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July 7, 2011

A Daughter's Grief Observed

Meghan O'Rourke's luminous The Long Goodbye traces the final months as her mother succumbs to cancer.

Rachel Stone

Meghan O’Rourke is best known as a literary and cultural critic, a contributor to Slate, and the onetime fiction editor at The New Yorker. But she is a poet first, as is clear from the opening pages of her new memoir, The Long Goodbye. A chronicle of the final months of her mother’s life and the months afterward, O’Rourke’s book is luminous; her words evoke her tremendous love for and grief over her mother with a grace that few writers can match:

Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. . . . A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without the sky: unimaginable.

O’Rourke’s reflections on what a mother means — and what her mother meant to her — are achingly sad in light of her loss, but no less a beautiful tribute to a mother who loved children, dogs, and life itself (“YOUR A GOOD MOM. YOUR A GOOD SEWER. HOW COME YOU ARE SO NICE,” [sic], O’Rourke wrote in a card to her mother at age 6), an Irish-Catholic schoolgirl turned atheist private-school headmaster, a stunningly beautiful, witty, warm, and intelligent woman until the day she breathed her last. She was at home on Christmas morning, her favorite day of the year, surrounded by her family, including Meghan, her two brothers, and their father.

As a writer and literary critic, O’Rourke was able to be with her mother as she was suffering from metastatic colorectal cancer, driving her to doctors' appointments and searching for drinks that wouldn’t irritate the dreaded chemo sores inside her mother’s mouth. She observes so keenly the things that many of us only sense regarding the process of dying: the endless buzzing and clicking of hospital machines; the strange power dynamics in hospitals — don’t ask too much, don’t know too much, defer to medical authority and medical ‘facts’; the sense that watching television is both a strange thing to do with one’s final hours and yet not so strange (“What the hell. What is she supposed to do, contemplate every moment with saintly beatitude?”); and the longing for “somewhere to put my grief.” She writes:

I was imagining a vessel for it: a long, shallow wooden bowl, irregularly shaped. I had the sense that if I could chant, or rend my clothes, or tear my hair, I could effect, create that vessel in the world. Five days after my mother died a man elbowed me on the subway and I felt bruised and angry; if I had been wearing mourning clothes, I furiously thought, he would have taken greater care.

Making that which is almost ineffable somehow visible is, of course, what art, poetry included, is so often about. T. S. Eliot famously regarded Hamlet as a dramatic flop because he felt that Shakespeare failed to sufficiently externalize whatever it was that was going on inside Hamlet’s grieving mind. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that O’Rourke was preoccupied with that particular play in the days immediately following her mother’s death. Hamlet is a young man grieving the death of his father, and he can neither understand nor be understood by those around him because of it. She observes that “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.”

O’Rourke read the Bible, too, and C. S. Lewis’s memoir of his wife’s death, A Grief Observed. Although she describes herself as the “child of atheists,” there is in this book a deep longing for something beyond this life, a sense of “otherness.” O’Rourke writes,

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?

O’Rourke’s keenly observed grief leads her inexorably toward questions like these; her longing for something like eternity, or at least, for her mother to "stay another night," is beautifully sad, resistant to all easy answers. In that way, the book is reminiscent of Ecclesiastes, which, though acknowledging a Creator, despairs at the certainty of suffering and death. Though some of us, finding hope in the promise secured in Christ’s resurrection, do not grieve without hope, we still grieve. This searching and beautiful memoir is a gift to the grieving, sure to become a classic among books Lewis’s, Kubler-Ross’s, and The Preacher’s, which help people both with and without faith understand the shape of loss.

Posted by Katelyn Beaty on July 7, 2011 10:03 AM

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