Read Online The Long Goodbye by Meghan O'Rourke - Free Book Online

those words, prefaced by her sharing a piece of her experience of what it was like for her to be in the world, meant much more than the same words in any other context. I recall clearly the sensation I had—a squeezing, falling one, a silly, encompassing flush of love. And also this: In that moment I could see her as more than my mother; I could see her as a daughter, a person who’d had to make her own way, who’d had to learn to speak in public, to command authority—things she did now with such ease you’d never guess that once they struck her nearly mute with fear.
    And so as I write this, I am hit by a feeling of error, a sense that during my twenties, when I thought my mother never quite understood me, it was I who saw her incompletely. I remember the times when she filled my Christmas stockings with the hand warmers sold in ski shops, so I could make it through the winter with warm fingers. (Who would do that for me today?) I took for granted so many of her seemingly casual qualities. The familiar old panic rises in my stomach. “Don’t worry about that, Meg,” Isabel tells me, when I say as much to her one night before my birthday. “It wasn’t your job to tell her she was a great mother. It was her job to be your mother.”
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    O F MY MANY ANXIETIES, the one I was most secretive about was my fear of death. It seemed impossible to confess. One cool summer day, curled up in my sleeping bag on the couch, reading an Agatha Christie mystery, I listened as my brother Liam, fiddling with the radio dial while my mother dealt a hand of Go Fish, turned to her and said, “I don’t want to die. Do you not want to die? What happens to us when we die?”
    And my mother put the cards down and said, slowly, “No, I don’t want to die. But I don’t know what happens to us when we die.”
    â€œIt’s scary,” he said.
    â€œYes, it is,” our mother said, calmly. “But it’s not going to happen to you for a long time.”
    I was nauseated and riveted: these were the words I wanted to say, and could not say—the comfort I wanted to seek in her, only her, and could not seek. Perhaps that is because I already felt that any comfort she could offer would be false. Dismayingly, this problem was one that she could not solve.

CHAPTER FOUR
    {anticipation}
    So much of dealing with a disease is waiting. Waiting for appointments, for tests, for “procedures.” And waiting, more broadly, for it —for the thing itself, for the other shoe to drop. Except in the waiting you keep forgetting that “it” will really happen—it’s more like a threat, an anxiety: Will my love love me forever? My mother couldn’t have her radiation surgery (called CyberKnife) on the nodules in her brain until after Thanksgiving. So we waited. Her confusion was getting worse. She couldn’t go to school and she couldn’t be alone.
    One day, my father drove to upstate New York to pick up Eamon from college. My brother had appealed his suspension, but the school had rejected it, which meant he had to come home. Our friend Diana was with my mother, and I came up to relieve her. Diana, one of my mother’s closest friends, had been my father’s student at Saint Ann’s many years earlier. She babysat Liam and me back when my parents used to go on “date night” every Tuesday. We liked these nights, because Diana was the funniest of all our babysitters; with her mellow and bemused approach to chaos, she reminded me a bit of our mom. After college, she became my mother’s assistant, when my mom was appointed head of the middle school; later, my mother promoted her to assistant head. They were a Laurel & Hardyish pair, always teasing and playing and joking. Now Diana regularly visited, to see my mom and to help out when my dad couldn’t be there.
    Diana was trying to make breakfast, but my mother couldn’t