because in it I had known a kind of youthful joy and optimism that I never experienced as vibrantly again.
His reentrance into my life had intersected eerily with my mother’s illness. We’d run into each other in a coffee shop the day I found out my mother’s cancer had returned, and made plans to see each other. When we did, we talked nostalgically about our relationship and the curious vividness it had for both of us all these years later. There was still something between us, but everything was kept at bay for some time, until one fall night, not long before my mother died, he kissed me. He smelled the same, and I had the sensation of dropping into a vortex; the past was present.
Since then, there had been something ghostly about our encounters. In the time before her death he floated into my life, then disappeared, then came back again, and I did the same. But after the death, I suddenly wanted to clutch him close. After my mother’s funeral, we had dinner a few times, and one night he came over when I called him in tears, and soothed me. But he always seemed to be holding back—why, I did not know. I fretted about this evasiveness, wishing that he would plunge into my grief with me, even though I knew that was unrealistic, unwise. When I talked to friends in those first weeks, I often talked about him, not my mother. By some strange internal math, he had become part of her disappearance: if I could hold on to, reconnect, with him, she might return. We could travel backward through time, and I could choose not to leave him, and my mother would still be alive. It was like an algebraic equation whose variables I couldn’t keep straight. Even if I couldn’t reclaim her, if I ended up with him, I might somehow become her—I could have a version of her life, her newly valuable, lost life.
One night, we went out to celebrate my birthday; unable to bear the odd intensity of my feelings, I said to him, after we’d gone to my apartment, that perhaps this was not the time to be seeing each other. I was in a strange place; I didn’t want him to pity me or to be afraid to call things off if he wasn’t interested. Inwardly I was hoping that he would assure me he wanted to be with me. And he did. Then he lifted me in the air and hugged me, and gave me a birthday present.
After this, he pretty much vanished. When I called, he didn’t call back. Weeks passed. A few weeks later, he phoned to say he would be coming to the memorial service we were holding for my mother. At the service itself, he acted odd, avoiding me at the reception. Leaving early, he said, “We should talk.” I raised an eyebrow, and he said, “I didn’t mean it like that, I just meant I had to apologize for not calling sooner.” But he never called.
You motherfucker, I thought. My mother died. Now you’re going to make it feel like you died, too—like everything I touch will disappear.
This second vanishing of someone I loved haunted me; it seemed so strangely symbolic.
I began to wonder if I had invented it. I began, too, to have dreams that he called to explain what had happened, why he had disappeared; in them, I experienced a curiously intense sense of relief.
It didn’t occur to me at the time that these dreams were really about my mother, concocted, in the strange logic of the dreaming brain, to continue to make me think some reunion was possible. Later I read that the bereaved often focus on the first loss they ever endured rather than the loss they’d just suffered. I found that to be true. M., M., I would pine, lying in bed at night, or taking a bath.
In February, there was a two-day snowstorm in New York. For hours I lay on my couch, reading, watching the snow drift down through the large elm outside, wondering what had happened to M., the sky going gray, then eerie violet, the night breaking around us, snow like flakes of ash. A white mantle covered trees, cars, lintels, and windows. It was like one of grief’s moods: melancholic; estranged from the normal; in touch with the longing that reminds us that we are being-toward-death, as Heidegger puts it. Loss is our atmosphere; we, like the snow, are always falling toward the ground, and most of the time we forget it.
But grief left me perhaps too aware of the transience of everything. In its heightened moments I revered the world—light gracing the corner of a building, the wind on the beach. At other times, the awareness that everything disappears was nightmarish. On the second night of the blizzard, I slept restlessly, waking at three a.m. in a cold sweat, my heart racing. I had dreamed that I was walking up and down a dirt road overhung by ancient elms, dashing from the grasp of wraiths that were pursuing me, trying to make me one of them. The wraiths were evil, and it was my job to walk up and down the road and their job to envelop me. I couldn’t sleep afterward; sometimes you can’t make it better even with the lights on. It was hard in these
moments to wake up utterly alone, to realize that both my marriage and my mother were truly gone.
ONE NIGHT, I was talking to my father on the phone when he mentioned a “loss of confidence” that we had all experienced. I asked him what he meant. I’d felt strangely off-balance and insecure since my mother died, but I’d always been nervous, especially compared with my brothers, and I was in the midst of reconstituting my life as a single person whose friends were mostly married and having babies. “Your mother is not there,” he explained. “And we are dealing with her absence. It makes us feel, I think, a loss of confidence—a general loss, an uncertainty about what we can rely on.”
I counted it as lucky that I did not have to work full-time in the first months after my mother’s death. But helping launch the new Web magazine was intense work and demanded a level of focus that was beyond me. In the past, I had been good at keeping track of details, but now I couldn’t. Often it took all my energy simply to get to the office, and at meetings I found it hard to concentrate. Instead, my brain ran through my mother’s last days over and over. I intensely wanted to write down the story of her death or tell it, over and over, to friends; I read and reread the journal I’d kept during her illness.
I wasn’t sure why, except that the habit of writing things down to understand them had been planted in me by her. When I was five, she gave me a red corduroy–covered notebook for Christmas. I sat in my floral nightgown turning the blank pages, wondering what on earth I was supposed to do with it.
The Long Goodbye Page 10
