This passage may be the first modern description of the psychological process, familiar to us all, of silencing our fear and distancing ourselves through repression.
Ivan Ilyich’s death is also “silent”—and modern—in another sense: everyone knows he is dying and no one will acknowledge it. They treat him like a child, infantilizing him. This repression makes him angry:Ivan Ilyich’s chief torment was the lie—the lie that was for some reason acknowledged by all—that he was only ill and was not dying, and that he only needed to keep calm and undergo treatment, and that something very good would come of it.
In the past, ministering to the dying was an important, even cherished part of life. But attitudes toward caretaking, too, have shifted. As the extended family fell apart—and as dying became something to be silenced rather than something holy and even transcendent—people began to fear that their deaths might be “burdensome.” One of the most upsetting facts I’ve come across since my mother’s death was in a 2004 survey about end-of-life attitudes among Nebraskans. In the section titled “Very Important Aspects of Dealing with or Thinking About Dying,” “not being a burden” was a concern of eighty-three percent of those surveyed. Our squeamishness about death has impoverished the way we die, it would seem. The ill body gives the lie to our repression of death; it exposes the lie that medicine will offer a solution to the body, dissolving it, one happy day, into pure spirit, or allowing us to survive as a brain in a jar.
I KEPT REMEMBERING days I’d forgotten. One summer, when I was eight, my father took Liam and me fishing on Moosehead Lake in Maine, where we went canoe camping sometimes. It was a hazy and hot day. We had practiced casting on the shore. I asked my father why he fly-fished instead of using a regular rod like ours and he said it was because flies didn’t hurt the fish. You could catch a fish with a fly and throw it back. I liked to study the flies in his kit with their bright green threads. They were almost toys. But the barb on the end of our lines would likely go through the fish’s throat and kill it one way or another.
By the time we got in the canoe and paddled out, the lake was getting flat and the sun was low in the sky by the bluish pines. We were going where the fish were, and I was wondering how I could have let this happen. I didn’t want to fish. I had wanted to do it only because it was what my father did. But he fished in a way that didn’t hurt the fish. I trailed my hand in the water and let the brown and green plants slide past. The sky was bright. Liam was excited but I was quiet and for once didn’t care to compete. “What’s wrong, Meg? Do you need help?” my father said. No, I said, and told them I was going to watch. I sat quietly. I was ashamed for wanting something without understanding what wanting it meant. I sat quietly and looked at the nesting loons, eager to get back to shore.
As I’ve mourned, I have been surprised by how few people asked what to me is the most pressing question of all: Where do you think the dead go? What happens to the dead? Over fifteen months only two people, both of them men I had just met, asked me this question. In the past, it would have been clear to each of us what the other believed. But in this world we may not know what our peers and friends think about this most pressing of questions. Many nonreligious people, I’ve found, believe that there is some kind of after-existence. Some religious people make it clear that they don’t know what to believe the afterlife will be like. A “transcendental, psychedelic trip,” one of the men, a regular churchgoer with a penchant for drugs, said he was hoping it might be. Even the spiritually minded are uncertain about the contours of life after death. And most of us remain attached to the pleasures of this world: the calling of the loons at dusk, the soothing wind over a lake.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
{reevaluation}
In July, I went to Paris to give a poetry reading. I spent the first two days in a jet-lagged daze, afraid to leave my hotel. The room was dirty and cold, and ants congregated around the minibar. I closed the curtains and slept through the morning and afternoon. I woke, exhausted. I was supposed to read in two hours. I felt leaden. I have no idea how to continue, I thought, in bewilderment. It will never get better. “I’m not mourning. I’m suffering,” the French theorist Roland Barthes wrote after his mother died. Yet I was ashamed of my pain; it seemed abnormal.
When I’d been in the airport, waiting for my plane, my friend Vanessa had called me. “You’ve been handling this with grace,” she said, kindly. “You deserve to have some fun.”
Now I was stupid with anger at myself for thinking I was handling anything well. It just meant I was hiding everything.
I walked up the rue des Saints-Pères and went to Café de Flore to order a hard-boiled egg and a café crème. The waiter asked if I liked croissants. Yes, I said, uncertainly. He brought two croissants. I looked at them. They looked like alien maggots. I drank the café crème, spooning sugar in. It was sweet and comforting. Finally I got in a taxi and went to the reading. The building was locked, and I couldn’t figure out how to get in. I began to panic, tears rising to my eyes. Finally, two men approached and pressed a buzzer I hadn’t seen, and the door opened; I followed them, chagrined at my lack of inner resources. The rest of the world had its feet on the ground. I didn’t even notice the buttons you were supposed to press. Just press the buttons, I told myself.
That night, I slept quietly for the first time since arriving. The next day, I made myself get up early and go to the Musée d’Orsay.
The only other time I’d visited Paris I had been with my mother, who’d been chaperoning a school trip. Fresh out of college, I tagged along. We shared a hotel room. I remember being disturbed by our proximity. Paris was the home of the exiles—where writers went to be writers, wild and narcotic and alone. Instead, here I lay, listening to my mother breathe asthmatically.
My most vivid memory was our visit to the Musée d’Orsay, where she marveled at Monet’s The Magpie, which neither of us had ever seen. The painting depicts a snowy field by a barn and a single magpie in the midst of the barren stillness. Monet painted relatively few snowscapes. He was more interested in the summer’s wildly various light than in the equalizing neutrality of winter’s. The tones of The Magpie are cool and monotonous—whites, browns, grays, yellows. But to the left, the eye notices a startling dab of black and focuses to see a magpie sitting on the fence. The bird is the only black in the painting. It is unusual; most paintings, if you look closely, rely heavily on black for shadows and depth. The landscape organizes itself around this dab, once you’ve noticed it.
My mother was fascinated. “Do you see how there is no black?” she said to me.
“I do,” I said.
“It changes everything,” she said. “It is amazing to me how such a simple thing could change everything.”
And we were very happy standing there.
The mourner’s mind is superstitious, looking for signs and wonders. At the museum once again, I secretly felt that if I found The Magpie, my mother would be resurrected beside me to look at it once more, like a Star Wars hologram recording you could play over and over. But the physical space did not cooperate: the paintings were hung on different walls, in different rooms, and I couldn’t find it. Tired, I started for the exit. Looking at the floor map, I saw I’d missed a room holding paintings by Manet and Monet on the first floor. I climbed past the sculptures toward the room. And there it was.
In a spring landscape, you might never notice the magpie, but in this wintry image it stands out. There is an exaggerated sense of solitude; the bird is the only sign of life in all the stillness. Most Impressionist landscapes were painted “en plein air,” with an emphasis on capturing the moment in which they were made. But the art historian Charles S. Moffett points out that The Magpie couldn’t have been painted entirely this way. It is a painting from memory, even though it appears to capture a specific moment: the shadows striking the snow just so. The painting summoned absence—and yet as a piece of art it was entirely present. There was something witchy about it. My mother was that winter light,
it occurred to me—reconstituted only in memory. And the little bird on the gate, perched in quietude, what was that? I suppose you could see it as hope: a sign of continuity. Later I discovered that the gift shop sells more postcards of The Magpie than of any other painting in the museum. People flock to Starry Night, but they take The Magpie home with them. Months afterward, I went into my mother’s office—left mainly as she’d had it—to find some batteries. There, on the shelf to the left, were her books—A Guide to Great Gingerbread ; Yoga and You—and photos of her dancing with my brothers. In the middle stood a postcard of The Magpie. I hadn’t even known. She had it, I said, right by her desk.
On my last Sunday in Paris, I went to Notre Dame and lit a votive candle for my mother, then sat as they began the Vespers service. I know you would hate this, I whispered to her. But I don’t know what else to do. I want to remember you. And the last time I was here we came here together. And you marveled at the height of the ceiling and the beauty of stained glass. You wanted to look at old things before you died and this is old.
The bells rang for Vespers, and I listened to the music, tears running down my face.
When I returned to my hotel a light rain was falling. I was restless so I went back out, murmuring to the concierge, “Be back soon,” as if he were my father, then wandered past the gay bars to an old gelato place as the rain fell on me.
I thought I was prepared for my mother’s death.
I knew it would happen.
Yet the reality of her being dead was so different from her death.
I WENT to New Hampshire for four weeks that reminded me of my childhood summers. I read and wrote all day, swam in the afternoons, and spent the nights eating and talking late into the dark. For the first sustained period, I felt my old self plump up and the shadows shrink.
Then my father called me on a Friday night in July, as I was studying the way the setting sun had turned the clouds pink against the light-blue sky. He sounded distraught. “Meg, I wanted to tell you that Ringo isn’t doing so well,” he said. “He’s standing around, panting, and I can’t get him to eat much. And I have to go to this wedding tomorrow, and I have never done something like that without your mother. She was always the one who could get me out the door.”
I told him that he should do whatever felt comfortable, that everyone would understand. He exhaled and said, “I’m just worried about Ringo. I was talking to Eamon, and he said it seems that Ringo has changed an enormous amount since Mom died. It’s true. Some nights I go outside and Ringo is standing on the driveway, just standing there, looking out, like he is waiting for someone, searching for them.”
There was not much I could say to comfort him. I had the distinct sense that Ringo was going to die soon. When I had stopped at my dad’s on my way to New Hampshire, I’d seen Ringo and thought: It’s going to happen any day. Diana and I had been throwing balls for Ringo and her dog, Ajax, and he came trotting back to us at an odd angle. “He looks like a drunken sailor!” Diana laughed.
Ringo had been a present for Eamon when he was a boy. But my mother was the real animal lover in our family. She had wanted to be a vet when she was young. She’d always been the one to feed our dogs and groom them and train them. She took Ringo to obedience classes; sweet-tempered by nature, he became the gentlest dog I’d ever spent time with. He was afraid of small spaces under furniture. My mother used to love to watch him look at a ball under a chair and whine.
You big baby, she would say. You big baby. What are you doing? Get it. Get the ball!
And sometimes, after standing there for minutes looking at the tennis ball, he would. Then he would look up at her as if he was proud.
“Anyway, I got a different kind of food,” my dad said, “and when I gave it to him, he ate it quickly, like he was starving. I just have to pay attention. Ringo is going on twelve. Big dogs get sick when they get that old. But it makes you feel that you are up against the inevitability of things. After what we went through this winter, it makes you feel you are up against the inevitability of things.”
His voice broke. “I have this crazy feeling of ‘What can I do?’ Because I went through this before, and the outcome was one I was not happy with. I did what I could, everything I could, and the outcome was really not an outcome I’m happy with.”
He paused. I heard him breathe in.
“When are the gods going to stop?”
Two days later he called back.
“I had to put Ringo to sleep,” he said. His voice was hoarse.
He’d taken the dog to the vet for a set of tests, and one came back showing that Ringo had a tumor in his chest. “They could have operated, but he would have been in extreme discomfort and pain afterward,” my father said. He was almost in tears. “I couldn’t put him through more.”
At first I thought Ringo represented my mother to my father, and that in Ringo’s sickness my father was reliving my mother’s—finding better food, adjusting medicines. But now it seemed to me that he identified with Ringo. We were all talking about ourselves. We are ailing. We lurch like drunken sailors even when we come together for a birthday or a holiday.
YOU REMEMBER her in flashes. The flashes hurt. They light up your stomach. Then you breathe, look out again.
At a party, you say my dead mother. You explain, She died at Christmas.
Christmas? Ohh . . . comes the pitying response.
Yes.
It hurts. Then you explain: But it’s good. We can all be together if we want to. We will never forget this is the day our mother died.
You are learning the narrative. You are establishing the catechism, responses to the questions:A: She was sick for two years.
A: Yes, cancer.
A: She died on Christmas Day.
A: We were all with her.
A: She was young—I mean, she was relatively young , fifty-five.
A: She was a teacher and then an administrator.
A: She grew up in New Jersey.
A: My father is OK.
A: My brothers are doing OK. [Pause] It is very hard for all of us.
A: No, that’s OK.
And you are thinking in some chamber inside your heart: Fuck, fuck, fuck. How dare you turn pain to reason?
In those moments I want to hurt, like an outraged child in a sulk. But quickly a day passes and I’ve enjoyed myself in the sun, or at dinner, having a glass of wine, talking to friends, reading, talking, not thinking about death.
Yesterday, while I was brushing my teeth, I raised my face to the mirror and unexpectedly saw myself. And I thought: I am becoming someone whose mother is dead.
Then a cool sadness flooded me. It was true. I was getting used to her being dead. My mother was gone. And I: letting her go.
Then, one morning in New Hampshire, I see a river moving lazily in the sun and I start to cry, because the water is moving so fast. I am doing laundry with two older women and they talk about how hard it is to buy gifts for your mother and I get a lump in my throat and excuse myself to get detergent. I am always wanting either to hide away or to plunge into a “systematic derangement of the senses,” as Rimbaud would have it. I drive too fast. When running, I cross the street in front of cars. With other people, with strangers, I count the hours until I can go be alone and get back to my secret preoccupation, my romance with my lost mother. This is what I need to do, remember her, puzzle over her, understand the difference between us. I trust that one day I’ll stop needing to do this.
One night I am lying in bed in my room in a creaky old house. It is a warm summer night. Mosquitoes buzz around me. The light is on, I have been reading Remembrance of Things Past, I nod off and wake up. I have a profound, spreading sense that I have been here in this room before. I have felt this pain before. I have seen this very light, I have felt this very temperature, I have known this very feeling of loneliness—except this time I know it is part of the pattern, I am at one with the universe, everything is interconnected. I feel an extreme peace. I am OK. My mo
ther is there. I am in a vision of the universe I love. Nothing need be disturbed, and I could—perhaps I should—die now and all would be well. It is like a waking dream and for a second I have the distinct sense of a voice telling me this is right, it is the moment, I could die, all is well, and this is the moment to end on. The “world” seems very far away. Furniture and its edges; light; all seems in retreat, disposable.
AFTER A LOSS, you have to learn to believe the dead one is dead. It doesn’t come naturally. One July day, I went for a swim in Willard Pond, now an Audubon preserve, where there is a family of nesting loons. I’d spent time reading in the sun, and my arms were getting brown. I had gained weight in the months after my mother died—I kept eating ice cream and cereal late at night when I missed her—but for once I wasn’t totally unhappy about the feeling of extra flesh, detecting in the weight a comforting, maternal presence, as if I were mothering my own body.
She would like this pond, I thought. So today I’ll go there for her. Driving out, because driving was still so new to me, I imagined who she was when she was thirty-three, what the experience of those summers in Vermont was like for her. I realized she would have had two kids in tow (my brother and me) and was about to become pregnant with her third. I would have been ten. She would, on an afternoon like today, have been driving us down to the covered bridge to swim. I wondered if perhaps she sometimes felt shy, exploring new places with two children and no other adults around—a question I’d never asked myself before. It was because I felt shy going by myself to swim. And then I thought, having children means you have a clear reason for being wherever you are in the summer—at the beach, at the store. There we would be, tugging at her hands, saying, “Mom, Mom—did you see? There was a frog on that rock.” And she would tease and say, “A frog? No, you didn’t see a frog.” And we would point and she would pretend not to see and then she would dive into the freezing water, and swim against the current, goofing around with us.
The Long Goodbye Page 15
