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Summary
Summary
From one of America's foremost young literary voices, a transcendent portrait of the unbearable anguish of grief and the enduring power of familial love.
What does it mean to mourn today, in a culture that has largely set aside rituals that acknowledge grief? After her mother died of cancer at the age of fifty-five, Meghan O'Rourke found that nothing had prepared her for the intensity of her sorrow. In the first anguished days, she began to create a record of her interior life as a mourner, trying to capture the paradox of grief-its monumental agony and microscopic intimacies-an endeavor that ultimately bloomed into a profound look at how caring for her mother during her illness changed and strengthened their bond.
O'Rourke's story is one of a life gone off the rails, of how watching her mother's illness-and separating from her husband-left her fundamentally altered. But it is also one of resilience, as she observes her family persevere even in the face of immeasurable loss.
With lyricism and unswerving candor, The Long Goodbye conveys the fleeting moments of joy that make up a life, and the way memory can lead us out of the jagged darkness of loss. Effortlessly blending research and reflection, the personal and the universal, it is not only an exceptional memoir, but a necessary one.
Author Notes
Meghan O'Rourke is the author of the poetry collections Once and Halflife . She is a cultural critic for Slate , and her essays and poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this eloquent, somber memoir about the death of her mother and grieving aftermath, poet and journalist O'Rourke (Halflife) ponders the eternal human question: how do we live with the knowledge that we will one day die? O'Rourke's mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer on Christmas day 2008; the headmaster of a Westport, Conn., private school, she was only 55 years old, and left a stricken husband, two sons, and daughter O'Rourke, the eldest sibling. O'Rourke had shuttled back and forth from her life in Brooklyn and then job at Slate over the preceding year to care for her increasingly debilitated mother. The two were extremely close, and the shock of her mother's illness devastated the whole family (the author married her longtime boyfriend shortly after the Stage 4 diagnosis, then separated just as quickly). Over the last months, O'Rourke was bracing herself, "preparing" for her mother's death, by reading everything she could during the dizzying rounds of doctors' and hospital visits, until the family could take their mother home to die in a heavily medicated peace. Anxious by nature, secretive, often emotionally brittle, O'Rourke grew acutely sensitive to her mother's changing states over the last months, desperate for a sign of her mother's love to carry her through the months of bereavement. O'Rourke heals herself in this pensive, cerebral work, moving from intense anguish and nostalgia to finding solace in dreams, sex, and the comforting words of other authors. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Slate's O'Rourke conveys the tectonic shift that accompanies the death of a parent with a rare elegance and poignancy that touches the soul. From the Taser-like shock of her still-young mother's cancer diagnosis through her chemotherapy, brief remission, and death at just 55, O'Rourke's grief is an open wound. No matter the length and bitter reality of her mother's illness, it is clear that O'Rourke remained unprepared for the impact of her death. But beyond the depiction of her personal grief, this is the story of a family accustomed to taking their love and interconnectedness for granted. The raw feelings, the inevitable self-pity over each person's own loss, and their futile wishes to somehow make Mother's last days not be her last days will likely feel all too close to home for many who have suffered similarly. And yet, accompanying O'Rourke on this trek through her valley of grief and seeing how she flounders in the midst of a culture that offers scant support for mourners provides a kind of comfort that only a kindred spirit (who can write fantastically well) can. Every tear-stained page is not a road map, but rather a lovely gift from a fellow traveler.--Chavez, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
In this memoir, Meghan O'Rourke grieves for her mother. THE Christmas that Meghan O'Rourke was 5, her mother gave her a journal - a whole world of blank pages, puzzling to the child but not to the mother. Barbara O'Rourke explained to her daughter that the book was a place for her to put her thoughts: "You'd write something like 'Today I saw a woman with purple hair crossing Montague Street.'" Purple hair! For Meghan O'Rourke, who would grow up to be a poet and professional thought-putter, it was a revelatory instruction: that the world was a thrilling place, that it might be her pleasure and prerogative to capture it in words. Appearing halfway through "The Long Goodbye," the moment also provides a glimpse of Barbara O'Rourke and her generous vision. She was a woman who loved fireflies and golden retrievers, a teacher and headmaster who didn't believe in God but who counted daily on the transcendent possibilities of art and laughter and purple-haired hope. Given a diagnosis of late-stage colorectal cancer when she was 53, she died less than three years later, on another Christmas Day, in 2008, leaving her husband and three children to make sense of a paler world without her. "The Long Goodbye" is O'Rourke's anguished, beautifully written chronicle of that passage, from the innocence of a relatively privileged life to the wider and more desolate country that great loss imposes. So there are two main characters in this story, a wisely determined balance that allows us to care for the mother as well as the narrator, rendered helpless in the wake of death's dominion. A poet and critic with a considerable résumé for her years (an acclaimed book of poems, "Halflife" as well as editorial stints at The New Yorker and The Paris Review), O'Rourke grew up in Brooklyn. Her father, an Egyptologist and classics teacher, and her mother, who had been his student, both taught for decades at the prestigious St. Ann's School. O'Rourke was 30 when she learned her mother was dying - when she realized that the "stealthy, quilled creature" of fear had taken up residence in her days and nights. "I know this may sound melodramatic," she writes at the start of her memoir, aware that the territory of grief in which she found herself is both cruel and commonplace. Still, the difference between acknowledging the inevitability of loss and actually experiencing it is a bit like seeing a photo of the moon before visiting there. "In the last year of her illness, I got to know my mother as never before," she writes. "Knowing that I was one of the lucky ones didn't make it much easier." As any poet or psychologist will tell you, memory is both the curse of grief and the eventual talisman against it; what at first seems unbearable becomes the succor that can outlast pain. Taking its narrative cues from the jagged path of O'Rourke's experience, "The Long Goodbye" begins and ends with the death of the mother - who made "a madrigal of quiet sounds" on the day she died, who kept her daughter close throughout the workaday horrors of her illness and told her she was not afraid to die. O'Rourke steeled herself through oncologist appointments and tumor-induced dementia and her father's heartbreaking efforts to stay functional; she took a dinner knife to her forearm one night in an effort to trump the psychic pain she was in. Believing with the lunacy of early grief, that she could stave off the inevitable if she flung herself far enough away from it, she married her longtime boyfriend, left him within months, quit a job, had an affair. These brush fires did dot spare her the greater calamity, which came on its own schedule, accompanied by death's usual mix of sacred and mundane. "Time does not obey our commands," O'Rourke realizes after a day of watching episodes of "Lost" at the hospital while her mother is in surgery. "You cannot make it holy just because it is disappearing." A cultural critic for Slate, O'Rourke wrote an autobiographical column there in the aftermath of her mother's death, much of it transformed into this narrative. This immediacy is reflected in the real-time portrayal of her experience, although a surfeit of detail sometimes threatens to muffle the story's power: the day-to-day panic, the bartering with some unknown god for a few more days of life, the well-intentioned fools who offer empty condolences. Unsparing in its description of the process of dying and the world that catapults past, "The Long Goodbye" hardly suggests that people - physicians, friends and family, the narrator herself - know how to behave in the face of death. One doctor, caught unawares by the metastases in Barbara O'Rourke's brain, announced to Meghan that this new turn was "fascinating"; O'Rourke argued with her mother's friend over who got to feed her, and fought with her father, who was near collapse, over the use of a car. Grief doesn't necessarily make you noble. Sometimes it just makes you crazy, or primitive with fear, and O'Rourke captures that emotional violence with elegant candor. "The Long Goodbye" also traces the second crossing that death mandates: the architecture of mourning that enables survivors to go on. In search of a different landscape, O'Rourke traveled west to the Mojave Desert. "I wanted to be reminded of how the numinous impinges on ordinary life," she writes. Nothing had prepared her for the physical goneness of her mother, or for the dearth of ritual and understanding that would acknowledge her loss. She immersed herself in the literature of grief - in Freud and Bowlby, poetry and "Hamlet," fiction and history and clinical works. Her crash course in bereavement study is synthesized here with equivocal results. That sangfroid doctor might consider it "fascinating," but I often found it a distraction from the glinting edge of O'Rourke's own story. What she learned from her research was not so much grim as bracing, articulated point-blank in her italicized notes: "There is no solace, and also, This has been going on a long time." O'Rourke's greatest amulet of course, will be the mother herself, classic and eternal, "the shell," as O'Rourke writes, "in which you divide and become a life." In Barbara O'Rourke's last days, Meghan tells her, weeping, "I'm going to miss you so much" - expecting tears and consolation in return. Instead her mother is still. "I know," she tells her, then says it again. This bare-bones scene reminded me of the young child who takes a painful fall and then wails for reassurance. You're O.K., the good-enough mother will say. You're O.K. "The Long Goodbye" is an elegiac depiction of a drama as old as life, wherein the mother's first job is to raise a daughter strong enough to outlast her. 'Time does not obey our commands. You cannot make it holy just because it is disappearing.' Gail Caldwell is the author of two memoirs, "Let's Take the Long Way Home" and "A Strong West Wind." She is the former chief book critic for The Boston Globe.
