"The Long Goodbye" by Meghan O'Rourke [Book Review]

Image From Meghan O\’Rourke\’s Website

“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 sky: unimaginable.”
- Meghan O'Rourke, The Long Goodbye

Poet and critic Meghan O’Rourke’s first memoir is about living through her mother’s death in a culture that prefers to look the other way when it comes to mourning. The Long Goodbye examines what it’s like to have to navigate the dark, convoluted terrain of grief for the first time (O’Rourke was 32 when her mother died of colorectal cancer) without an instruction manual—or a mother. With an honest voice and poetic insight she leads us from being “irrevocably aware that the Person Who Loved Me Most in the World was about to be dead” through the aftermath of “acquainting yourself with the world again and again” in the wake of that person’s absence.

“We had no rules about what to do right after my mother had died. In fact, we were clueless.”

What began as a series of essays on Slate Magazine—O’Rourke was encouraged by her editor to write about grief in her column—took on the eventual shape of a full-length memoir that offers another perspective of grief in a conversation O’Rourke found, when turning to literature for comfort and guidance, surprisingly lacking. She read extensively: Shakespeare (Hamlet, in particular), Emily Dickinson, C.S. Lewis, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, and others, but she still didn’t find the answers she was looking for. It wasn’t until O’Rourke put down the books and started writing her own story that she began to understand how to manage grief.

“We tend to do it [mourn] alone, in the middle of the night…In our culture of display, the sadness of grief is largely silent.”

While writing this book was not therapy for O’Rourke,—she is an artist, a published poet—she turned to words, as Montaigne once wrote of himself, “to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind—and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.” Through the writing process, O’Rourke is able to step back and examine grief objectively: “Dying is bureaucratic and fluorescent,” while at the same time, discover things about herself: “And so as I write this, I am hit by a feeling of error, a sense that during my twenties, when I thought she never quite understood me, it was I who saw her incompletely.” Her literary eye sees coincidence in the ordinary, the way people do when they're searching for meaning in random events, such as the similarity O’Rourke finds in the words “unmoored” and “unmothered.”

Perhaps that’s the appeal of reading memoir, being able to glimpse this journey into the unknown, the author’s detached intellectualizing, the desperate bargaining, the nonlinear memories, and the eventual acceptance. We read memoirs in order to live vicariously through a stranger (and if we’re lucky, an eloquent and insightful stranger), while still being safe in our own bodies. (The difference between reading a memoir like O’Rourke’s and, say, a memoir about growing up in the Sudan is that while the latter is far removed from reality for most of us, losing someone, granted we live long enough, is inevitable). We read memoirs for the same reason O’Rourke found solace in C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed; though she was raised an Atheist she identified most with Lewis because she could relate to his trajectory of grief. We read memoirs to find answers to the often unanswerable.

And sometimes we read memoirs for insight into the future. Perhaps it’s masochistic, but there’s something cathartic about tasting the bitterness that is yet to come, something about that small taste that keeps us focused on what is important, in the here and now.

Because it was not just the loss of her mother O’Rourke suffered. Grieving a parent’s death is about reliving your childhood and then letting it go, thus reassessing your place in the world or “finding a new normal.” In an interview, O’Rourke said, “I didn’t want The Long Goodbye merely to be an account of suffering, or an account that pretended it was importantly simply because I had suffered. Grief isn’t a disease, or a niche. It connects deeply to all the issues all of us deal with all the time confronting mortality, decisions about how we want to live our lives. In this sense I think the book is in many ways about how to live.”

Meghan O'Rourke: [official]