The Long Goodbye

The Long Goodbye

Meghan O'Rourke's memoir about the death of her mother, The Long Goodbye, is out this week. The book began as a series of essays for Slate, which we've republished below.

The other morning I looked at my BlackBerry and saw an e-mail from my mother. At last! I thought. I've missed her so much. Then I caught myself. The e-mail couldn't be from my mother. My mother died a month ago.

The e-mail was from a publicist with the same first name: Barbara. The name was all that had showed up on the screen.

My mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer sometime before 3 p.m. on Christmas Day. I can't say the exact time, because none of us thought to look at a clock for some time after she stopped breathing. She was in a hospital bed in the living room of my parents' house (now my father's house) in Connecticut with my father, my two younger brothers, and me. She had been unconscious for five days. She opened her eyes only when we moved her, which caused her extreme pain, and so we began to move her less and less, despite cautions from the hospice nurses about bedsores.

For several weeks before her death, my mother had been experiencing some confusion due to ammonia building up in her brain as her liver began to fail. And yet, irrationally, I am confident my mother knew what day it was when she died. I believe she knew we were around her. And I believe she chose to die when she did. Christmas was her favorite day of the year; she loved the morning ritual of walking the dogs, making coffee as we all waited impatiently for her to be ready, then slowly opening presents, drawing the gift-giving out for hours. This year, she couldn't walk the dogs or make coffee, but her bed was in the room where our tree was, and as we opened presents that morning, she made a madrigal of quiet sounds, as if to indicate that she was with us.

Since my mother's death, I have been in grief. I walk down the street; I answer my phone; I brush my hair; I manage, at times, to look like a normal person, but I don't feel normal. I am not surprised to find that it is a lonely life: After all, the person who brought me into the world is gone. But it is more than that. I feel not just that I am but that the world around me is deeply unprepared to deal with grief. Nearly every day I get e-mails from people who write: "I hope you're doing well." It's a kind sentiment, and yet sometimes it angers me. I am not OK. Nor do I find much relief in the well-meant refrain that at least my mother is "no longer suffering." Mainly, I feel one thing: My mother is dead, and I want her back. I really want her back - sometimes so intensely that I don't even want to heal. At least, not yet.

Nothing about the past losses I have experienced prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me in the least. 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. What makes it worse is that my mother was young: 55. The loss I feel stems partly from feeling robbed of 20 more years with her I'd always imagined having.

I say this knowing it sounds melodramatic. This is part of the complexity of grief: A piece of you recognizes it is an extreme state, an altered state, yet a large part of you is entirely subject to its demands. I am aware that I am one of the lucky ones. I am an adult. My mother had a good life. We had insurance that allowed us to treat her cancer and to keep her as comfortable as possible before she died. And in the past year, I got to know my mother as never before. I went with her to the hospital and bought her lunch while she had chemotherapy, searching for juices that wouldn't sting the sores in her mouth. We went to a spiritual doctor who made her sing and passed crystals over her body. We shopped for new clothes together, standing frankly in our underwear in the changing room after years of being shyly polite with our bodies. I crawled into bed with her and stroked her hair when she cried in frustration that she couldn't go to work. I grew to love my mother in ways I never had. Some of the new intimacy came from finding myself in a caretaking role where, before, I had been the one taken care of. But much of it came from being forced into openness by our sense that time was passing. Every time we had a cup of coffee together (when she was well enough to drink coffee), I thought, against my will: This could be the last time I have coffee with my mother.

Grief is common, as Hamlet's mother Gertrude brusquely reminds him. We know it exists in our midst. But I am suddenly aware of how difficult it is for us to confront it. And to the degree that we do want to confront it, we do so in the form of self-help: We want to heal our grief. We want to achieve an emotional recovery. We want our grief to be teleological, and we've assigned it five tidy stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Yet as we've come to frame grief as a psychological process, we've also made it more private. Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail. We may - I have done it - weep and rail privately, in the middle of the night. But we don't have the rituals of public mourning around which the individual experience of grief were once constellated.

And in the weeks since my mother died, I have felt acutely the lack of these rituals. I was not prepared for how hard I would find it to re-enter the slipstream of contemporary life, our world of constant connectivity and immediacy, so ill-suited to reflection. I envy my Jewish friends the ritual of saying kaddish - a ritual that seems perfectly conceived, with its built-in support group and its ceremonious designation of time each day devoted to remembering the lost person. So I began wondering: What does it mean to grieve in a culture that - for many of us, at least - has few ceremonies for observing it? What is it actually like to grieve? In a series of entries over the next few weeks, I'll delve into these questions and also look at the literature of grieving, from memoirs to medical texts. I'll be doing so from an intellectual perspective, but also from a personal one: I want to write about grief from the inside out. I will be writing about my grief, of course, and I don't pretend that it is universal. But I hope these entries will reflect something about the paradox of loss, with its monumental sublimity and microscopic intimacy.

Finding a Metaphor for Your Loss

But when my mother died, I found that I did not believe that she was gone. She took one slow, rattling breath; then, 30 seconds later, another; then she opened her eyes and looked at us, and took a last. As she exhaled, her face settled into repose. Her body grew utterly still, and yet she seemed present. I felt she had simply been transferred into another substance; what substance, where it might be located, I wasn't quite sure.

I went outside onto my parents' porch without putting my coat on. The limp winter sun sparkled off the frozen snow on the lawn. "Please take good care of my mother," I said to the air. I addressed the fir tree she loved and the wind moving in it. "Please keep her safe for me."

This is what a friend of mine - let's call her Rose - calls "finding a metaphor." I was visiting her a few weeks ago in California; we stayed up late, drinking lemon-ginger tea and talking about the difficulty of grieving, its odd jags of ecstasy and pain. Her father died several years ago, and it was easy to speak with her: She was in what more than one acquaintance who's lost a parent has now referred to as "the club." It's not a club any of us wished to join, but I, for one, am glad it exists. It makes mourning less lonely. I told Rose how I envied my Jewish friends the reassuring ritual of saying kaddish. She talked about the hodge-podge of traditions she had embraced in the midst of her grief. And then she asked me, "Have you found a metaphor?"

"A metaphor?"

"Have you found your metaphor for where your mother is?"

I knew immediately what Rose meant. I had. It was the sky - the wind. (The cynic in me cringes on rereading this. But, in fact, it's how I feel.) When I got home to Brooklyn, I asked one of my mother's friends whether she had a metaphor for where my mother was. She unhesitatingly answered: "The water. The ocean."

The idea that my mother might be somewhere rather than nowhere is one that's hard for the skeptical empiricist in me to swallow. When my grandfather died last September, he seemed to me merely - gone. On a safari in South Africa a few weeks later, I saw two female lions kill a zebra. The zebra struggled for three or four long minutes; as soon as he stopped, his body seemed to be only flesh. (When I got home the next week, I found out that my mother had learned that same day that her cancer had returned. It spooked me.)

But I never felt my mother leave the world.

At times I simply feel she's just on a long trip - and am jolted to realize it's one she's not coming back from. I'm reminded of an untitled poem I love by Franz Wright, a contemporary American poet, which has new meaning. It reads, in full:

I basked in you;
I loved you, helplessly, with a boundless tongue-tied love.
And death doesn't prevent me from loving you.
Besides,
in my opinion you aren't dead.
(I know dead people, and you are not dead.)

Sometimes I recite this to myself as I walk around.

At lunch yesterday, as velvety snow coated the narrow Brooklyn street, I attempted to talk about this haunted feeling with a friend whose son died a few years ago. She told me that she, too, feels that her son is with her. They have conversations. She's an intellectually exacting person, and she told me that she had sometimes wondered about how to conceptualize her - well, let's call it a persistent intuition. A psychiatrist reframed it for her: He reminded her that the sensation isn't merely an empty notion. The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.

That's a kind of comfort. But I confess I felt a sudden resistance of the therapist's view. The truth is, I need to experience my mother's presence in the world around me and not just in my head. Every now and then, I see a tree shift in the wind and its bend has, to my eye, a distinctly maternal cast. For me, my metaphor is - as all good metaphors ought to be - a persuasive transformation. In these moments, I do not say to myself that my mother is like the wind; I think she is the wind. I feel her: there, and there. One sad day, I actually sat up in shock when I felt my mother come shake me out of a pervasive fearfulness that was making it hard for me to read or get on subways. Whether it was the ghostly flicker of my synapses, or an actual ghostly flicker of her spirit, I don't know. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't hoping it was the latter.

"Normal" vs. "Complicated" Grief

What studies actually say is that I'll begin to "accept" my mother's death more quickly than I would have in the case of a sudden loss - possibly because I experienced what researchers call "anticipatory grief" while she was still alive. In the meantime, it sucks as much as any other death. You still feel like you're pacing in the chilly dark outside a house with lit-up windows, wishing you could go inside. You feel clueless about the rules of shelter and solace in this new environment you've been exiled to.

And that is why one afternoon, about three weeks after my mother died, I Googled "grief."

I was having a bad day. It was 2 p.m., and I was supposed to be doing something. Instead, I was sitting on my bed (which I had actually made, in compensation for everything else undone) wondering: Was it normal to feel everything was pointless? Would I always feel this way? I wanted to know more. I wanted to get a picture of this strange experience from the outside, instead of the melted inside. So I Googled - feeling a little like Lindsay in Freaks and Geeks, in the episode where she smokes a joint, gets way too high, and digs out an encyclopedia to learn more about "marijuana." Only information can prevent her from feeling that she's floating away.

The clinical literature on grief is extensive. Much of it reinforces what even the newish mourner has already begun to realize: Grief isn't rational; it isn't linear; it is experienced in waves. Joan Didion talks about this in The Year of Magical Thinking, her remarkable memoir about losing her husband while her daughter was ill: "[V]irtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of waves," she writes. She quotes a 1944 description by Michael Lindemann, then chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. He defines grief as:

sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing, and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power, and an intensive subjective distress described as tension or mental pain.

Intensive subjective distress. Yes, exactly: That was the objective description I was looking for. The experience is, as Lindemann notes, brutally physiological: It literally takes your breath away. This is also what makes grief so hard to communicate to anyone who hasn't experienced it.

One thing I learned is that researchers believe there are two kinds of grief: "normal grief" and "complicated grief" (which is also called "prolonged grief"). Normal grief is a term for the feeling most bereaved people experience, which peaks within the first six months and then begins to dissipate. ("Complicated grief" does not - and evidence suggests that many parents who lose children are experiencing something more like complicated grief.) Calling grief "normal" makes it sound mundane, but, as one researcher underscored to me, its symptoms are extreme. They include insomnia or other sleep disorders, difficulty breathing, auditory or visual hallucinations, appetite problems, and dryness of mouth.

I have had all of these symptoms, including one (quite banal) hallucination at dinner with a friend. (I saw a waitress bring him ice cream. I could even see the flecks in the ice cream. Vanilla bean, I thought. But there was no ice cream.) In addition to these symptoms, I have one more: I can't spell. Like my mother before me, I have always been a good speller. Now I have to rely on dictionaries to ascertain whether tranquility has one L or two. My Googling helped explain this new trouble with orthography: Some studies have suggested that mourning takes a toll on cognitive function. And I am still in a stage of fairly profound grief. I can say this with confidence because I have affirmation from a tool called "The Texas Revised Inventory of Grief" - one of the tests psychiatrists use to measure psychological distress among the bereaved. Designed for use after time has gone by, this test suggested that, yes, I was very, very sad. (To its list of statements like "I still get upset when I think about the person who died," I answered, "Completely True" - the most extreme answer on a scale of one to five, with five being "Completely False.")

Mainly, I realized, I wanted to know if there was any empirical evidence supporting the infamous "five stages of grief." Mention that you had a death in the family, and a stranger will perk up his ears and start chattering about the five stages. But I was not feeling the stages. Not the way I was supposed to. The notion was popularized by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her famous 1969 study On Death and Dying. At the time, Kübler-Ross felt - accurately - that there was a problem with how the medical establishment dealt with death. During the 1960s, American doctors often concealed from patients the fact that they were terminally ill, and many died without knowing how sick they were. Kübler-Ross asked several theology students to help her interview patients in hospitals and then reported on what she discovered.

By writing openly about how the dying felt, Kübler-Ross helped demystify the experience of death and made the case that the dying deserved to know - in fact, often wanted to know - that they were terminal. She also exposed the anger and avoidance that patients, family members, and doctors often felt in the face of death. And she posited that, according to what she had seen, for both the dying and their families, grieving took the form of five emotional stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Of course, like so many other ideas popularized in the 1970s, the five stages turned out to be more complex than initially thought. There is little empirical evidence suggesting that we actually experience capital-letter Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance in simple sequence. In On Grief and Grieving, published years later, Kübler-Ross insists she never meant to suggest the stages were sequential. But if you read On Death and Dying - as I just did - you'll find that this is slightly disingenuous. In it, she does imply, for example, that anger must be experienced before bargaining. (I tried, then, to tackle On Grief and Grieving but threw it across the room in a fit of frustration at its feel-good emphasis on "healing.") Researchers at Yale recently conducted an extensive study of bereavement and found that Kübler-Ross' stages were more like states. While people did experience those emotions, the dominant feeling they experienced after a death was yearning or pining.

Yearning is definitely what I feel. I keep thinking of a night, 13 years ago, when I took a late flight to Dublin, where I was going to live for six months. This would be the longest time I had ever been away from home. I woke up disoriented in my seat at 1 a.m. to see a spectacular display of the aurora borealis. I had never seen anything like it. The twisting lights in the sky seemed to evoke a presence, a living force. I felt a sudden, acute desire to turn around and go back - not just to my worried parents back in Brooklyn, but deep into my childhood, into my mother's arms holding me on those late nights when we would drive home from dinner at a neighbor's house in Maine, and she would sing a lullaby and tell me to put my head on her soft, warm shoulder. And I would sleep.

Hamlet's Not Depressed. He's Grieving.

Meghan O'Rourke's memoir about the death of her mother,

I had always thought of Hamlet's melancholy as existential. I saw his sense that "the world is out of joint" as vague and philosophical. He's a depressive, self-obsessed young man who can't stop chewing at big metaphysical questions. But reading the play after my mother's death, I felt differently. Hamlet's moodiness and irascibility suddenly seemed deeply connected to the fact that his father has just died, and he doesn't know how to handle it. He is radically dislocated, stumbling through the world, trying to figure out where the walls are while the rest of the world acts as if nothing important has changed. I can relate. When Hamlet comes onstage he is greeted by his uncle with the worst question you can ask a grieving person: "How is it that the clouds still hang on you?" It reminded me of the friend who said, 14 days after my mother died, "Hope you're doing well." No wonder Hamlet is angry and cagey.

Hamlet is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it. Grief, Shakespeare understands, is a social experience. It's not just that Hamlet is sad; it's that everyone around him is unnerved by his grief. And Shakespeare doesn't flinch from that truth. He captures the way that people act as if sadness is bizarre when it is all too explainable. Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, tries to get him to see that his loss is "common." His uncle Claudius chides him to put aside his "unmanly grief." It's not just guilty people who act this way. Some are eager to get past the obvious rawness in your eyes or voice; why should they step into the flat shadows of your "sterile promontory"? Even if they wanted to, how could they? And this tension between your private sadness and the busy old world is a huge part of what I feel as I grieve—and felt most intensely in the first weeks of loss. Even if, as a friend helpfully pointed out, my mother wasn't murdered.

I am also moved by how much in Hamlet is about slippage—the difference between being and seeming, the uncertainty about how the inner translates into the outer. To mourn is to wonder at the strangeness that grief is not written all over your face in bruised hieroglyphics. And it's also to feel, quite powerfully, that you're not allowed to descend into the deepest fathom of your grief—that to do so would be taboo somehow. Hamlet is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.

Strangely, Hamlet somehow made me feel it was OK that I, too, had "lost all my mirth." My colleague put it better: "Hamlet is the grief-slacker's Bible, a knowing book that understands what you're going through and doesn't ask for much in return," he wrote to me. Maybe that's because the entire play is as drenched in grief as it is in blood. There is Ophelia's grief at Hamlet's angry withdrawal from her. There is Laertes' grief that Polonius and Ophelia die. There is Gertrude and Claudius' grief, which is as fake as the flowers in a funeral home. Everyone is sad and messed up. If only the court had just let Hamlet feel bad about his dad, you start to feel, things in Denmark might not have disintegrated so quickly!

Hamlet also captures one of the aspects of grief I find it most difficult to speak about—the profound sense of ennui, the moments of angrily feeling it is not worth continuing to live. After my mother died, I felt that abruptly, amid the chaos that is daily life, I had arrived at a terrible, insistent truth about the impermanence of the everyday. Everything seemed exhausting. Nothing seemed important. C.S. Lewis has a great passage about the laziness of grief, how it made him not want to shave or answer letters. At one point during that first month, I did not wash my hair for 10 days. Hamlet's soliloquy captures that numb exhaustion, and now I read it as a true expression of grief:

O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter. O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Those adjectives felt apt. And so, even, does the pained wish—in my case, thankfully fleeting—that one might melt away. Researchers have found that the bereaved are at a higher risk for suicideality (or suicidal thinking and behaviors) than the depressed. For many, that risk is quite acute. For others of us, this passage captures how passive a form those thoughts can take. Hamlet is less searching for death actively than he is wishing powerfully for the pain just to go away. And it is, to be honest, strangely comforting to see my own worst thoughts mirrored back at me—perhaps because I do not feel likely to go as far into them as Hamlet does. (So far, I have not accidentally killed anyone with a dagger, for example.)

The way Hamlet speaks conveys his grief as much as what he says. He talks in run-on sentences to Ophelia. He slips between like things without distinguishing fully between them—"to die, to sleep" and "to sleep, perchance to dream." He resorts to puns because puns free him from the terrible logic of normalcy, which has nothing to do with grief and cannot fully admit its darkness.

And Hamlet's madness, too, makes new sense. He goes mad because madness is the only method that makes sense in a world tyrannized by false logic. If no one can tell whether he is mad, it is because he cannot tell either. Grief is a bad moon, a sleeper wave. It's like having an inner combatant, a saboteur who, at the slightest change in the sunlight, or at the first notes of a jingle for a dog food commercial, will flick the memory switch, bringing tears to your eyes. No wonder Hamlet said, "… for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Grief can also make you feel, like Hamlet, strangely flat. Nor is it ennobling, as Hamlet drives home. It makes you at once vulnerable and self-absorbed, needy and standoffish, knotted up inside, even punitive.

Like Hamlet, I, too, find it difficult to remember that my own "change in disposition" is connected to a distinct event. Most of the time, I just feel that I see the world more accurately than I used to. ("There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.") Pessimists, after all, are said to have a more realistic view of themselves in the world than optimists.

The other piece of writing I have been drawn to is a poem by George Herbert called "The Flower." It opens:

How Fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
Are thy returns! ev'n as the flowers in spring;
To which, besides their own demean,
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.
Grief melts away
Like snow in May,
As if there were no such cold thing.

Who would have thought my shrivel'd heart
Could have recover'd greennesse? It was gone
Quite under ground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown;
Where they together
All the hard weather,
Dead to the world, keep house unknown.

Quite underground, I keep house unknown: It does seem the right image of wintry grief. I look forward to the moment when I can say the first sentence of the second stanza and feel its wonder as my own.

Dreaming of the Dead

Meghan O'Rourke's memoir about the death of her mother.
After my mother died, one of my brothers told me he had been dreaming about her. He was comforted by this. I was envious. I was not dreaming about her, and my main fear, in those first days, was that I would forget what her face looked like. I told an old friend this. He just looked at me and said, "That's not going to happen." I didn't know how he could know this, but I was comforted by his certainty.

Then, about a month later, I began to dream about her. The dreams are not frequent, but they are powerful. Unlike dreams I had about my mother when she was alive, these dreams seem to capture her as she truly was. They seem, in some sense, beyond my own invention, as if, in the nether-realm of sleep, we truly are visiting each other. These visits, though, are always full of boundaries—boundaries, that, judging from other mourners' accounts, seem almost universal.

The first dream was set in both the past and the present. And it captured an identity confusion that is, apparently, not uncommon right after a loved one dies. In the dream, it was summertime, and my mother and I were standing outside a house like one we used to go to on Cape Cod. There was a sandy driveway and a long dirt road. We were going to get ice cream, and we were saying goodbye to my youngest brother, who is 12 years younger than I am; in the dream, he was just a little boy. When I looked at him, I felt an oceanic sadness, but I didn't know why. He smiled and waved from the porch as my mother and I pulled out; I was driving, which struck me as odd in the dream. (My mother loved to drive, and I learned to drive only last year; she taught me.)

As we headed down the long road, my mother talked about my brother, telling me I didn't need to be anxious about him. It became clear she was going somewhere, though I couldn't figure out where. The conversation replicated one we had while she was in the hospital, when I reassured her that my brother (now in college) would be OK, and that I'd help look after him. Only in the dream, she was playing me and I was playing her. The dream had a quality so intense I can still feel it: I am as sad as I have ever been, as if ice is being poured down my windpipe, and I keep trying to turn so I can see my mother, but I have to keep my eyes on the road.

In the next dream, I am at my parents' house in Connecticut with my father and one of my brothers, when, to our surprise, my mother walks into the kitchen. Somehow, we all know she will die in six days. She seems healthy, although her fate hangs around her and separates her from us. Even so, her eyes are bright and dark, darker than I remember them being. We ask her what she is doing that day. She tells us, with a sly smile, that she is going to something called Suicide Park. I become upset. She reassures me. "I'm not going to there to commit suicide, Meg," she says. "It's a place where people who know they're dying go to do risky things they might not do otherwise—like jump out of a plane." She's excited, like a bride on the precipice of a life-changing ritual. I am happy to see her face, and I never want her to leave.

(Two days later, I tell her friend Eleanor about my dream, and she goes silent on the phone. Then she asks, "Did you know that your mother told me she wanted to jump out of a plane?" No, I say. "One Friday this fall, when she had to stay home from school, I was at the house with her, and she said: 'I really want to jump out a plane before I die.' I said, 'B, you can't—you'll hurt your knee.' But she got upset. So we tried to figure out how she might really jump out a plane. She also wanted to learn Italian. This was when we thought she had more time.")

The third dream had the quality of a visitation. Again, I am at my parents' house in Connecticut, feeling anxious about work. In the den, I tell my father, who is watching football, that I need to go back to New York, and he gets up to look at the train schedule. As he rises, I become aware in my peripheral vision that there are holiday ornaments on the kitchen table, and that people are sitting there. "Stay another night," I hear my mother's voice say, and I look up to see that she is the person at the table. She looks at me, but her hands are busy—either knitting or kneading dough for apple pie. "Stay another night," she says again, with longing in her voice. "Of course," I say, happy I can grant this wish, so simple yet so fundamental. When I woke that morning, I felt calm and peaceful. The voice was my mother's voice, and for the first time, her face was my mother's face. I felt that she had been saying something important to me; I wasn't quite sure what it was, but it had to do with how she loved me; I was still her daughter.

My middle brother has told me about some of his dreams, too. And I am struck by the continuities among all of them. Our dreams almost seem to follow certain rules of genre. In all, I know my mother is gone and that she will never be back as before. But I am given a moment to be with her, to say something, or to share a look or a feeling. In most, the important conversation comes when we are alone together, although another family member may be present on the outskirts. I am never fully able to grasp her; in the first, the car was a barrier between us; in a recent dream, I held her hand over the barrier of a hospital bed. My brother's dreams are similar. (His, I find, are even more beautiful and evocative than mine.) We both experience a quality of being visited, of being comforted, though we also feel a sense of a distance that cannot be traversed. Many readers who have written to me have reported a similar sense of feeling visited from a great distance.

Every time I wake from these dreams, I am reminded of passages from epics like The Aeneid in which the heroes go to the Underworld to see their fathers and cannot embrace them, though they can see them. Or of the beautiful sonnet by Milton about his wife, who died in childbirth. Recounting a dream about her, he writes, "Me thought I saw my late espoused saint," and then invokes her disappearance at precisely the moment they try to touch : "But oh! As to embrace me she inclin'd,/ I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night." What surprises me is how comforted I feel when I wake. I am sad that the dream has ended, but it's not the depleted sadness I've felt in the past when I've woken up from a wishful dream. I feel, instead, replete, reassured, like a child who has kicked the covers off her in her sleep on a chilly night and dimly senses as her mother steals into the dark room, pulls them up over her, strokes her hair, and gives her a kiss before leaving.

Can Nature Help Assuage Your Grief?

Meghan O'Rourke's memoir about the death of her mother.
The other night, I was talking to my father on the phone, remembering my mother, when he happened to mention a "loss of confidence" that "we" (that is, our family) had all experienced. I asked him what he meant. I had been noticing that I feel shy and insecure ever since my mother died, but I had assumed my insecurity was particular to me; I've always been a nervous person, especially compared with my sociable brothers. But here was my father talking about something he saw all of us suffering from. He explained. "Your mother is not there," he said. "And we are dealing with her absence. It makes us feel, I think, a loss of confidence—a general loss, an uncertainty about what we can rely on."

Perhaps that's why I've gone to the desert twice since my mother died. Not only does the physical desert reflect back at me my spiritual desert, it doesn't have a lot of people in it—allowing me to enjoy solitude without feeling cut off, as I would if I were hunkered down in my Brooklyn apartment. In January, three weeks after my mom's death, I flew to L.A. and then drove to the Mojave Desert, where I spent a few days wandering around Joshua Tree National Park. Being alone under the warm blue sky made me feel closer to my mother, as it often has. I felt I could detect her in the haze at the horizons. I offered a little prayer up to her, and, for the first time since she died, I talked out loud to her. I was walking along past the cacti, when I looked out into the rocky distance. "Hello mother," I whispered. "I miss you so much." Then I started crying, and, ridiculously, apologized. "I'm sorry. I don't want you to feel bad. I know you had to leave." Even now, whenever I talk to my mother—I do it every few weeks, and always when I'm outdoors—I cry and then apologize because I don't want her to feel guilt or sorrow that she can't be here with me as she used to be. A part of me believes this concern is foolish. But it is intrinsic to the magical thinking at the heart of the ritual. I am powerless over it.

Just last week, I went to Marfa, Texas, a town in the Chinati Desert in far west Texas, near Mexico. One afternoon, I drove south through the desert to Terlingua, an old ghost town, where I sat in the fresh spring sun. Perhaps because it is almost spring in New York, the warmth of the air registered as the augur of a new stage of mourning. It was as if I had been coaxed out of a dark room after a long illness. I watched a band play songs to a haphazard group of people who, for one reason or another, had been drawn down to this borderland and its arid emptiness. A group of girls lazily Hula-hooped in the sun while a drunk older man from New Jersey, with the bluest, clearest eyes I have ever seen, razzed the musicians: "Yer not stopping yet, are ya, ye worthless sons of bitches? It's just gettin' goin'." Later he pulled up a chair next to me. He told me he was about to turn 74. This lent his desire for things not to end a new poignancy. Dogs wandered among the tables, and tourists paused to watch before walking to the general store, where they could buy souvenirs and spring water. Listening to the band sing about loss and love, I felt sad and wrung out, but this, too, was good, like the sun on my skin. A vital nutrient that had seeped away during the winter was being replenished.

Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny. And this, too, I think, is why I am drawn to landscapes that juxtapose the minute and the splendor; the very contrast is expressive of what I felt. After the concert, I drove down along the Rio Grande, noting all the green that had sprouted up along the dry riverbed. Then I turned and went into Big Bend National Park—a majestic preserve. Here, as in Joshua Tree, you drive along roads and can see rolling, rocky desert for many, many miles. The sky is as open as can be. On the horizon, mountains loom like old gods. On a clear day, you can see so far you can actually detect the curvature of the earth, according to the National Park's literature. I wasn't sure I saw any curves, but it hardly mattered. Having my sense of smallness reflected back at me—having the geography mimic the puzzlement I carry within—made me feel more at home in a majesty outside of my comprehension. It also led me to wonder: How could my loss matter in the midst of all this? Yet it does matter, to me, and in this setting that felt natural, the way the needle on the cactus in the huge desert is natural. The sheer sublimity of the landscape created room for the magnitude of my grief, while at the same time it helped me feel like a part—a small part—of a much larger creation. It was inclusive.

Being in the vast spaces while mourning made me think about religion. On New Year's Eve, I'd had dinner with a friend who had been through his share of ups and downs. I was telling him that I hadn't felt my mother leave the world, and he asked me if I believed in God. I told him that I did not know. "I can say existence is a mystery I don't understand or presume to pretend I do," I said. And I mentioned that over the past year, I had prayed in several moments of need, and had always felt better—as if something were coming back at me. He was quiet and then said, "I don't know if I believe in God. But I do believe in prayer." If you are a secular agnostic in America today, chances are you subscribe to a psychological framework for seeing the world. This framework places stress on individuality, on the unique psyche and its formation. I believe in the importance of individuality, but in the midst of grief I also find myself wanting connection—wanting to be reminded that the sadness I feel is not just mine but ours.

I also want to find a way not to resent my suffering (though I do). It is hard to know what that way is, outside of the ethical framework of religion. Last fall, I copied out a passage from an interview with author Marilynne Robinson in an issue of the Paris Review. She is one of my favorite novelists; she is also Christian. The interviewer recalled Robinson once observing that Americans tend to avoid contemplating "larger issues." (Many mourners would agree.) Here is what Robinson said in response:

The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of it, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.

To that, I can say: Amen. And it underscores why I have been drawn to the remote outdoors, to places largely untouched by telephone wires and TGI Fridays. I want to be reminded of how the numinous impinges on ordinary life. It's a feeling I have even in New York, but traffic lights and honking cars and businessmen leaping over puddles can make it hard to let that eerie, weird knowledge in.

Watching Someone You Love Accept Death

Meghan O'Rourke's memoir about the death of her mother,
A few weeks ago, I spoke by phone to Holly Prigerson, a clinical researcher on grief at the Dana Farber Cancer institute at Harvard. She told me something that lodged in my brain. Research has shown that when a terminally ill patient "accepts" her death, the bereaved—her family and friends—typically find their grief more manageable than when a terminally ill patient is in "despair" about her death. It is, of course, difficult to study "grief," because the salient feature of grief is that it's not monolithic or singular; it's personal and variable. That said, there are many universal features of grief, I've discovered from talking to and hearing from others who've seen loved ones die. And one seems to be this, the ameliorating influence of watching your loved one accept his or her death.

Needless to say, witnessing the acceptance is painful in its own right. One conversation stands out to me. It took place at the hospital about 10 days before my mother died. We had taken her there because she woke up one morning in a delirious fever, though she had seemed her usual self the night before. We didn't know it at the time, but her liver had begun to fail. She was in the hospital for six days. For two, it seemed as though she'd never be coherent again. But on the third morning, she woke up clear-headed. A mini-resurrection, I thought; the rock rolled back from the cave. My brother had spent the night on the couch and was serving her breakfast when I got to the hospital. "Hi, Meg," she said cheerily; just to hear her tone—her old loving tone—shook me.

Our conversation took place a few days later. I had stayed overnight with her in the hospital, and I was trying to find a local oncologist so the hospital could release her. At this point, my mother wanted deeply to go home, but I couldn't get the nurse to give us permission, because my mother's doctor was in New York. What they wouldn't say, but what we knew, was that we needed a local doctor because time was short and more emergencies were bound to occur. It was a Saturday, and the only oncologist around was a doctor named Malefatto. After a silent double take—his name, traced back to Latin roots, sounded a lot like Dr. "Wrongdoing" or Dr. "Badly Done"—I asked the nurse to send him to our room when he did rounds.

Dr. Badly Done turned out to be kind. And he did well something that is easily done badly: He told my mother she had a few days or weeks left to live, a fact she had not quite taken in. It was his job to tell her that she had to decide whether she wanted to become a "hospice patient"—to receive only pain management rather than medicine that might help slow down, say, her liver failure. He said something about "what remained to be done"; my mother misunderstood him and said she didn't want any chemotherapy. He corrected her: "There's really no more chemotherapy we can do," he said. In that moment, I saw my mother realize, anew, what she had realized earlier that fall when her primary doctor told her there were no remaining treatments. "So," she said slowly, "there is nothing left to do?" "No," said Dr. Malefatto. Her face grew still. I could see how strange this was to her, as it was to me. Five days earlier, she'd been walking around, even going to work for an hour. Now she couldn't stand without one of us lifting her. How had we gotten here so fast? Then she looked at me. "I have to call your father and tell him," she said.

Later that day, her four sisters and her mother came to say goodbye. My mother sat in the living room of her hospital "suite," with her legs poking out from her hospital pants, beside potted plastic plants and a 1960s-style Zenith TV. She and her sisters sat and joked and reminisced. My mother had been nervous about the visit beforehand, but now she relaxed. One sister asked my mother what her favorite color was. (Blue.) My grandmother was quiet. At one point, she gave my mother a garden angel and a piece of paper. "I couldn't sleep last night," she said. "And in the middle of the night I remembered this prayer I had taped above your crib when you were a little girl, and I wrote it down for you." My mother often bridled at religious gestures—she was a lapsed Catholic—but now she didn't. She read the prayer and said, "Yes, I remember waking up and looking at this prayer when I was little. I'll put it by my bed."

I was overwhelmed, and I went back to my dad's house to take a run and to let them all be together. When I returned to the hospital, my mother was alone, sitting in bed, looking contemplative. "Hi, Mom," I said. (How many more times will I say that? I wondered.) "Wasn't that nice?" she said immediately. I sat at the end of the bed and began to give her a foot massage, which I did a lot in those last three weeks—it helped take her mind off her pain, which increased every day. "I thought so," I said. "That's why I left for a while." "It was nice," she said. "We laughed a lot. I want them to remember me with a sense of humor." She grew quiet. "It was hard to say goodbye to them." She paused and stared at her hands. She had begun to have a pronounced inward quality, a withdrawn beauty, as if she were already on her way to another world; it made her seem even younger than her 55 years. "But not the way you'd think." Then she looked at me and said, "It's good to have time to contemplate the end of your life. I mean, when else do you do it? When do you really think about death?"

"It is good?" I asked tentatively, as I rubbed more lavender lotion into her cracked soles.

"It's not what I would have thought," she said. "I'm not afraid. I feel I will still be here." Then she began to talk about what she wanted. She wanted her hospital bed to be in the living room, so she could look out the picture window at things that "would last a long time." She wanted to look at the fir tree on the lawn. And the pond. Just that year, a great blue heron had made a habit of stopping in the pond to fish. We would see him rise up out of the water, his wingspan at once awkward and magnificent. It was nearly Christmas, and she wanted us to buy a tree to be in the room with her bed. She talked about my brothers, and my dad, and said again that she wasn't afraid, though she was sad about "sappy" things.

"Like what?"

"Like Christmas. And my birthday." I took some lavender oil and put it behind her ears. She tilted her chin up like a child so I could sweep her hair back. She loved lavender, and it was supposed to be calming. "I'm sad about the things I have a lot of memories of, of the days when the whole family was together," she continued. "That's why I'm sad about Christmas and my birthday."

I began to cry. Through tears, I said, "I'm going to miss you so much." This is when a moment I keep going back to happened. I thought she would get tears in her eyes or melt in that special way that mothers melt—or, at least, that she usually melted—when she saw one of us kids in pain. Instead, she looked at me, and said, "I know," with a quiet calm. She had a funny look on her face, a look I had never quite seen directed at me before, of appraisal and remove. In that moment, I had the sense that she was letting me know something, that she thought I would be OK. This is what happened: Parents died, while children lived, and, in some sense, it was meant to be. Even if we both felt the moment had come too soon. This was not the response I wanted, but the authority of her look stilled me. I wiped away my tears. "I know," she said again.

Now, in the worst moments of grief, my mind often goes back to that night in the hospital as I exhaustedly rubbed her feet. I think of that moment when she said, "I know." And it calms me. Her voice had the strange motherly knowledge that nothing approximates (except, of course, fatherly knowledge). Even though—or actually because—she didn't respond as I'd expected, that moment has become a form of comfort. My mother was giving me a command: Be OK.

After my mother died, many friends recommended Buddhist books to me, among them Gehlek Rimpoche's Good Life, Good Death and Sogyal Rinpoche's The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. These books preach nonattachment—the idea (as I take it) that we need to let go rather than clutch—and acceptance of the impermanent state of life. The first I can't really understand, but the second seems crucial to me. At times, Buddhism (as filtered through Western self-help speak) strikes me as cruelly sanctimonious and callous; one routinely encounters the story of the angry cancer-riddled woman who consults a monk, learns to accept her death, and—voilà!—is healed. I have rarely been angrier than I was when I read: "Tibetan Buddhists believe that illnesses like cancer can be a warning, to remind us that we have been neglecting deep aspects of our being, such as our spiritual needs. If we take this warning seriously and change fundamentally the direction of our lives, there is a very real hope for healing not only our body, but our whole being."

At the same time, I do take to heart what a book like Good Life, Good Death has to say about what acceptance and a "good death" might be. Its ideas are not novel: Rimpoche mainly counsels acknowledgement of what is taking place and a kind of letting go on the part of both the ill and the soon-to-be-bereaved. This is good advice, though not every temperament is able to heed it, and that's where I get stuck every time. Acceptance isn't necessarily something you can choose off a menu, like eggs instead of French toast. Prigerson, the Harvard researcher, told me that much of the current clinical thinking on grief has concluded that some people are inherently primed to accept their own death with "integrity" (their word, not mine), while others are primed for "despair." Most of us though, she said, are somewhere in the middle, and one question researchers are now focusing on is: How might more of us in the middle learn to accept our deaths? This sounds touchy-feely, but it has, as she pointed out, real consequences for both the dying and the bereaved. For one thing, the terminally ill make clearer decisions about their end-of-life medical care when they have acknowledged their illness; for another, watching them acknowledge their death helps us, in turn, accept it, too. My brothers, father, and I witnessed my mother in traumatic, painful moments I'm sure we'd rather forget. Cancer is not a gentle disease. But in this one regard at least, my mother had what Buddhists and psychologists would call a good death. Which is to say: She accepted it.

"I don't want anyone to be afraid to ask me questions," she told me that night. We had no idea that three days later she would lapse back into a coma-like state and never speak again. How could we? Even in the midst of acceptance, we were always bargaining for more time. We still lived inside Zeno's Paradox—the idea that if you go halfway toward something over and over, you never actually arrive. Mathematicians call it a paradox, but most of us take it to be a reality until proven otherwise. Or, at least, I did.

What Is It Like To Recover From Grief?

Meghan O'Rourke's memoir about the death of her mother,
I began to notice it around Easter, the season of resurrection, the season of regeneration. The daffodils were peeking up out of the seemingly still-frozen ground. The magnolias had come into bloom, their spoon-size petals opening wide. And I started feeling … better. Not "recovered," the way one feels after a flu. But … better. I suppose this isn't a surprise. I simply conform to the clinical norm: Studies show many mourners begin to feel less depressed around four months after the death. Knowing this makes me feel annoyed and truculent. I don't want to conform to a grief scale. I want to be an extremity. A master of grief. Or do I mean a slave to it, a supplicant? But in practical terms, it feels like a relief. I have begun to roll the rock back from this cave, at least.

Mainly, I have more energy. I can crack a joke now and then. (Though I can still detect a kind of heaviness in my reactions, the artificiality of trying to act "normal.") When I'm sad, the pangs are just as painful—perhaps even more so, since it has been longer now since I've seen my mother, and the reality of her death is beginning to intrude on me in new ways. So "better" doesn't mean I'm any less shocked by the odd enormity of loss. It just means it's easier to get out of bed.

Easter itself was painful. I spent the day being reminded of the ghosts of Easters past: the many times my mother would hide eggs for us to "hunt" and then forget where she had put that last one. A week later, moldy and soft, it would turn up in someone's shoe. (At the time, I couldn't understand how she could forget: those precious eggs! So hard to find!) I walked around in my neighborhood, a mix of old Italian-Catholic families and bourgeois arrivistes, and found it difficult to watch kids and their parents saunter about in the lazy togetherness.

The day put my superstitious magical thinking and my intellect at odds. I am not religious, and I don't quite believe that Jesus rose from the tomb. But the truth is that even now, nearly four months after my mother's death, I still go about privately believing she's coming back. Deep down, I feel that—like Dr. Manhattan in The Watchmen—she will, through some effort of mind, reconstitute herself and appear to me, even as a flickering ghostly form. A friend sent me a wonderful poem by Stephen Edgar, "Nocturnal," which captures this disbelief. The poet describes listening to a cassette play the voice of a lost loved one:

Who ever thought they would not hear the dead?
Who ever thought that they could quarantine
Those who are not, who once had been?
At that old station on North Head
Inmates still tread the boards,
Or something does …
Undeleted,
What happened is embedded and repeated.

That Thursday—one of those fabulously warm spring days that come and vanish—I went for a run in Prospect Park in the late afternoon. I went all the way around the park, which I don't often do, finishing the loop after a long hill near the entrance. At the top of the rise, there is a stand of magnolias and a view of what's called "Long Meadow." Exhausted, salty with sweat, I plopped down on the grass and granted myself 10 minutes to put aside the to-do lists invading my head and just … contemplate. (One downside of feeling better has been that it's become easier to let time pass without noticing how I'm really feeling.) I felt the sun on my face. The grass tickled my hands. An ant crossed my pinkie. The spring sun was warm but not yet hot.

As I relaxed, I was flooded with first one memory, then another, and then, like a BlackBerry tuning in to its signal after a plane trip, a dozen or so distinct memories of being with my mother in this park. First I remembered that one summer day in 1994 she and I met her friend (then-assistant) Diana to sit in lawn chairs and catch up while I read Joan Didion's After Henry. I remembered the many mornings my mother and I would go running together in the park before school. We'd listen to cheesy mixes we made and traded on our Walkmans, or we'd just talk. Running in the cool morning air, discussing our lives, I felt like her friend as well as her daughter.

So I sat there, thinking of her and looking around me. I had for a moment the distinct feeling that she had asked me to do this—that she had said, somehow: I can't look at it; will you look for me? And as I sat there, a robin hopped toward me. Its red breast was shiny, and it had bright, bold eyes. And I thought: OK, so, resurrection; I don't know. But what in the world—in the universe—made this creature? Can evolution account for the mystery of life? As a theory, it doesn't go as far as you'd like toward explaining the world. I wanted the sky to open up and reveal universal secrets to me. My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures. And here I was, ready to learn! But: silence. A robin hopping closer. I watched it for some time, half-wondering if in any way it could be my mother. What made you, robin? my brain practically shouted. Then the bird lost interest in me. I stood up. I brushed the dirt from my pants and jogged the rest of the way out of the park. I thought about that bird all day. How could I disregard the bubbly, foolish sense of beauty I felt looking at it? And: How could I reconcile that with the pain my mother endured before she died?

The poet Anne Carson wrote that after her mother died she suddenly felt that everything she read was in strikethrough font, like this. I understand what she means. I write and want to strikethrough. I smile and want to strikethrough. It is as if, for some time, the world exists mostly in strikethrough. Over time, the strikes get lighter, and you can see the words underneath more clearly.

Just the other day, nearly a week after Easter, I had to make an apple pie for a video shoot about mothers and daughters. The recipe I used was my mother's recipe, and for a day or two before I made the pie I was in a gloomy mood. I felt anxious, irritable, resentful that I had to make the pie—a pie I'd been wanting to make but was frightened of making ever since my mother died. It was absurd how much mental space this pie was taking up.

The day came. I made the pie. I pulled out the old recipe book my mother and father had given me and my brothers—the 4A Cookbook, they called it, after the apartment we lived in. And, step by step, almost as if it wasn't happening, I made the pie. I didn't let the dough chill for long enough and it came apart as I tried to roll it out. The result looked messier than usual as it went into the oven. But I felt OK; it had been strangely comforting to read my mother's words and revisit her way of making things. I loved that at the end of the recipe for pastry (butter, Crisco, flour, sugar, water) she wrote, philosophically: "This will constitute the dough."

But as the pie was cooking, I had a little meltdown. I was supposed to turn the heat down from 425 degrees, I remembered. But … to what temperature? Time to call Mom. I reached for the phone. And realized—I couldn't ask her anymore. From now on, I would have to answer my pie questions myself, through trial and error. The pie made my mother more absent. And yet—it also made my mother more present: When it came out of the oven, it reminded me of her. It almost, through some strange synesthesia, looked like her.

Afterward, I called my dad. I asked him why he thought making the pie had brought me so close to her, when other, abstract things I learned from her don't. He listened, then said, "A few months ago, you were talking about how you were envious of certain cultures where there are rituals—you put on black when you mourn. And it just seems to me that within our family, when things happened, whether good or bad, we tended to get together. And when we got together, we ate together, which meant cooking. So you learned from your mother how to make pie. And, yes, it is a concrete thing she gave you. But it's also that when you make it, you are part of a tradition. Someday you're going to be the person to teach someone else."

That brought tears to my eyes for a second, and I told him about that impulse to call her. He said something that stayed with me. "The making of the pie is the phone call. To make pie was to call your mom." Then, classics teacher that he is, he embarked on a mini-Socratic dialogue of his own. "Why is it that every time you made the call and asked those questions you never bothered annotating the answer in your own notes? Because making the pie was a shared experience, even though your two households were not going to both be eating the pie that night."

Then he added, "Next Thanksgiving, you've got to make the apple pie."

"What do you mean I've got to?" I asked.

"Well, we were just trying to figure out why ancient societies did the things they did," he said. (We had been talking about old mourning rituals and how different some were from ours.) "But the common thing across societies is this idea of yearly commemoration—Easter, the empty chair at the Seder, the Egyptian feast called the Beautiful Feast of the Valley, when the Thebans crossed the Nile to picnic at the mortuaries that held their ancestors and recent dead. It's almost like forced remembrance. But it's always structured in such a way that it's hardly forced. Next Thanksgiving, you've got to make the apple pie."

And so the tradition has been broken and renewed. I will make the apple pie from now on.

It's not the resurrection I was looking for. But it's not nothing.

---

The Moment I Heard My Mother's Diagnosis

Posted Thursday, May 7, 2009, at 6:47 AM ET

Meghan O'Rourke's memoir about the death of her mother.

All love stories are tales of beginnings. When we talk about falling in love, we go to the beginning, to pinpoint the moment of freefall. But this story is the story of an ending, of death, and it has no beginning. A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That's what makes her a mother.

There is this, though. It's early May of 2006, and I have taken the Metro-North to Fairfield, Conn., to spend the day with my parents. They have moved to Connecticut from Brooklyn, N.Y., to start a school, which my mother is running. My mother is very good at this job, in part because children instinctively love her. She is an extremely calm, open person with a strong sense of justice.

The day is unseasonably warm. My mother and I go out into the yard and sit by the pool, rolling up our pants and dangling our feet in the cool blue water. Leaning back, she pushes her sunglasses up over her thick, dark hair, and turns her face up to the sun. She suddenly looks extremely girlish to me. I haven't seen her in several months, because I've been finishing a book and she and my father have been busy cleaning out their old apartment. As we sit together, she tells me she has been under a lot of stress; the pressures at school are enormous, and selling the apartment where she and my dad lived for 20 years wasn't easy. Mostly, though, she is quiet, and seems content just to sit in the sun with me as the early dragonflies skim the water. Her two golden retrievers nose through the grass around us. A spell of stillness radiates from her. I am content just to be near her; I have, I realize, been anxious about her for reasons I can't identify.

The next Friday, I leave work early because I feel sick to my stomach. I've just lain down in my small, blue bedroom—like a little ship—when the phone rings. It's my mother. "Meg?" she says, her voice rising. "You're home?" I tell her I left work early. "Well, there's something I want to tell you," she says, with a deliberateness that alarms me. "And I wanted you to hear it from me." I take a breath. "I haven't been feeling well," she says, "and I went to the doctor for some tests, and she found a tumor." "Where?" I say, stupidly. "In my colon," she continues. "They don't know what it means. It could be benign. They're running tests and we'll know more about it on Tuesday." The way she says "they don't know what it means" makes me feel hopeful, as if the tumor is something that can be interpreted. Like a passage in Shakespeare, its meaning is up for debate. It's not a disease; it's a pound of flesh. I can hear that she, too, wants to think of it this way.

The next week she calls as I am walking back to my office on 57^th Street after a business lunch. I pause beside some scaffolding, the end of the lunch crowd bustling around me, and she says, bluntly, "The doctor got the results. The tumor is cancerous." My knees feel weak—a cliché, but true—and I lean over the scaffolding, the cold metal bar hard against my stomach. "I'm going to need to have surgery and then maybe radiation and chemotherapy, and we need to do it soon. But they think they can treat it," she continues.

I can't remember whether I got any work done that afternoon or what, exactly, came next. I remember crying in my office and calling a former colleague and friend who is an oncologist to ask him for advice. I remember fighting with my parents on the phone because they scheduled surgery right away but they had done no "research." In my view, they didn't know very much about the doctor they'd chosen or whether surgery was even the right approach. This bothered me. I live to collect information, and I am also a perfectionist. I couldn't fathom this approach. It's cancer, I thought. What if the surgeon is third-rate? We can wait a week to find out more. We need the best surgeon. We need a perfectionist of a surgeon. No; we need me to be a surgeon. I was being a nightmare.

This is the meta-narrative of the illness memoir. It begins with a phone call, a scan, a shock. Disbelief reigns. You distract yourself by watching movies, drinking coffee, doing the normal things. (The night we found out, I played Trivial Pursuit—which my mother had given me for Christmas—with my brother, my boyfriend, and an old friend from graduate school.) The first scan is followed by more scans. These new scans are crucial to the narrative. In my mother's case, the next scan, in June, was very bad. Colon cancer is treatable if it's caught in the early stages. But by Stage 3 the odds of surviving more than five years drop precipitously. By Stage 4—as I had already discovered from statistics online at sites like the National Cancer Institute—the survival rate past five years was a mere 6 percent. During those first weeks when we were waiting to find out what was happening inside her body, I would lie awake at night praying to an invisible God I didn't believe in: Please, please, please let my mother not be Stage 4, I whispered. Anything but Stage 4. In June, the PET scan showed that she had cancerous nodes on her lungs and liver. She was Stage 4. She had metastases to multiple organs. This was bad. The outlook had suddenly become much grimmer.

For a while, we got lucky. After three months of what one doctor called "industrial-strength chemo," my mother went into remission. Her doctors considered it almost miraculous. She went on "maintenance" drugs (Avastin), went to work and did her job, and even took a vacation. Then, six months later, the cancer returned, more aggressive than ever. She died 14 months later—a year she spent feeling nauseated from treatment, a year she spent in extreme pain from tumors that had moved into her right iliac bone in her pelvis and into vertebrae in her spine.

The first summer my mother was diagnosed, I was haunted by what she must be feeling. I spent a lot of time on the porch of a rental house in Long Island reading, slapping flies away from my sweating legs. But I was really thinking about how scared she must be. Today, I have a modest glimmer of what she felt while she was waiting for that first test to come back. One week after we found out that her cancer had returned, my OB/GYN told me he had found a large tumor on my right ovary. It looked, he felt, "highly suspicious." There were characteristics that troubled him. My genetic history also troubled him. It was a Friday; he wanted to perform surgery on Monday.

I walked out of his office, on 59^th Street, stumbling through traffic and into Central Park. I felt numb and sick to my stomach. The refrain in my head was banal. How can this be happening to me? I kept saying, over and over. And then: How on earth does my mother bear this? How can she not be angry every moment of the day?

In the end, my mother's narrative and mine diverged. My tumor was not cancerous, and my surgery was minor. My mother's tumor was cancerous, and her chemotherapy was not minor. To this day, this seems like an accident of narrative to me. If we went back, I still wonder, could we change the story somehow? Could we take a right turn instead of a left? When I smell the lilacs she so loved, will that not bring her back? No, apparently. Eighteen months later, I walk through New York and watch the trees bloom once more, and she does not. The beginning of her disease was the only chance we had for intervention. But the moment passed. I think about how differently things turned out for me and my mother, and I recognize that it might be different for me next time. I don't know what story to tell myself about that.

This, too, is part of the narrative of illness. I used to feel some distress that my experience of illness was so indistinguishable from so many other experiences of illness. But in the wake of my mother's death I have found that commonality to be comforting. While writing this series, I have heard from friends, family, and readers, many of whom have shared feelings that seem universal. I still care a great deal about individuality, but I now feel myself to be a tiny part of a sticky web of experience in which many others are entangled. I wonder what move the horrible spider of fate will make next. And I wonder, too, whether we can learn in the meantime to find purpose in grief. I am reminded of Emily Dickinson, who was stunned to learn that the newly widowed Robert Browning had written a poem, "till," as she put it, "I remembered that I myself, in my smaller way, sang off charnel steps." (A charnel-house was a slaughterhouse.)

Loss doesn't feel redeemable. But for me one consoling aspect is the recognition that, in this at least, none of us is different from anyone else: We all lose loved ones; we all face our own death. And loss, strangely, can attune you to what is beautiful about existence even as it wounds you with what is awful. You live with a new sense of what the Victorian critic Walter Pater once called "the splendour of our experience and … its awful brevity," too.

As Auden said: I thought that love would last forever; I was wrong.