MEMOIR: The Long Goodbye: A Memoir of Grief,By Meghan O'Rourke, Virago, 297pp. £14.99
MEGHAN O'ROURKE was 32 when she lost her mother to metastatic colorectal cancer. It was Christmas Day, 2008. Barbara was 55 years old. O'Rourke's memoir, The Long Goodbye, is part love letter to her mother, part mapping of both the universal condition that is grief and its "exquisitely personal transactions" – what CS Lewis called "the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace" that is lost when a loved one dies.
Barbara and Paul O’Rourke were teachers and school administrators who had married when she was just 17 and he 23. Barbara was “tall, fizzy, athletic”, a practical woman who loved children and was possessed of a “calm vibrancy” and a “clear compass”. She and Paul had three children who enjoyed an apparently idyllic upbringing: “The days seemed created for our worship,” O’Rourke writes.
By the time she was in her 20s, Meghan O'Rourke was already highly accomplished. One of the youngest editors in the history of the New Yorker, she has since served as culture editor and literary critic for Slateand poetry editor for the Paris Review. She has published two poetry collections, Onceand Halflife, and the blend of the lyrical and the journalistic, the personal and the public, shapes this beautifully wrought memoir.
“For hours I lay on my couch,” O’Rourke writes, “reading, watching the snow drift down through the large elm outside . . . the sky going grey, 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 . . .”.
O’Rourke tracks her responses – and to a lesser extent, those of her father and brothers – to the loss, calling herself as “a lucky person whose life was . . . touched by the ineluctably real for the first time”.
The ineluctably real is the painful fact of impermanence, which she tries to battle first by marrying during her mother’s illness. “I had gotten married in some way to signal my faith in the future . . . Once it became clear that our marriage would not save [my mother], I found myself fleeing it.”
The marriage quickly fell apart and ended in divorce, though O'Rourke and James Surowiecki, a financial columnist at the the New Yorker, have since reunited. She then left her job and began an affair with a man who lived across the country, believing that if she changed everything, she could change the inevitable, too.
The death of a loved one may, perhaps, be harder to bear for those who don’t believe in an afterlife: “a secular mind searching for its lost love” has little idea where to look and an underlying suspicion that any consolations are contrived.
Meanwhile, the “brutally physiological” elements of mourning are no less present – the increase in stress hormones, the sleep and appetite disruptions, the weakening of the immune system, the palpitations, difficulty breathing, auditory or visual hallucinations – nor is grief any less obsessive: “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”.
Although O’Rourke had many of the signs of depression, she recognised an interesting difference between this grief and depressions she’d suffered in the past. Now, the world appeared to her in “heightened, shimmering outlines, like a mirage. At times it seemed excruciatingly beautiful, a place I never wanted to leave”.
In exploring grief in its wider elements, she calls on Shakespeare, Freud, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, CS Lewis's classic A Grief Observedand the myth of Orpheus, as well as on the work of anthropologists, historians and sociologists. She traces the shift from public and communal mourning to "the privatisation of grief", pointing to a combination of forces and developments, including world wars (communities were overwhelmed by the sheer number of dead, rendering ritualised mourning for individuals difficult to sustain) and the rise of psychoanalysis, with its focus on individual experience.
This move away from shared cultural rituals has taken a toll not only on mourners but on those who would be a comfort. Without meaningful conventions, friends are often unsure what is expected of them, while those in mourning have the sense that they are "expected to performgrief palatably". In America, O'Rourke writes, grief that lasts longer than a few weeks is often considered self-indulgent. She finds herself longing for rituals that could indicate not only that one is in mourning, but that would provide nonpsychological, and non-discursive, ways of expressing and commemorating loss, ways of showing grief rather than telling it.
Throughout The Long Goodbye, memories are interspersed like photographs. They illustrate the life O'Rourke shared with her mother ("you don't just mourn the dead person, you mourn the person you got to be when the lost one was alive") and, as time passes, help her to return to the world of the living, to the point where she is able to recall that, as much as we loathe loss, death is the limiting horizon that gives life meaning. At one point, she quotes from a Paris Reviewinterview with American writer Marilynne Robinson:
“The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow.”
The literature of mourning, O’Rourke points out, is the enactment of a certain dilemma – we know we must let go of the dead, and yet that letting go cannot happen all at once.
That grieving takes time is certainly one of its universally experienced constituents. That the worst of it passes is a point on which the literature of mourning can reassure us. There is solace to be taken from The Long Goodbye, not only because of its delineation of the depths of loss and the possibility of emergence, but because of the beauty of the prose.
Molly McCloskey's latest book, the memoir Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brother,was published this summer by Penguin Ireland
