The Long Goodbye: Can Nature Help Assuage Your Grief?

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.