Thinking About "The Long Goodbye"

"This sturdy belief system [that if one just tries hard enough, things will work out] has a sidecar in which superstition rides."

That's a sentence I like very much even if motorcycles with sidecars seem to be a rarity these days.

In fact, it may be the most memorable single sentence in "The Long Goodbye," a memoir poet Megan O'Rourke wrote about prolonged grief during and in the wake of her mother's death from cancer at age 55. I read the book because I liked a poem O'Rourke wrote that was recently published in The New York Times  Sunday Magazine.  In an earlier post, I wrote about the poem ("Self-Portrait as Myself") because it relates to my novella "Gina/Diane."





"The Long Goodbye" is based on a journal O'Rourke kept during her mother's slow decline. In the book, she both recounts with considerable feeling her own many ups and downs, and she ponders the nature of grief, a topic about which it appears she has read a great deal. There is an extensive list of possible "further reading" at the end of the book.

But as I read "The Long Goodbye," I found myself pondering O'Rourke's character more than the topic of grief. A lot of her distress, which I have no doubt was, and perhaps still is, heart felt, stemmed from what appeared to be her own insecurity and difficulty with relationships outside of the family, making it perhaps harder than would otherwise be the case for her to lose her mother.

"She had always been my protector," O'Rourke explained.

At one point O'Rourke described herself as "deeply shy" and at another point said: "my anxiety level has always been high."

In the course of her mother's illness, O'Rourke married a man identified as Jim, but the marriage lasted only eight months -- a development she attributes to Jim's difficulties with both adjusting to being married and to his inability to understand or cope with her state of grief.

But was it really his fault? "Jim and I had been together for five years, and while I'd always wanted children, I'd never experienced a deep desire to get married," O'Rourke said, attributing her change of attitude not to a deepening commitment to Jim, but to what was happening to her mother.

In the course of her mother's decline, she nonetheless called on Jim for help on numerous occasions and he is described as having been very responsive. Interestingly, at one point O'Rourke related that she blamed her mother for never supporting her divorce. One can see why her mother may have taken that position.

Then, later, O'Rourke began dating another man she doesn't identify by name. But that relationship came "to a crashing halt" when after the man called and enumerated her failings, keeping O'Rourke up all night thinking about her motives." And because I had indeed told lies, and had kept secrets, I found truth in many of his accusations."

Still later, she took up with an old high school boyfriend identified as M. But that didn't work out either when "he pretty much vanished."  That was after O'Rourke said she told M she didn't think it was the right time for them to be seeing each other while at the same time, "Inwardly I was hoping that he would assure me he wanted to be with me."

While O'Rourke attributed these relationship difficulties to the turmoil in which she was in as a result of grief over her mother's decline, I found myself wondering, as I read the book, whether underlying relationship problems may have exacerbated her grief. She comes across as very needy and she never talks about what she gave back to anyone other than to her mother.

The bottom line: is this a book to read if one is having trouble coming to terms with the death of  a parent?  I'm not sure it is all that useful. O'Rourke herself seems too problematic to be broadly representative.