The Long Goodbye, by Meghan O’Rourke

The Long Goodbye is poet Meghan O'Rourke's account of her mother's colorectal cancer and the year of mourning that followed her death. I read the book the first time through as a companion—O'Rourke's experience is eerily like my own. The second time through, I read it thinking of the church—what we in the church might take from this exploration of dying, death and bereavement. It is a book the church should read.

O'Rourke's description of the emotional topography of caregiving is brave and truthful. There is plenty of straightforward filial love here, but there is also frustration, anger and jealousy of the hospital nurses to whom her mother was so consistently kind. O'Rourke also considers her own relationship with mortality. She was made mortal by her mother's dying. She came to realize something about her own finitude—but what she mostly realized is that she cannot fully grasp her own eventual death. This is one of the odd fruits of a parent's death, a spouse's death: you are given "the knowledge that we die." You want to reshape your life around that awareness, but you can't, not consistently. You are now mortal, but only sporadically so. Pondering La Roche­foucauld's injunction that death, like the sun, is not to be looked at directly, O'Rourke puts the matter plainly: "Mother, I am confronting yours, here, as I write. But I have not come to terms with my own."

O'Rourke also offers great insight into mourning. Our society, she notes, has forgotten how to mourn and how to respond to mourners. In the days after her mother's death, O'Rourke "felt the lack of rituals to shape and support my loss. . . . I did not know what I was supposed to do, nor, it seemed, did my friends and colleagues." O'Rourke and her family are not religious, yet they would not likely have encountered more robust ritual had they been devout Christians. The church sometimes ritualizes burial well, but we pay less attention to what often precedes death (long-term illness) and what follows it (bereavement).