The Long Goodbye
by Meghan O’Rourke
Virago pp 306
ISBN 978-1-84408-6764
As individuals, we all have different ways of how to deal with personal grief. While some cannot hide it and even make a display of it, others manage to keep it squeezed tightly inside themselves – to their own detriment, we are told. The few fortunate ones can, or think they can, offload it by writing poetry and memoirs, as Meghan O’Rourke has done with this remarkable book. But does it really work?
Ms O’Rourke has been both lauded and condemned over this work that she had started earlier as a column in an electronic magazine. Artists are bound to get mixed reactions to their intimate outpourings, which is only fair by every critic’s standards.
For example there were those who insisted this is a very beautiful book – beautifully written, beautifully moving – and one would be hard-pressed not to be affected by the author’s story of how she dealt with her mother’s passing away from cancer at the relatively young age of 55.
But then there were readers who, while they understood that to grieve is to be plunged into terrible suffering, they thought – with some good reason – that with this work, Ms O’Rourke was actually protecting herself from that very abyss.
The Christmas when Ms O’Rourke was five, her mother gave her a journal – a whole world of blank pages, puzzling to the child but not to the mother who explained to her daughter that the book was a place for her to put her thoughts: “You’d write something like, ‘Today I saw a woman with purple hair crossing Montague Street’.”
For young Meghan, who would grow up to be a respected poet and writer, it was a revelatory instruction that the world was a thrilling place and that it might be her pleasure and prerogative to capture it in words.
Appearing halfway through The Long Goodbye, this special moment also provides a glimpse of Barbara O’Rourke and her generous vision. She was a woman who loved fireflies and golden retriever dogs, a teacher and headmaster who didn’t believe in God but who counted daily on the transcendent possibilities of art and laughter and purple-haired hope.
Given a diagnosis of late-stage colorectal cancer when she was 53, she died less than three years later, on another Christmas Day, in 2008, leaving her husband and three children to make sense of an emptier world without her. The Long Goodbye is, in fact, Ms O’Rourke’s anguished, beautifully written chronicle of that passage, from the innocence of a relatively privileged life to the wider and more desolate terrain that great loss imposes.
Making efficient use of some of what great literature there is about grief, from C.S. Lewis to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the author shows how while she steeled herself through oncologist appointments and tumour-induced dementia and her father’s heartbreaking efforts to stay functional, she took a dinner knife to her forearm one night in an effort to eliminate the psychic pain she was in. In so doing, Ms O’Rourke quotes Pascal’s “Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.” Believing that, with the lunacy of early grief, she could stave off the inevitable if she flung herself far enough away from it, she eventually married her long-time boyfriend, left him within months, quit a job and had an affair.
The Long Goodbye is Ms O’Rourke’s quasi-journal of her mother’s battle with cancer and of her own journey through the inevitable grief, not dissimilar, one must say, to the grief of other mothers and daughters, fathers and sons.
While some may find her work whiny and navel-gazing, many, like this reviewer, agree that what makes this work unique is how Ms O’Rourke has been able to create a work that is part poetry, part memoir and part love story of what is, after all, sadly an everyday occurrence in human life.
• Mr Flores is a writer, journalist and broadcaster. He has written books of fiction and non-fiction as well as poetry in both Maltese and English. He was one of the co-founders of the Moviment Qawmien Letterarju.