Nothing prepared me for her loss, even knowing she would die — she had been ill for more than two years. A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. Waking up without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable.
....Throughout this time, I experienced an acute nostalgia, a longing for a lost time that was so intense I thought it might split me in two, like a tree hit by lightning. I was flooded by memories — a submersion that threatened to overwhelm me, water coming up around my branches, rising higher. I yearned for the sound of her voice saying my name....
I was surprised by how physical grief’s toll was....Medication might have helped, of course, and there were times when I thought: ‘Just give me something to take the pain away.’
I kept coming back to a simple fact: my pain was caused by the absence of my mother. Did I want to deny this? Did I want to take something to make it go away? No. Grief is common. We know it exists all around us. But experiencing it made me suddenly aware of how difficult it is to confront head-on. When we do, it’s usually in the form of self-help: we want to heal our grief. We’ve subscribed to the belief (or pretence) that it happens in five easy stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
Though we’ve become open about everything from incest to sex addiction, grief remains taboo. In our culture of display, the sadness of death is largely silent....
Mainly, I thought: ‘My mother is dead, and I want her back.’ A mother is a story with no beginning; that is what defines her. What are you to do when the story ends?
...After a loss, you have to learn to believe a loved one is dead. It doesn’t come naturally....
But I still believed she was coming back. Deep down, I felt she would, through some effort of mind, reconstitute herself and appear to me, even as a ghostly form. Grief is not linear, it turns out; it comes in waves, which ebb and subside at unexpected moments.People kept saying: ‘It gets better after a year.’ And it did in one sense: I could go for days without thinking too much about the fact someone I still loved as dearly was dead. But to expect grief to ‘heal’ is to imagine it is possible to stop loving, to reconcile yourself to the fact the loved one is gone. Living with grief, I came to think, is like being a tree confronted with an obstacle. You have to grow around it; your path is shaped by it.
I still think about my mother every day, but on most days the grief is lighter, less oppressive. With my mother’s death the person who brought me into the world left it, a door closing behind her, a line of knowledge binding her body to mine in the old ways. Who else contained me, felt me kick, nursed me? She crosses my mind like an exotic bird flying past the edge of your eye: startling, luminous, lovely, gone.
--Meghan O'Rourke, U.K. Daily Mail, 21 August 2011. Excerpt from her book The Long Goodbye (publ. Virago 2011)
