On thy cold grey stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
O, well for the fisherman’s boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!
Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.
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.
IN 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 e
ncouraged 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:TO MOM
I LOVE YOU.
I LOVE THE STORIES
YOU MAKE WITH ME.
I LIKE THE BED YOU
MADE FOR MY DOLL HOUSE.
I HAVE A GOOD TIME
WITH YOU. YOUR A GOOD MOM.
YOUR A GOOD SEWER.
HOW COME YOU ARE SO
NICE. AND HAPPY
BIRTHDAY.
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:We usually think of time as a river, a river like the Nile, with strong, swift current bearing us further and further away from what we have been and towards the time when we will be not at all. . . . But perhaps we should think of time as a deep, still pool rather than a fast-flowing river. . . . Instead of looking back at time, we could look down into it . . . and now again different features of the past—different sights and sounds and voices and dreams—would rise to the surface: rise and subside, and the deep pool would hold them all, so that nothing was lost and nothing ever went away.
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.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
{hasten slowly}
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.
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:From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. . . . Certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock. . . . There is a pattern hid behind the cotton wool.
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.
SITTING 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.
IT 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.
The Long Goodbye Page 21
