“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—
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.
{a note on further reading}
I read many books and poems in the year a
fter 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.
Critical Studies and Nonfiction
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.
On the Psychology of Grief
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.
Studies
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.
Fiction, Poetry, and Drama
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.
Memoir
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 author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from the following:
“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.
ALSO BY MEGHAN O’ROURKE
Halflife: Poems
The Long Goodbye Page 22
