Preparation

I caught myself (again) last night, sort of studying what it will be like when Ma dies. It's a strange impulse, in a way, but one I got from her. To understand things I attack them head on, research them, read about them and then read about them again.  And then I write about all of it, of course. 

Right now, I'm reading The Long Goodbye, by Meghan O'Rourke, a gal I sort of hated from the get go, given her prowess in the literary world since she was 26, as an editor of Slate and an author of a well-reviewed book of poems. Plus, she beat me to the punch, with the story of the young-ish mother dying, leaving a devastated daughter in the wake.  Crass as that may sound, one of the only ways I feel like I can survive her death is to figure out how to make it into something else with my writing, whether it be fiction or non, and sometimes it feels like each piece of the literary pie is being sliced thinner all the time, whether it be technology or someone getting there first.

At any rate, despite some really beautiful moments, at the onset, this book did not (as Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Ford and the New York Times promised me) make me weep due to both content and the beauty of the writing - the opposite really, as I found myself feeling really sorry for this woman who didn't really seem to be all that close to her mother in many ways, and I'm wondering if that is at the heart of the book, although the writer herself doesn't really go there. At any rate, the episodes and family moments described weren't all that gripping to me, and neither were the people (sorry Meghan!) - they just didn't really come to life to me on the page in the beginning, least of all, her mother.  It was only after the mother was gone that the book began to pick up steam for me, interspersed as it was with strange dreams, hallucinations and Meghan's own desperate search to understand what grief was, exactly, and when exactly she would be able to be free of it, or at least given a reprieve.  This, I related to - that sense if she could only understand and master it,  it wouldn't continue to impact her anymore than it already had. From there on in, Meghan weaves scenes and vignettes in with her own research into grief that bring the family to life in a way her description of her mother's decline simply didn't.

I guess this is why the book has gotten such rave reviews, such a young mother, such a young writer willing to dive headfirst into grief and wrestle with it; (she's 32, dammit!) yet I was continually struck with the lack of honest dialogue that occurred between she and her mother, and was reminded again of how lucky I am to have the mother I do.  I've never had to hide who I was from her, and vice versa, and sometimes the honesty was too much (from both sides) but in the end, we can sit here and talk about her dying, what makes us both sad about that specifically, but she can leave this world with both of us knowing that nothing is left unsaid.

I guess (in the literary world) it would be a better story if my mother had been a stranger to me before this, or at least distant and somewhat misunderstood, but there is no mystery for me to uncover. Honesty and transparency has always been her way of living life, and since she worked so hard trying to undo the dysfunction of her childhood by raising my sister and me in a wholly different way, we grew up highly aware of who she was and why she did the things she did. I have long understood the struggle it was for her to become the person she has, how difficult it was to find her true self underneath the projections of oppressive parents and a difficult first marriage. If anything,  I have only seen her come more fully into that in the last two years, and am lucky that this fucking brain tumor hasn't taken away the essence of who she is in any way, shape or form.

I was about 150 pages into The Long Goodbye (a damn good title, something else that irked me) sort of observing Meghan's struggle from a distance, almost clinically, studying how she wrote about certain emotions, memories and feelings, taking lots of mental notes, when suddenly, I had to put the book down. I think it was after reading a line about the difference between her mother dying and her mother being dead that I remembered, Holy Shit, I am not going to get to skip any of this, and no matter what happens, I will be just as unhinged and confused, and fucked, really, when it happens. I tell myself differently all the time, that these two years have given us time to prepare, to anticipate, that her being paralyzed reminds us every day of what's happening, and that given everything, including living with my parents for the last 18 months, I will probably be the most prepared (and equipped, of course) person on the planet for her death.  Meghan had two years of cancer with her mother too, and she indicates plainly that it did fuck all, if any, good in terms of preparation.

My point? I'm not sure, exactly.  Only that I will probably pick up the book again, and finish it, because however futile, I want to understand what the inconceivable might look like.  This too, I got from my mother - she has been studying death and dying her entire life, and has a room full of books to show for it.  She was and is endlessly fascinated by death (even if she's not too keen on doing it right this second), it was her way of trying to understand losing a younger sister to SIDS at three days old, when my mother was 3. She wanted to know where her sister went, and for the last 40 years, has been trying to wrap her mind around what is essentially unknowable to any of us.

That might be the thing I will miss the most about her; how much she understands this strange urge in me to read, research and master what is happening, and moreover, that I want to write about it, that I am taking time away from her to mold this story into something understandable, a novel-ish kind of thing that I'm writing at the moment. This is not a wholly normal urge, I understand, but it's what a writer does, and right now it is giving me this tiny parallel universe to slide into, where I get to make the story my own.  I can put words in people's mouths, make them behave better or worse than they actually have,and  expand the small quietness of what my family has been living in the last few years into words spread wide across the page.  The bitch of it, of course, is that the mother still dies in the story.  It can't be any other way.